Hi everyone,
I'm getting a lot of questions come my way about what early warning systems are available and effective -in any sort of environment. I'm keen to crowdsource some experience here - are you using Early Warning Systems? Can you tell me about how they're working - species you're working on, successes/failures, recommendations?
Thanks a lot!
Steph
13 December 2023 10:37pm
We had reasonable success predicting elephant crop raiding from movement patters during the day preceding the nights crop raid Staging behaviours identify spatial and temporal risk of human‐wildlife conflict - Hahn - 2023 - Journal of Applied Ecology - Wiley Online Library (colostate.edu)
Rob Appleby
Wild Spy
16 December 2023 6:06am
Hi @StephODonnell , that's one of the ideas behind our 'WID' tag:
We are currently working on an updated version of this sort of tag, with much better range and flexibility, and I am hoping to organise a release to open source, although it involves a partner organisation, so they'll also have to agree. I think there are some similar systems with bears and sharks that I can, ahem, track down if you like. Is this sort of what you are after or am I way off?
There's also the emerging AI camera systems of course (e.g. as discussed by @kimhendrikse here:
Successfully integrated deepfaune into video alerting system | WILDLABS
Hi all, I've successfully integrated deepfaune into my Video alerting full-features security system StalkedByTheState. The yellow box around the image represents the zone of interest that I defined and the blue crosses represents matching the category of interest in the zone, in this case wolves. This will generate a new event into the system that can result in multiple actions, such as generating a video alert or flashing flood lights or other actions to try and deter the wolf from coming further if this was outside a farm for example.https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-installStalkedByTheState is an advanced security system that an monitor multiple cameras and trigger video alerts or other actions when it gets a match. The AI computer vision is abstracted behind a network interface which made it a simple task to integrate deepfaune.Deepfaune first uses megadetector to detect the presence of either a person, an animal or a car. I've joined this two steps and present the API in the form of a traditional yolo API so it appears to detect and classify in one step.This announcement is a bit of a pre-release really. The code is working but I still have to release this in a usable for on github.StalkedByTheState is designed to be able to run locally on NVidia's AI on the edge Jetson servers.It's now possible to define a json file defining what animals you wish to detect and generate video alerts for them. Or even invoke local control automatically from the Jetson server directly. There is support for local relay control, inputs and outputs.I still have to complete the installation script to support the new Jetson Orin series computers, it's working on them, but I've manually installed it at the moment. When this is complete I'll make a new announcement.
wildlabsnetApologies if I am way off...
Cheers,
Rob
Henrik Cox
Conservation X Labs
25 March 2024 2:21pm
Hi @StephODonnell , HWC applications are coming up on our radar pretty soon. We currently use the Sentinel devices and AI models we build in-house for biodiversity monitoring but our current satellite provider's technical limitations mean we can't send alerts or filtered information from the camera traps in under 2 hours. We are coming out with a LoRa version of the devices in a month or two, and we're building the cellular version to be released by the end of the summer. Those should open the door to sending information fast enough to respond to.
These kinds of applications are at first going to be more successful in areas that already have functional LoRa/cellular infrastructure, so it leaves out dense rainforest habitats (where LoRa is going to be a less viable comms solution). However, we're working with another satellite provider in the coming months to speed up the current latency on our satellite data delivery so that they can be used for HWC scenarios.
On a question of scalability, we've done ~200 devices in 6 countries over the past 10 months and are working on building and deploying 1000+ by the end of the year. We also do custom AI models so species are not a limitation - so long as there is enough training data to work with for the species of interest!
The Sentinel — Conservation X Labs
Artificial intelligence for wildlife conservation. The Sentinel is Conservation X Labs’ AI toolkit that makes conservation tools smarter. It upgrades wildlife monitoring tools — like trail cameras and acoustic recorders — with revolutionary and intuitive AI technology.
Conservation X LabsCheers,
Henrik
George Wittemyer
Colorado State University
Save the Elephant