Democratising Camera Trap AI: An Open-Source Model for Detecting UK Mammals

An open-source object detection model has been released for identifying 31 classes of UK mammals and birds, utilizing a YOLO26x architecture trained on a curated dataset of 48,165 labeled instances. The model achieves a mean Average Precision of 0.984 at IoU 0.5 and demonstrates high precision (0.988) and recall (0.965), with a minimal false-negative rate of 0.17%. This initiative aims to democratize access to AI tools for ecologists, providing a non-commercial alternative to proprietary models while supporting real-time camera applications.