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AI satellite survey returns fewer than 600,000, and is contested

2022–2023 imagery; published 2025 · Recorded · climate

The source states this happened, and its date is not in the future. The word the source used for it is observed.

Duporge and colleagues applied UNet and YOLO models to 33–60 cm satellite imagery from 2022 and 2023, counting roughly 300,000 and 500,000 animals respectively and concluding fewer than 600,000 migrate annually. The authors framed the result as complementary to aerial work and noted that differences in timing, coverage and method could explain much of the gap; Grant Hopcraft called it 'completely unconvincing as an estimate of abundance' and Joseph Ogutu warned it could undermine confidence in fifty years of survey data. A correction to the paper was published in December 2025.

Source

PNAS Nexus (Oxford University Press) · Duporge I., Wu Z., Xu Z., Gong P., Rubenstein D., Macdonald D.W., Sinclair A.R.E., Levin S., Lee S.J., Wang T. (2025) PNAS Nexus 4(9): pgaf264; correction PNAS Nexus 4(12): pgaf382. Expert criticism reported in Science news, 'Have half of wildebeests in the Serengeti disappeared?', science.org, September 2025.

Standing

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How it arrived

Editorial — A dated record from the Richseen Atlas editorial corpus, written and cited by a curator. Not captured from anywhere, and not live.

Where

At a canonical Atlas object, placed and checked by a curator.

Subject

SPECIES_WILDEBEEST · Serengeti National Park · ORG_SERENGETI_RESEARCH