Data from: Snapshot Serengeti, high-frequency annotated camera trap images of 40 mammalian species in an African savanna

Camera traps can be used to address large-scale community ecology questions by providing systematic data on an array of wide-ranging species. We deployed 225 camera traps across 1,125km2 in the centre of Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, to evaluate spatial and temporal inter-species dynamics. The cameras have operated continuously since 2010. From June 2010 to May 2013, the survey accumulated 101,315 camera-trap days and produced 1.51 million sets of pictures. Members of the general public classified the images via the citizen science website www.snapshotserengeti.org. Each image was viewed by multiple users who recorded the species present, number of individuals, behaviours observed, and presence of young. For the data described here, 28,040 registered users contributed 10.8 million classifications. We applied a simple algorithm to reduce the classifications into a final "consensus" dataset, yielding a final classification for each image and a measure of agreement among individual answers. The consensus dataset and images are a novel dataset for ecological research, providing an unparalleled opportunity to investigate multi-species dynamics among dozens of species in an intact ecosystem. The consensus dataset, raw classification dataset, and images are also a valuable resource for machine-learning and computer-vision research.