SatoyamaCT: A Multi-Axis Night-IR Camera-Trap Benchmark for Monitoring Crop-Damaging Wildlife in Japanese Agroforestry

Abstract

Crop and forest damage from sika deer, wild boar, and Japanese macaque is a serious economic problem in Japanese satoyama, where farmland and forest intermingle. Camera traps enable scalable monitoring, yet existing benchmarks evaluate recognition in-distribution, rarely prioritize night infrared imagery, and do not jointly address regional domain shift, novel-species detection, and uncertainty-based triage on a single dataset. We introduce the Satoyama Camera Trap Dataset (SatoyamaCT), 12,642 expert-verified crops from night-IR-dominant camera traps across three satoyama regions. An iterative annotation protocol combining BioCLIP embeddings with confidence-ordered confirmation reduced expert effort while all labels were verified by domain ecologists; species-level inter-annotator agreement reached Cohen's kappa = 0.900. A multi-axis protocol jointly evaluates domain generalization across region, camera placement, and illumination; open-set novel-species detection; and selective prediction, all under capture-event-based leakage control. Difficulty separates into distinct failure modes: a data-inherent regional gap of 16 to 27 percentage points persists in Wakayama across four backbones and domain-generalization methods including CORAL, DANN, and GroupDRO, and open-set detection reaches AUROC 0.93 to 0.96 overall yet degrades jointly with classification in Wakayama. Selective prediction recovers Wakayama accuracy from 0.593 to 0.815 at 50% coverage, supporting an uncertainty-aware triage workflow for practical pest monitoring in agroforestry.