I'll definitely check out your channel! To be honest, I'm much more on the animal science and behaviour side of things than the hardware engineering side, so I can't speak to the exact specs of the older gear I've seen, but having that high of a resolution without motion blur definitely sounds like a massive leap forward.

The way I see it, the trickiest part about any remote tech, no matter how high-res it gets, is that you can never truly measure the 'avoidance factor' from behind the lens. If a cautious animal senses a foreign object in its home ground and decides to completely steer clear of that zone, the camera will never catch it. You only ever get data on the animals that don't mind the camera, which can unintentionally skew the behavioural picture.

It’s the classic observer dilemma. It’s why some of the most famous animal behaviourists in history only truly understood nuanced behaviour by actually embedding themselves in the environment and becoming part of the pack, rather than relying solely on a fixed lens. But as a tool to bridge the gap where humans can't go, it's definitely exciting to see how much clearer the visibility is getting!

I would love to have feedback from a behavioral researcher. When I made the comment, I was mostly thinking about macro behavior. I haven't dived into the requirements for micro research, but it sure is interesting.

The area where I hope to make the most impact is in human-wildlife conflict mitigation. I would be thrilled if it turned out to be useful to behavior analysis as well.

Occasionally we get a close close up of an animal. Such as this hare. I would love to know whether in you consider it contains sufficient detail for behavioral purposes.

Hare closeup in Thermal

And here, even better

Ring side view of a hare close up

Over time, the animals do get comfortable with our gear. I'm sure that a bird built a nest under the panel recently. I just haven't been out there in a while to check, but it keeps flying up from below in the area. We have a visible view of that.

Baby bird living under a solar panel

Most of our wolf videos are on our other channel. Here the wolves indeed were very wary of the gear at first. Mostly they would glance up, however at first they would have been looking at the camera, but over time I think that most of the time they were looking across the field to the road on the other side.

We also have a 4K ultra low light camera that we were lighting with invisible (940nm) lighting. This we have also recording continuously.

Wolf with 4K ultra low light camera
 
We custom design all weather enclosures for out thermal modules. They are design such if you wanted you could remove them and use them in a stealth custom made enclosure of your own. They are USB based modules, so the main recording unit can be hidden away from the camera. Here is a photo of a 640x512 unit

There's a camera mounting fitting underneath so you can can ball joint camera mounts to mount them on and only a little bit sticks up into view.
 
The 1280x1024 resolution module is a bit bigger

I joined today. I have a possible solution for your sparse problem - How H-ear Works | AI Sound Classification & Audio Annotation.

Hi! I'm interested in this as well actually, though I have a BS in Computer Science, no Masters.

Hey, I am also interested, would you also be able to share the information with me too :)

Makes sense, I thought there might be a Lisp preference factoring in there 🙂

Cuirass looks cool, I'm going to check it out, and the eco-pulse-monitor project looks great too, well done!

Related to AI sustainability, have you checked out any of the CodeCarbon tools by chance? I've been working on incorporating their library into our daily code tasks at work, seems like a worthwhile project - 

Read "CodeCarbon" on

CodeCarbon

Track & reduce Co2 emissions from your computing

EcoLogits just joined CodeCarbon too I think, also neat - 

Read "EcoLogits - EcoLogits" on

EcoLogits - EcoLogits

Thanks!

Hi Sam,

Your medium article is an interesting tale from an entrepreneurial perspective.

Are you still working on the app? How did the story end?

cheers

Frank

That sounds cool! I am the CyberTracker/SMART-Mobile developer. Capturing long running logs of multiple streams is a direction we are moving in. Let me know if this is something you are interested in collaborating with. We are starting small with just audio+location which is post-processed by AI into discrete observations. Turning this into a KML tour is also something I have been thinking about.

Hello! We are actually building something like this. 🐟 

Spyfish Aotearoa is a project by Wildlife.ai and the Department of Conservation in New Zealand. 

I am hoping that in a few months once we are done with the pipeline for our specific usecase, to make it open source for a general usecase. (I mean it's already open source, but definitely not easy to plug into yet).



Would you be up for a chat, would love to hear what your work looks like.



 

Read "Spyfish Aotearoa - Wildlife.AI" on Wildlife.AI

Spyfish Aotearoa - Wildlife.AI

Spyfish Aotearoa is a citizen science and machine learning approach to identify fish in baited underwater videos.   A BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOT Over half of the 17,000 marine species in New Zealand

Wildlife.AI