Wadden Sea Seal Monitoring
Automated seal population monitoring system using AI to count, classify, and identify individual seals from aerial imagery in the Wadden Sea.
Grey seals range widely across the northern Atlantic, from the United States to Russia, and were estimated at about 632,000 in 2016.2 They live on rocks, islands and shoals near the shore and breed on beaches and remote islands.2 Record bulls reach about 3.3 m long.2 The species is listed as Least Concern.1
In the Wadden Sea
Grey seals share the Wadden Sea with the smaller harbour seal. In 2025, 3,051 grey seal pups and 12,064 moulting grey seals were counted there.3
What we do
Telling the two species apart, sexing them and judging their life stage from aerial photos is expert, slow work. Our Wadden Sea seal monitoring work does it automatically for every seal in a survey, and recognises individuals across seasons, so researchers spend their time on the numbers rather than the counting.
Projects
Live demos
Seal Identification
Re-identifying individual seals by their whisker and face patterns, non-invasively and across seasons.
Tools
Animal reID
A modular computer vision framework for individual animal identification using state-of-the-art techniques including metric learning, local feature matching, and spot pattern analysis across multiple species.
Open to collaboration
Every project here was built hand in hand with conservation partners, and much of the code is open source. If our work fits a challenge you're facing, or you'd like to build something together, we'd love to hear from you.