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However, high-quality regionally customized datasets remain scarce, particularly within urban environments. The existing large-scale bird image datasets often lack a dedicated focus on endangered species endemic to specific geographic regions, as well as a nuanced consideration of the complex interplay between urban and natural environmental contexts. Therefore, this paper introduces Macao-ebird, a novel dataset designed to advance AI-driven recognition and conservation of endangered bird species in Macao. The dataset comprises two subsets: (1) Macao-ebird-cls, a classification dataset with 7341 images covering 24 bird species, emphasizing endangered and vulnerable species native to Macao; and (2) Macao-ebird-det, an object detection dataset generated through AI-agent-assisted labeling using grounding DETR with improved denoising anchor boxes (DINO), significantly reducing manual annotation effort while maintaining high-quality bounding-box annotations. We validate the dataset\u2019s utility through baseline experiments with the You Only Look Once (YOLO) v8\u2013v12 series, achieving a mean average precision (mAP50) of up to 0.984. Macao-ebird addresses critical gaps in the existing datasets by focusing on region-specific endangered species and complex urban\u2013natural environments, providing a benchmark for AI applications in avian conservation.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/data10060084","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,2]],"date-time":"2025-06-02T12:27:09Z","timestamp":1748867229000},"page":"84","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Macao-ebird: A Curated Dataset for Artificial-Intelligence-Powered Bird Surveillance and Conservation in Macao"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"10","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0009-1755-6906","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xiaoyuan","family":"Huang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Applied Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao SAR 999078, China"},{"name":"School of Electrical Engineering and Intelligentization, Dongguan University of Technology, Dongguan 523000, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5385-4734","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Silvia","family":"Mirri","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, 40128 Bologna, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8104-7887","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Su-Kit","family":"Tang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Applied Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao SAR 999078, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,5,30]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"444","DOI":"10.1038\/nature11631","article-title":"The global diversity of birds in space and time","volume":"491","author":"Jetz","year":"2012","journal-title":"Nature"},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"347","DOI":"10.1126\/science.269.5222.347","article-title":"The future of biodiversity","volume":"269","author":"Pimm","year":"1995","journal-title":"Science"},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"810","DOI":"10.1126\/science.1146002","article-title":"International conservation policy delivers benefits for birds in Europe","volume":"317","author":"Donald","year":"2007","journal-title":"Science"},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Luck, G.W., Carter, A., and Smallbone, L. 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