WildMe

Wild Me is a non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon, that builds open-source software and leverages artificial intelligence to support the fight against wildlife extinction. The organization’s flagship product is Wildbook, a machine learning and computer vision platform that identifies individual animals in photographs. Unlike traditional monitoring that relies on physical tags or collars, Wildbook uses the unique natural patterns of an animal—such as the spots on a whale shark, the stripes of a zebra, or the edge of a whale’s fluke—to create a digital "fingerprint." This allows researchers to track population movements and health without invasive procedures. Founded in 2008, Wild Me works at the intersection of conservation, engineering, and academia. The platform serves more than 200 organizations and nearly a thousand researchers, tracking tens of thousands of individual animals across the globe. By importing large amounts of data from biologists and public "citizen scientists," Wild Me creates a collaborative environment for global conservation. In 2021, the organization partnered with the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) to further scale its technological impact. The data generated through Wildbook provides the necessary metrics for scientists and conservationists to justify specific conservation actions and policy changes.