Field Tests
The ESS has been regularly tested in real-life conditions. Over the years we have conducted 10 separate campaigns in numerous environments:
Hluluwe-iMfolozi Park and Phinda Private Game Reserve in central KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (Multiple flights spread over September 2014 to May 2015)
The Northern Tuli Game Reserve in the Tuli block, Botswana (September 2015)
NG26 concession in the Okavango Delta, Botswana (2 campaigns, September 2015 and July 2018)
Bwabwata, Mudumu and Nkasa Rupara national parks in the Zambezi strip, Namibia (3 campaigns: August 2016, February 2018 and September 2019)
Madikwe game reserve in the North-West province, South Africa (3 campaigns: July 2017 and November 2018, September 2020)
The Tests
Initial tests were pure information gathering exercises. In later campaigns we were actively testing the performance of our neural nets, eventually building up to direct comparisons where we flew alongside human surveying crews and compared results, either at the sighting level or at the population estimate level. For more detail on these campaigns and the results achieved, you are welcome to browse the reports in the