Huebner, Sarah

Wildlife Ecologist

Dr. Sarah E. Huebner is a Wildlife Ecologist and the Digital Curator of SmithsonianWILD, a collection of wildlife imagery designed to support ecological research, artificial intelligence development, and global conservation efforts. Her research focuses on developing practical, scalable approaches to understanding and protecting wild mammal populations. She uses long-term, standardized wildlife monitoring to evaluate changes in species distributions, population demographics, community composition, habitat use, and responses to anthropogenic disturbance, with an emphasis on translating ecological data into information that can directly support conservation decision-making.

A major focus of her work is expanding what can be learned from existing camera trap survey archives. Through SmithsonianWILD, Snapshot USA, Snapshot Safari, and related collaborative monitoring networks, she develops methods and data pipelines that transform large image collections into richer sources of ecological information. By extracting information about animal behavior, indicators of population health, habitat preference, and species interactions from previously collected imagery, these approaches can support AI-assisted inference of ecological processes across broad spatial and temporal scales.

Her work transforms image archives into dynamic ecological observatories. By recovering behavioral and ecological signals already embedded within millions of images, she aims to improve our ability to study trophic dynamics, community structure, habitat relationships, and ecological function across systems without requiring equivalent increases in field sampling. More broadly, her research integrates ecological monitoring, open data, artificial intelligence, and collaborative science to build tools that make biodiversity information more useful for researchers, conservation practitioners, and the public.

Background And Education

Education And Training

Ph.D. in Wildlife Ecology and Management, University of Minnesota

Professional Biography

Dr. Sarah E. Huebner is a Wildlife Ecologist with Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and the Digital Curator of SmithsonianWILD, the Smithsonian’s first born-digital wildlife collection. Built from expertly labeled camera trap imagery, SmithsonianWILD is a free, open-access resource designed to support ecological research, artificial intelligence development, and global conservation efforts.

Her work bridges wildlife ecology, technology, policy, and public engagement, with a focus on making conservation data widely accessible and actionable. Drawing on extensive field experience monitoring entire mammal communities across diverse landscapes, she studies practical approaches to protecting wildlife through long-term biodiversity monitoring and the assessment of changes in species distributions, population demographics, community composition, and responses to anthropogenic disturbance.

While completing her Ph.D. in Wildlife Ecology and Management at the University of Minnesota, Huebner co-founded Snapshot Safari, a multinational network of ecologists and wildlife managers using standardized camera trap surveys to enable cross-site comparisons of wildlife populations and conservation programs. She continued to develop Snapshot Safari after joining the Smithsonian and now works with the team responsible for Snapshot USA while contributing to efforts to connect these networks through Snapshot Global. She has also contributed to the development of the Labeled Image Library of Alexandria (LILA), a public image repository supporting machine learning and wildlife species identification. Across her work, she combines camera trap monitoring, biodiversity informatics, artificial intelligence, open data, and collaborative science to expand our ability to understand and conserve wildlife at scales ranging from individual populations to ecological communities.