Motivation: Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of species is essential for a sustainable development of humanity, as well as for biodiversity conservation. However, the burden of the routine identification of plants and animals in the field is strongly penalizing the aggregation of new data and knowledge. Identifying and naming living plants or animals is actually almost impossible for the general public and often a difficult task for professionals and naturalists. Bridging this gap is a key challenge towards enabling effective biodiversity monitoring systems. The LifeCLEF evaluation campaign aims at boosting and evaluating the advances in this domain since 2011. 

The 2020 edition of LifeCLEF proposes four data-oriented challenges related to the identification and prediction of biodiversity: 

Challenge 1 - BirdCLEF: Bird species recognition in audio soundscapes

Challenge 2 - GeoLifeCLEF: Location-Based Species Prediction (based on environmental and occurrence data)

Challenge 3 - PlantCLEF: Cross-domain plant identification (from herbarium specimens to plant pictures)

Challenge 4 - SnakeCLEF: Image-based snake identification