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.
Harbour seals live along the coasts of the northern Atlantic and Pacific, including the Baltic and North seas, with an estimated 350,000 to 500,000 worldwide.2 They return to familiar resting spots to haul out, on rocks, ice, sand or mud.2 The species is listed as Least Concern.1
Why it matters
As top-level feeders in kelp forests, harbour seals enhance species diversity and productivity.2 In the Wadden Sea, 8,230 pups and 23,772 moulting seals were counted in 2024, figures that only mean something when they are repeated, year after year.3
What we do
Counting and describing thousands of seals by eye from aerial photos takes hundreds of hours every season. Our Wadden Sea seal monitoring work detects each seal in the survey photos and records its species, life stage and more, and can recognise individuals from their whisker and face patterns.
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.