WildBox: A Dataset and Benchmark for Aerial Monocular 3D Detection of African Savanna Wildlife

We introduce WildBox, a dataset and benchmark for monocular 3D detection of wildlife from drone video, comprising 237,505 3D bounding box annotations across seven African savanna species grouped into six benchmark classes. Annotations follow a KITTI/Omni3D-compatible format in a per-segment scale-normalised camera frame, with instance identities maintained across each segment. We evaluate two open-vocabulary monocular 3D architectures, OVMono3D-LIFT and DetAny3D, under zero-shot, ground-truth 2D box prompt, and supervised fine-tuning protocols. Open-vocabulary 2D foundation models provide usable zero-shot wildlife localisation (50.55 AP@50), but zero-shot 3D detection collapses to 0.00 AP across both architectures and every 2D-input condition tested, including ground-truth 2D box prompts, thus isolating the failure to the 3D stage. Fine-tuning on WildBox recovers performance to 8.68 +/- 0.47 AP-BEV@0.50 and 13.17 +/- 0.69 AP3D macro. Depth contributes 84% of normalised Hausdorff distance after fine-tuning and over 99% in zero-shot, identifying monocular aerial depth as the dominant open problem in this regime. A coarse-to-fine curriculum, i.e. pretraining on a merged zebra class before fine-tuning on the Grevy's/plains split, improves macro 3D performance with less total compute, with the largest gains on the two zebra subclasses. WildBox is released with video-level splits, evaluation code, and baseline checkpoints to enable progress in 3D wildlife perception from drone video.

FAIR^2 Drones: An AI-Ready Standard for Cross-Domain Wildlife Drone Datasets

Animal ecology data collection using drones represents a substantial investment of time, expertise, and financial resources. Yet most existing datasets serve only a single research community, limiting interdisciplinary reuse. We propose a unified drone dataset standard, FAIR^2 Drones, that bridges ecology, robotics, and computer vision by building on existing FAIR and AI-ready data frameworks while adding essential platform metadata and annotation specifications. Our standard enables datasets to simultaneously support ecological analysis, robotics algorithm development, and computer vision benchmarking. We provide open-source validation tools, reference implementations, and multimodal extensions linking drone imagery with complementary sensors such as camera traps, GPS, and acoustics. By standardizing metadata across disciplines, this framework maximizes the scientific return on investment for costly field deployments and accelerates cross-domain collaboration in environmental monitoring.