Hi Ollie,

You can do the photogrammetry without a drone. You just need a tripod and a camera. The drone is useful because it can move to locations automatically ensuring that you have correct overlap but  in caves you obviously will not have the GPS signal you need for most off the shelf units to navigate.

Thom mentioned to me a device called a Zebedee, which should do what you are hoping for. I don't know anyone who has one though and I'm afraid I don't have a LiDAR unit to lend. 

Tom

A colleague showed me this last week - laser scanning in Nottingham's 'caves' - scroll down and check out the video.

http://tparchaeology.co.uk/caves/caveswebsite/index.htm

For good measure, here's some cave survey porn of Hang Son Doong cave in China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOH4gbW18Ts

This sounds fantastic! Am based out of San Diego but could potentially travel in and would be interested to join a WILDLABS team if there's one in the making.

Managed to chorale a group together at my company and submitted our application last night. If any Wildlabs folk are joining as part of other teams though, I love to meet them there (and will keep my fingers crossed that we're all selected to attend!) :)

Hi @twhitten ,

Over in the other thread  looking at developing best practise user guidelines @Jeremy+Lindsell shared a doc that might very well provide the template you're looking for. The Univeristy of Exeter dronelab research group (led by Karen Anderson) has developed a template for researchers using drones to help them meet CAA operating standards.

You can download the PDF here: 

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/01431161.2017.1286059/suppl_file/tres_a_1286059_sm2155.pdf

And a Word version here:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/01431161.2017.1286059/suppl_file/tres_a_1286059_sm2164.docx

Thanks Jeremy!

Cheers, 
Stephanie

Hi @twhitten 

The British Model Flying Association provide a specialist insurance for drone operators who are not using them as a hobby nor for commercial purposes ("aerial work"). The category is termed "data, development and demonstration" and is recognised by UK Civil Aviation Authority as a legitimate mode of opeation that doesn't fit the current binary legislation of hobby or commercial. The insurance covers worldwide liability for operation. Most other drone insurance avilable assumes you are commercial, doing "aerial work" by CAA definition, and have a formal CAA licence.

BMFA are also a good source of information about current UK Gov and EU discussions on further legistlation re drones (registering all users for eg).

Best

Jeremy

This is a long shot, and I don't have much of a biology background, but :  Would it be feasible to amplify the traces of human handling of meat enough to make that serve as a deterrent to any birds consuming tampered meat?   My assumption is that a human has to handle meat to poison it, some traces of human-ness (fairmones/body oils) must rub off on that meat. Rather than designing sensors to trigger off specific chemicals, would we be better off just triggering off human intervention?  Not sure how the sensors would be deployed, but... 

Thanks for sharing this interesting post Tarik and your insights into the problem....I like your thinking Kbala but as I understand it a sensor to detect human interference would be practically impossible with the current state of this kind of technology and at best it would be very expensive thus not feasible to use on enough birds to make an impact...

Tarik do you happen to know which of the 3 causes you mention causes the highest number of vulture mortalities? Or is there is any research on this topic?

-use in traditional medicine/uMuthi trade

-commercial farmers laying out poisoned 

-rhino poachers that leaves poisoned  carcasses behind 

This is a great ecological concern considering the knock on effect the lose of Vultures and other raptors have on local ecosystems...

Hi Kate, It all depends on the specie and data set accuracy you are trying to collect. If you are purely documenting frequency of visits, this is straight forward. However, if you are recording numbers then further analysis of photos may be needed. Some animals like foxes have distinctive marks or shapes, whilst smaller mammals can be a lot harder. If this is impossible, then a time limit should be defined across all camera traps. From all the papers I have read and projects we have worked with, there doesn’t seem to be clear standard. Hope this helps. Mike - handykam

Hi Kate, this may be a bit late for your analysis but I will put here for future reference. The case you mention would be to detemine independent events, not necesarily different individuals. Unless there is conspicuous colour, pattern, size, sex or other scars/markings then you shouldn't label them as different individuals. I haven't found much analysis or discussion on this point so it seems prior experience or a "best-guess" is used to determine the time between independent events. Within the R package "camtrapR" vignette it is mentioned (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/camtrapR/vignettes/DataExploration.html) "The criterion for temporal independence between records ... will affect the results of the activity plots" and you may have other data to correlate activity with abundance or density.

If you are using and occupancy analysis this may be trivial as you will likely be lumping multiple nights of survey into a single detection period for each camera anyway (we have used six 10-day detection periods for cats in central Aus). 

SECR methods may also be more useful for calculating density. Timing of events BETWEEN cameras can be used to show that photos are of different indivduals as they cannont exist in two places simultaneously or travel at fast enough rate to be captured in that time frame (clocks must be synchronised). 

I hope you have had as good a season in Bon Bon as we have in Alice Springs. Cheers, Al

The facts are simple. If you violate the assumption of independence of sampling events you will bias the result. In the event of multiple observations by overestimating occupancy due to counting the same animal twice. There is therefore no answer to your problem. People try to overcome it by chosing a particular random number to try and standardise the method across sampling sessions. Let us say we decide to use one hour between new samples in all our sampling sessions. If abundance changes between sessions our ability to detect an animal may change and our result may therefore be biased up or down depending on the trend. So we allow detectability to vary between samples to try and reduce this bias. This is done through assessing the results of the replicate samples i.e. n days.
However, the session time determines how many counts are reduced to presence only and as session time increases the variance of the occupancy estimate may grow. But we don't know if this increasing variance/ loss of accuracy is based on a real loss of information or not because we don't know if we are correctly throwing away information portraying the same individual or information on the presence of multiple individuals. Therefore selection of session time may effect our ability to detect a change in occupancy even with accounting for varying detection. i.e. detection may be equal if our session time is too short. In other words if in both one hour AND two hours we detect multiple animals on the same number of plots, convert this to the binomial (presence/absence), then detectability will be equal for both sessions. But if in one hour we detect half the number of animals as in two hours what does this say about occupancy?
Spatially explict (SE) models will also not help because as far as I know they are based on allowing multiple detections across plots, not within plots. Or cameras in this case.
Having said this there is apparently some hope in marking a portion of individuals to increase the accuracy of SECR or SE unmarked in this case. So my only advice would be to run an experiment with marking some foxes and use a SE model with predominantly unmarked indiviudals.
On a more jovial note you could simply mine the data by assessing the power to detect a change between pre/post baiting using a variety of different session times. The reality of such a result is highly dubious but it might inspire more thought on the behaviour of this particular situation. Failing all this youy could run away and join the circus.

I am finding ArcGIS Collector very usefull. I can say, as an dedicated R coder, some things are worth paying money for and Collector is one of the. I have used it to implement several monitoring and data collection projects. I particularly like the assurance that data will not be lost on the device and the ability to cache base maps. 

Dear BPdorsey, Collector will support custom basemaps ? It wasn't an option a few months ago.

CCI International GIS Day recap

GIS Day at CCI was a great success! We kept it short to try and maximise engagement and so that everyone could meet each other. Attendees have been sent a follow-up email, but if you've not received this or you want to know more then please message me for details.

It would be a great mini-legacy and a testament to the event if attendees could post a brief introduction / recap on this thread; just stating your occupation and interests, or anything that you took away from the event. Thanks to the organising committee @jonathanknox.ffi (FFI), @Tomswinfield (RSPB) and Andy Arnell (UNEP-WCMC). And thanks for the photos, @StephODonnell !

I'm a software developer with the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), working on online map-based applications for bird surveys (e.g. BirdTrack). My main focus is the databases (Oracle & Postgres, including spatial features) and preparing the GIS data using ArcGIS or QGIS. Our online applications are key to receiving survey data from a large number of volunteers and displaying the survey results back to the volunteers.

I also act as central contact point within the BTO for queries about GIS.