I’m interested in the Renaissance (文艺复兴), so I like visiting ancient Italian cities. Ferrara is called City of the Renaissance. When I learned about this city on the Internet, I decided to pay a visit to it.

The city has a certain charm, but I find it isn’t as great as other Italian cities like Verona, let alone Venice or Rome. The Michelin Green Guide gives it two stars, which is right.

I first visited the city centre. The Cathedral and Castello Estense are at the heart of the city. Both have striking appearances. I visited the Cathedral first. Castello Estense is also worth visiting, which owes its name to the powerful Este family. It was built with bricks and surrounded by a moat (护城河). At the lower levels, the history of the city and the Este family are told through displays, and in another part the ceilings are shown through mirrors on the ground.

In the north, we can appreciate the Renaissance extension of the town, with straight streets and monumental houses. The famous Palazzo dei Diamanti lies here.

When I was visiting it, it started to rain, so after taking a few photos quickly, I cut my visit there short. It had been raining for a few days. When the rain stopped, I went to visit the historical centre and the Renaissance buildings.

After leaving there, I visited several other interesting places such as palaces and the narrow streets of the downtown. After four hours in Ferrara I left by train to Mantua. There I had a much better time.

A new website will allow anyone in the world to access millions of wildlife photos taken by camera traps.

Researchers in the field often use camera traps to photograph the lives of animals. These fixed cameras have a sensor （传感器） that is started by heat or movement, letting researchers monitor animals without disturbing them.

The traps can be used for months at a time, sometimes taking hundreds of thousands of pictures. But these images, and the valuable information they reveal, usually just sit on researchers’ hard drives, unavailable to anyone else, according to Jorge Ahumada, a scientist of environmental nonprofit Conservation International.

So Ahumada started creating an online platform where researchers could share their photos. Wildlife Insights was launched in December 2019 as the world’s largest camera-trap database, hosting over 4.5 million images.

As well as making images available to other researchers, the site uses Artificial Intelligence （AI） designed by Google to overcome a key problem with these kinds of photos: Camera traps produce lots of images to manually analyze, says Ahumada, many of which are blank images. Manually sorting and deleting these photos is a laborious task.

To solve that, after someone uploads images to the Wildlife Insights database, its AI examines if the images were taken from a camera trap and automatically removes all blank images. If there is an animal in the image, the AI will identify the species. Now the AI recognizes about 450 animal species, which Ahumada says will increase over time as more images are collected from all parts of the world.

Apart from collecting and reviewing the images, the platform will provide analytics （数据分析） that could show trends in species’ population for different projects. That information could help researchers understand whether a species is increasing its range or if its numbers are falling.

While open access is key, the platform has taken steps to make sure this information doesn’t get into the wrong hands. “You will have to ask Wildlife Insights for permission to get the locations of the images,” said Ahumada. “That is an examination process that we will manage carefully because we know that poachers （偷猎者） and other people with illegal purposes will use this information to find endangered species.”