Penguin colony georegistration using camera pose estimation and phototourism.

Satellite-based remote sensing and uncrewed aerial imagery play increasingly important roles in the mapping of wildlife populations and wildlife habitat, but the availability of imagery has been limited in remote areas. At the same time, ecotourism is a rapidly growing industry and can yield a vast catalog of photographs that could be harnessed for monitoring purposes, but the inherently ad-hoc and unstructured nature of these images make them difficult to use. To help address this, a subfield of computer vision known as phototourism has been developed to leverage a diverse collection of unstructured photographs to reconstruct a georeferenced three-dimensional scene capturing the environment at that location.

Adélie penguins north and east of the 'Adélie gap' continue to thrive in the face of dramatic declines elsewhere in the Antarctic Peninsula region.

While population declines among Adélie penguins and population increases among gentoo penguins on the Western Antarctic Peninsula are well established, the logistical challenges of operating in the sea ice-heavy northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula have prohibited reliable monitoring of seabirds in this region. Here we describe the findings of an expedition to the northern and eastern sides of the Antarctic Peninsula-a region at the nexus of two proposed Marine Protected Areas-to investigate the distribution and abundance of penguins in this region. We discovered several previously undocumented penguin colonies, completed direct surveys of three colonies initially discovered in satellite imagery, and re-surveyed several colonies last surveyed more than a decade ago.