About

Built by people who run camera traps.

Patterns identifies individual jaguars from their coat pattern in camera-trap photos.

Patterns is a project by Grow Jungles, a U.S. 501(c)(3) founded in 2019, in partnership with Las Oncas. Miguel Guevara leads the project.

Origin

How it started

Miguel Guevara started Grow Jungles to protect endangered wildlife and primary rainforest in Costa Rica by putting land into conservation ownership and paying local communities to guard and restore it. Tico Haroutiounian and César Termine started Las Oncas to study and defend the jaguars moving through those same forests.

The two groups started working together in early 2020. They worked the same forests with the same cameras, and both believed conservation only lasts when local people are part of it. Both also had years of camera-trap photos sitting in folders nobody had time to go through. Patterns started there.

Jaguar (Panthera onca), Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica. Exact location withheld.

Why technology

Why we built it

Protecting a forest is hard to see from the outside. The cameras record it, but the photos sit unsorted. Patterns turns those photos into reviewed records that show whether protection is working.

Field work needs evidence

Rangers, landowners and reserve staff protect wildlife every day, but the results sit in unsorted camera-trap folders. Sorted, reviewed records let a funder, a ministry or a community see what that work does.

Protection needs measurement

You can't show a forest is recovering without counting the animals living in it. Identifying jaguars by their coat gives a program a count it can repeat.

Local teams should own the data

The people working the land collect the records. The tools they use should leave the data with them.

Shared across properties

Jaguars cross property lines and organizations. A shared catalog of individuals lets neighboring reserves, NGOs and researchers build one picture of the same population.

PARTNERS

Who builds Patterns

Grow Jungles

A U.S. 501(c)(3) founded in 2019 that places Costa Rican rainforest into conservation ownership and pays local people to guard and restore it. Patterns is a Grow Jungles project.

growjungles.com

Las Oncas

Jaguar conservation in Costa Rica, founded by Tico Haroutiounian and César Termine to study and defend the jaguars moving through these forests. Partner in Patterns since the start.

lasoncas.com

FIELD SITES