Company · May 2026

A grant for the Smart Wildlife Box: edge-AI to move trail cameras on

Trail cameras produce the raw material for wildlife monitoring, and the hardware has barely moved in years. A feasibility grant from the Province of Zeeland lets us work on that directly, with a project we call the Smart Wildlife Box.

What the box is

The Smart Wildlife Box is an edge-AI device for recognizing animals in remote places. Instead of every camera being a smart, power-hungry island, several low-power cameras connect to one box on site, and the box runs the first AI detection in the field. The aim is less power drawn and less bandwidth used than a set of standalone smart cameras. That's what a feasibility project is for: build the approach, and test whether it holds up.

Why the box

We keep coming back to the same frustration. The trail-camera world hasn't moved fast. We've bought plenty of cameras and taken them apart: plastic lenses, slow processors, each one locked to its own manufacturer app. Good ones exist, but the category as a whole is stuck. Off-the-shelf cameras should be able to feed something smarter without being thrown away and replaced. The box is our attempt to make that true.

The bigger gap

It fits a pattern we've written about in human-wildlife conflict and coexistence: the frameworks for managing wildlife are mature; the technology that feeds them real, defensible data mostly isn't. Data-driven wildlife management is still a young field. Smarter, cheaper hardware at the edge is one of the pieces it's missing, and it's the piece this grant lets us prototype.

This is a feasibility project, R&D, not a finished product, and we'll keep saying so until it's tested. If it works, it changes what a field of ordinary cameras can do.

The Smart Wildlife Box (STIM-02009) runs from April 2026 to March 2027, realized with financial support from the Province of Zeeland through the MIT Zuid scheme (MKB innovatiestimulering topsectoren Zuid-Nederland), administered by Stimulus Programmamanagement.