Citizen science · Kruger National Park

Every giraffe wears a fingerprint.

Photograph a wild giraffe. Patterns reads its coat like a barcode, recognises the exact individual, hands you a gold-foil collectible, and turns your sighting into real conservation data.

Try the live demo See how it works

~50

giraffes known in Central Kruger

98%

coat-match confidence

1 tap

photo → named individual

The loop

From a single photo to a giraffe with a name & a story.

Under the hood

How we tell giraffes apart.

A giraffe's coat is a fingerprint: unique, and unchanged for life. Patterns finds the giraffe in your photo, maps its reticulated pattern into hundreds of keypoints, and matches them against every individual we already know.

PATTERN MATCH ENGINE98.2% confidence

Hundreds of coat-pattern keypoints matched between two giraffe sightings

Your photoKnown · Thabo #07

match confidence

A real coat-match from the engine: every line is one keypoint on a giraffe's coat, matched to the same point on a known individual.

01 · DETECT

Find the giraffe

A segmentation model masks the animal out of the bush, sky and everything else.

02 · MAP

Read the coat

The reticulated pattern becomes hundreds of distinctive keypoints.

03 · SEARCH

Compare the catalogue

Those keypoints are matched against every known individual in a warm index.

04 · VERIFY

Confirm the match

A confidence score mints the card instantly, or quietly flags it for a ranger.

PyTorchDetectron2 segmentationFAISS nearest-neighbourWarm index · sub-second200+ keypoints matched

Hands on

It’s a real app. Go ahead, poke around.

Switch tabs, tap a card to open it, flip it over, hit a reveal. This is the actual interface, rebuilt to play with right here.

Tap the tabs · tap a card · tap “reveal”

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Your safari

My Safari

June 2026 · Central Kruger

Ready to reveal

Someone’s waiting…

Spotted Jun 14 · tap to reveal

Reveal this giraffe

Being identified

Being identified…

Jun 14 · submitted

● Analysing

Waiting for signal

Jun 14 · queued

◷ Queued

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Fit the giraffe’s neck & shoulder in frame

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A new find

Nº 12First ever

Unnamed

SPOT ID · GIRAFFE-12New

South African giraffe

A new giraffe!

You’re the first to spot this one

94%

Match

1×

Seen

new

Tracked

Name this giraffe ✦

tap the card to flip it

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Your collection

23 giraffes met

23 of ~50 known in Central Kruger

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7/23 collected

Nº 07South African

Thabo

South African giraffe

Thabo

98%

Match

6×

Seen

Tracked

SPOT ID · THABO-07Verified

Thabo

Giraffe facts

SubspeciesSouth African giraffe

ScientificG. c. giraffa

HistoryTracked 4 years

SightingsSeen 6 times

You spotted this on June 14, 2026

Rename ✦

Where has this giraffe been? →

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Tracking

Where has she been?

Thabo · 6 sightings

OlderRecent

~14 km roamed

Last seen near Sabie River · Jun 14

Live

A case of cards

Gold foil. Earned, not bought.

Each verified giraffe mints a single collectible: real coat texture, real stats, a holographic sheen. Provisional finds wear a muted frame until rangers confirm them. Tap any card to flip it.

Nº 02South African

Rowan

SPOT ID · ROWAN-02Verified

South African giraffe

Rowan

First seen · May 2026

97%

Match

9×

Seen

Tracked

Named byYou ✦

SPOT ID · ROWAN-02Verified

Nº 07South African

Thabo

SPOT ID · THABO-07Verified

South African giraffe

Thabo

First seen · June 2026

98%

Match

6×

Seen

Tracked

RangeSabie River

SPOT ID · THABO-07Verified

Nº 14Provisional

Kesi

SPOT ID · KESI-14Rangers checking

Awaiting confirmation

Kesi

A ranger will verify this find

71%

Match

2×

Seen

new

Tracked

SPOT ID · KESI-14Provisional

The reveal

Worth the wait.

Your photo doesn’t become a card right away. It waits in “My Safari” while the match is checked, then arrives ready to turn over. That little pause is the point: a small hit of wonder, for kids and grown-ups alike.

Reveals are evening-friendly: gentle, never grindy.

Nº 18South African

Amara

SPOT ID · AMARA-18Verified

South African giraffe

Amara

First seen · April 2026

99%

Match

12×

Seen

Tracked

SPOT ID · AMARA-18Verified

Naming rights

Find it first, name it forever.

Spot a giraffe nobody has logged and you get to name it. It’s a shared name everyone in Patterns will see: first come, first served, locked in on the server so two finders never clash. Or skip it and stay anonymous.

Names are kid-safe and reviewed. No internal labels ever leak.

You found a new giraffe

What should we call it?

Patches|

Save name

Skip for now

Why it matters

Every sighting is a data point for giraffe conservation.

Giraffe numbers have quietly fallen across Africa. Patterns turns families on safari into a distributed census: each photo is a verified individual at a known place and time. Exact GPS stays private (only a rough region is ever shared), and the movements feed straight into conservation partners like SANParks.

Coarse only

locations shared as a region, never the exact spot, to protect the animals

Real stats

no invented heights or herd sizes, only what the data actually shows

Built for Kruger

starting in Central Kruger, designed to scale park by park

Every screen

The whole app, end to end.

scroll sideways →

Sign in
immersive, frosted

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Your safari

My Safari

June 2026 · Central Kruger

Ready to reveal

Someone’s waiting…

tap to reveal

My Safari
field-journal feed

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Nº 21South African

Nia

SPOT ID · NIA-21Verified

South African giraffe

Nia

First seen · 2026

96%

Match

4×

Seen

Tracked

SPOT ID · NIA-21Verified

Reveal
tap to flip ✦

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Settings

Account

Signed in asyoung.ranger@…

Sign out

Danger zone

Delete account

Settings
account & privacy

Every giraffe wears a fingerprint.

From a single photo to a giraffe with a name & a story.

How we tell giraffes apart.

Find the giraffe

Read the coat

Compare the catalogue

Confirm the match

It’s a real app. Go ahead, poke around.

My Safari

23 giraffes met

Thabo

Gold foil. Earned, not bought.

Worth the wait.

Find it first, name it forever.

Every sighting is a data point for giraffe conservation.

The whole app, end to end.

My Safari

Turn your next safari into a field guide you build yourself.