There is a South African company Avior labs that successfully does drone surveys on game farms using AI to count and identify wildlife. The trick is to use both infra-red and optical camera simultaneously getting the AI to use the infra-red to narrow down where there are animals and then only use the optical camera feed of those areas to identify the species. Technically it is a lot trickier than it sounds but they have an effective AI workflow.

As to altitude for most countries there are restrictions to 120m above ground level for drone flights and to cover a significant area you need a relatively fast and really long endurance drone given that it has to fly survey grids. So using a 50mm lens on a 24.1megapixels DSLR camera your field of view would be 90 meters and your resolution would be 1.5cm per pixel. You would want to fly grids with overlap so you would cover 50m in a single transect. So to survey an area 10X10km you would need to fly 200 transects of 10 km i.e. 2000km, if you were flying at 135km an hour that would be 14 hours of flying if you took no time to turn around.  

I am just pointing out the limitations that I have come across - nothing one cannot address but one has to take into account. 

I have come to the conclusion that drones have not yet met their promise in conservation because we seriously underestimate the endurance needed for drones to become a daily conservation tool, doing game counts, surveying for vegetation changes, looking for snares.

I am trying to motivate for the investment in developing a long-endurance hydrogen fuel cell conservation drone with an endurance of 10 hours, speed of 135km and hour and the ability to run on green hydrogen generated on site through hydrolysis of water using solar power.

I really hope you get this funding! You are so right about increasing the cost of poaching as a deterrent (snares destroyed, investment in snare cables and logistics all for nothing....) - hopefully you are  going to want to trial this system in moist tropical rainforests next - hope you decide Kerinci Seblat, Sumatra an ideal candidate site! (Yes, I am very, very enthusiastic)

We had this same issue, and found that the firmware version 1.9.2 was our issue. We bumped it back to 1.9.0 and our energy consumption was back to normal. 

We record data for 7 hours a day (3.5 hour blocks), using sandisk extreme 64GB micro SD cards. We don’t use re-chargeable batteries, and the ARUs are set for 14-day periods before being collected. With the 1.9.2 firmware, for some reason they’d only record for maybe 9 days tops before dying. At firmware 1.9.0, we were back to our normal recording of minimum 14 days (although they often last longer). We tried different batteries, different energy saving settings, nothing worked besides bumping the firmware down. This issue was in both our brand new AudioMoths and 2-year old AudioMoths. 
 

I hope this helps. 
 

I have been working at the Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia for more than 15 years as a maintenance manager and, in recent years, taking advantage of my training in electronics, giving support in technological projects related to its Area of Biology and Biodiversity Conservation. In recent years we have worked on projects of bioacoustics, species tracking with RFID (BIRDLOG), microcameras in nest boxes of bats and birds, and autonomous recorders of human presence in protected caves (LOGCAVE), among others.
 

Glad to participate in this platform, so useful to share and find resources related to this field !

Hi everyone,

We’ve emerged into the genomic age and it is a powerful approach to back wildlife conservation. However, sometimes it can be tricky to become familiar with technologies and the software to analyse genomic data.

I would like to present SequenceServer. It is a fantastic tool that enables you to analyse genomic data. The interface is designed to make life easy, and you don’t need lots of computational experience. Many different analysis approaches are possible and will certainly be valuable to the world of conservation.

You can try it out for free! And if you have any questions, please feel free to message me. The SequenceServer team is happy to discuss your research needs and offer support.

Let’s help protect Earth together.

Daniel

Wow.. Really exciting to see this effort. Congratulations on the award!

I have been interested in this subject for a long time, as we have elephant-human conflicts in plenty in India (my country). Sometime back I had hacked a computer optical mouse as a seismic detector in order to study elephant intrusion into farmlands (where they are considered as pests). But I think we need more robust detectors. I am also considering laser led self-mixing as a technique to get a good alternative to expensive geophones. Wish you all the very best.

Wow.. Really exciting to see this effort. Congratulations on the award!

I have been interested in this subject for a long time, as we have elephant-human conflicts in plenty in India (my country). Sometime back I had hacked a computer optical mouse as a seismic detector in order to study elephant intrusion into farmlands (where they are considered as pests). But I think we need more robust detectors. I am also considering laser led self-mixing as a technique to get a good alternative to expensive geophones. Wish you all the very best.

Hi Courtney,

I haven't read through all the Wildlife computer options but I have heard of people using Zinc Anode disks as a type of slowly degrading attachment point for tags. We use these also as a backup for other types of releases on Oceanographic moorings etc. It would take some testing to see how the zinc could be attached or be small enough to degrade completely away from the pinniped but still be strong enough to hold a tag.....just some thoughts!

Cheers,

Stuart

This would be awesome Andrew! Happy to help with some organization of this/identifying potential chapter authors. 

I'm sure you know about this already, but there is also this book from Wich & Piel: https://www.amazon.com/Conservation-Technology-Serge-Wich/dp/0198850255 

Hi Andew,

Whatever became of your book? Also have you seen jupyterbook.org and mystmd.org? Both are free and open source software for publishing articles and books.

Best,

Vance