Hi Nazirul, 

That is so interesting! My assumption was that you would be using the shell markings as the ID, I hadn't even considered that the facial and fin markings would be a more useful way to diferentiate individuals. I would have thought that getting a look at a turtle's shell would be easier than taking a photo that shows the fins or face in enough detail to analyse - is this not the case? Or do you use the facial scale patterns because the shells do not differ enough between individuals?

I'm also keen to hear more now about your methodology. How to you take your observations? If you're using pattern recognition software and Wildbook, you must be taking photos. Are these remotely triggered (i.e. underwater camera traps), or are they from photos taken by divers or people there monitoring in person? 

Kate's link above doesn't seem to be working for me, is there a website we can visit to find out more? 

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,

Steph

@Lenny Just saw your profile on the members section. You might be interested in this. 

The application was 20th September though?

Hi Courtney,

Jason mentioned some very good journals (and there are many more) that cover broad areas of research as indicated by the journal titles. Perhaps your paper might fit into any of them.

However, people can give you more focussed recommendations if you tell us what research questions you addressed. At this point we only know what kind of technology you used.

Is technology itself the main topic of your paper? Or are you reporting what you learned about tiger biology/ecology through using accoustic technology?

Julia

Hello Courtney

My turn to apologies for delay. Your study sounds very interesting and potentially a valuable technique for future in-situ research. Seems it could indeed fit journals with a broad scope concerning wildlife ecology and conservation (including those mentioned earlier in this thread) and not narrowly limited to accoustics. I hope you are progressing towards publishing your work and I look forwarrd to reading it!

Hello,

I won't be attending the IUCN conference in Hawaii, but I am writing an article on efforts to curtail the illegal wildlife trade through greater regional and international cooperation between the entities tasked with stopping the trade.

The premise of the artlice will  focus on the issues raised in this working paper. https://cites.org/sites/default/files/eng/cop/17/WorkingDocs/E-CoP17-28.pdf

I'd like to focus on initiatives underway to clamp  down on the transportation and logistics aspects of the global trade.  And I'd like to interview the representatives of the conservation groups and agency officials attending for their views on what they'd like to see happen at Cop17.

My deadline is Sept 8th. But I'd like to conduct interviews this coming week.

Thanks,

Enrique Gili
Freelance Writer
email:[email protected]
Twitter: gili92107
SkypeID: gili92107

Hi all

We are running a session on IUCN's decision support tools (mostly databases) for addressing invasive alien species. Many of the tools have come about due to mandates from CBD, and in partnership with other organisations.

Species Conservation Pavilion

4 September 2016

19:30 - 21:30

Details can be seen here - https://portals.iucn.org/congress/session/12436

Many thanks

On behalf of the United States Department of State, I'd like to invite all interested conservationists, technologists, and others to take part in-person or online in a conservation technology event centered around the upcoming Zoohackathon! 

www.zoohackathon.com

On Friday, September 2 at 1:00 - 1:30 pm in the U.S. Pavilion at the World Conservation Congress, Undersecretary of State Cathy Novelli will host a group of leading wildlife officials, including CITES Secretary General John Scanlon and Association of Zoos and Aquariums Executive Director Kris Vehrs, for a conversation about Zoohackathon and conservation technology generally. We'll show off the recently developed Wildlife Witness app and then answer a few questions solicitied from YOU via WildLabs.net!

Please reply to this thread, write me directly, or follow up with other Zoohackathon threads on WildLabs to ask your conservation tech questions to this group of senior officials. Before the event, we'll pull a few of these questions and ask our panel, film the responses, and provide film and transcript follow-ups on WildLabs.

And if you can join us at the event in Hawaii, we'd love to see you! Then stick around for Jane Goodall's talk immediately following.

Thanks!

DeMark

Zoohackathon Global Coordinator, U.S. Department of State, [email protected] 

Hi @StephODonnell and others,

I'll be joining NOAA, Pew, Walton etc for a workshop on "Application of Monitoring, Control and Surveillance (MCS) Tools for Marine Protected Area (MPA) Enforcement" (session number: 10303; room 307AB; September 2, 2:30-7pm).

My part will be to present on a project that Stimson is launching ahead of the Our Ocean Conference called Secure Our Oceans, focused on technology and innovation for ocean security, including IUU (partnership with National Geographic). Check out www.secureoceans.org

J

Hi Paul, 

Interesting question. Are you interested in hearing about case studies that are investigating these sensor integrations? If so, I'm happy to share a number of examples I know of.  

This article in the WILDLABS.NET resources area might have a few additions for the list. It profiles a lot of different examples of conservation tech (and includes links and videos), so it's worth checking out. 

A new addition to the list I've spotted is a magnetometer - part of a slew of sensors UC Santa Cruz has added to a SMART collar they've developed for Pumas. From the aforementioned article:

UC Santa Cruz: SMART Collar 

Scientists at UC Santa Cruz have developed a Species Movement, Acceleration and Radio Tracking (SMART) Collar to study puma movements and caloric needs, similar to a Fitbit. The collars include a GPS unit, accelerometers, and a magnetometer to provide detailed data on where an animal is and what it is doing. 

After callibrating the collars with captive pumas, the team were able to were able to continuously monitor the movements of mountain lions in the wild and determine how much energy the big cats use to stalk, pounce, and overpower their prey. These findings help explain why most cats use a 'stalk and pounce' hunting strategy. 

The researchers were able to quantify, for example, the high energetic costs of traveling over rugged terrain compared to the low cost of "cryptic" hunting behaviors such as sit-and-wait or stalk-and-ambush movements. During the actual pounce and kill, the cats invest a lot of energy in a short time to overpower their prey. Data from the collars showed that mountain lions adjust the amount of energy they put into the initial pounce to account for the size of their prey.

The team now wants to look at mountain lion energetics in a range of different habitat types. In particular, they are interested in how human land use and habitat fragmentation may be influencing the energetic demands on mountain lions in the wild. They also have projects using the new collar technology to study other large carnivores, including wolves, polar bears, and Weddell seals.

For more information, visit the Santa Cruz Puma Project website. 

Let me know if you're interested in a list of case studies for the environmental conditions you've already identified and I'll share my secret stash :) 

Steph 

Hi Paul, 

I just remembered another one for the list. @BethClark is taking some really cool environmental readings for seabirds - Gannets - basically to build a picture of their lives in 3D. She talks about it on her blog here.

A few excerpts: 

Electronic devices are attached onto the birds to record their behaviour: GPS, altimeters, accelerometers and dive recorders. The key will be to use multiple loggers on the same bird to record their flights in great detail. The GPS tracking project has been going on Grassholm for a few years now and we are building up a good picture of where they tend to forage.

The altimeters show the height above the sea, which gives us 3D tracks of the birds’ movements – very cool! The higher you are, the further you can see, but the more difficult it is to pick up scents from the sea. We will find out if these 3D help us pick out foraging behaviour and see how they actually find fish (and fishing boats) in a huge and seemingly featureless ocean.

Dive recorders show the timing and depth of the famous torpedo plunge dives, which will let us know when the birds have successfully found a fishing ground.

The accelerometers measure acceleration in 3 directions, showing even a single wing flap. This will help us to measure how much effort the bird are putting in when they travel and forage, which is very important for trying to figure out how they decide where to go. We will also be able to identify other behaviours, such as telling apart high-speed plunge diving from a slower dive made from the surface.

I think altimeters and dive recorders might be new ones for your list. Beth's here on WILDLABS.NET (and has promised a nice case study for our Resources area), so I think she'd be delighted to answer any questions you might have. 

Cheers,

Steph 

Hello again!

An interesting paper exploring the new technologies being used to study cetaceans has a section devoted to what they term high-resolution multisensor tags (page 4).

As with @BethClark 's work above, the questions that arise when studying marine mammals bring another dimension into what information we might require sensors to collect. For example: 

Among cetaceans, there are two suborders: Odontocetes (toothed-whales) and Mysticetes (baleen whales). In general, toothed whales and dolphins use high-frequency acoustics for interanimal communication and feeding. In the marine environment, where sight is limited, sound propagates extremely well and all marine mammals communicate primarily through acoustic cues. Similar to bats, toothed whales and dolphins feed via high-frequency sound production known as echolocation, where acoustic signals reflect off of targets and the returning echoes can be translated into information on the environment or potential prey. For many years, independent passive acoustic recorders have been used to study the vocalizations of marine mammals. However, the incorporation of acoustic recorders (hydrophones) into animal-borne tags has only occurred in the past 20 years (Fletcher, Le Boeuf, Costa, Tyack, & Blackwell, 1996). The information that is recorded on the sensors in these tags (e.g. acoustic, movement) can be used to determine the frequency and acoustic structure of vocal behaviours that occur concomitant with motor behaviour, for example, echolocation signals during feeding events (Madsen, De Soto, Arranz, & Johnson, 2013) or contact calling while diving ( Jensen, Marrero Perez, Johnson, Aguilar Soto, & Madsen, 2011). Echolocation ‘clicks’ and ‘buzzes’ have been used from animal-borne tags to study the foraging behaviour of a wide range of odontocetes, from the small harbour porpoise, Phocoena phocoena, to the largest, the sperm whale (Fais et al., 2015; Wisniewska et al., 2015). This information has provided critical data on the feeding depths, frequency, timing and prey types targeted by different species and the behaviours associated with foraging (Johnson, de Soto & Madsen, 2009). These insights into feeding behaviour have recently been used to help determine foraging performance and foraging ecology (Watwood, Miller, Johnson, Madsen, & Tyack, 2006), as well as the energetic consequences of disturbing this behaviour (Miller et al., 2009). These new data products are ripe for linking to conservation efforts such as the individual and population consequences of human activities disrupting these behaviours (e.g. the use of naval sonar and seismic surveys). We explore below the tools produced, as well as new ones in development, to forge these links.

You have already identified sound in your original list, but I think the use of hydrophones with tags is an interesting addition - an example that didn't immediately spring to mind (at least for me), when I thought about the list. 

Cheers, 

Steph 

In Press: Nowacek, D. P., et al., Studying cetacean behaviour: new technological approaches and conservation applications, Animal Behaviour (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.07.019