HERDER: our AI joins a wolf co-existence R&D project

What HERDER is

HERDER — Herkenning van dieren en roofdieren — sets out to build a reliable, scalable system that can detect and recognize (predator) animals, up to 250 metres, day and night, and act on that with a deterrence module. The aim is practical co-existence between people and wolves. It is a collaboration led by Aperium B.V., with Untamed Data as a partner: Aperium brings the sensor and detection-pillar technology, and we bring the vision and AI side — species and predator recognition — which is exactly what our platform already does.

What the independent committee said

An independent advisory committee assessed the project and gave a positive recommendation, scoring it 95 out of 100. A few highlights (translated from the Dutch):

• Innovation (20/25): the project “genuinely thinks out of the box,” is modular, and the committee called the AI module that can tell (predator) animals apart in fog “highly innovative.”
• Economic value (22/25): a thoroughly substantiated business case that creates high-quality jobs in the region.
• Societal impact (20/25, weighted double as a priority topic): with the current debate around the wolf in the Netherlands, HERDER addresses “a topical societal issue” with potentially “significant impact for farmers and citizens,” and is modular enough to scale to uses like bird deterrence at airports or wildlife management in solar parks.

Why it fits us

Recognizing species — and getting predators right, even in hard conditions — is the core of what Untamed Data does. HERDER lets us push that further, on a problem that matters, and feeds directly back into the platform. The project runs from October 2025 to September 2027.

HERDER is carried out with financial support from the Province of Noord-Brabant through the MIT scheme (MKB innovatiestimulering topsectoren Zuid-Nederland), administered by Stimulus Programmamanagement. The MIT grant contributes €191,800 to the roughly €548,000 two-year project.