Ignite Labs: Space for Nature & Biodiversity Series
21 January 2024 2:46pm
Open-source kinetic energy harvesting collar - Kinefox
1 November 2023 5:31pm
20 January 2024 7:16am
Not a water wheel but equally cool.
20 January 2024 9:10pm
Super cool! thank you for sharing!
Kenya Forest Club, Central Region – Kenya Forest Club
20 January 2024 2:53pm
It has been an exciting challenge as a member of Kenya Forest Club whose main aim is solving climate change challenges through early childhood education and training, with a particular interest in forestry.
The club hopes to have members in all schools and setup of tree nurseries
Want to learn QGIS!
26 December 2023 11:49pm
17 January 2024 3:11am
Thank you for your reply.
17 January 2024 3:13am
Thank you so much for your reply and sharing the resources.
I'll surely look into them and if I face any difficulty would let you know.
Thank you.
20 January 2024 7:33am
Thank you for the links. As a trainer in GIS I have gone through them and they are very helpful for a beginner in QGIS.
Hiring bioacoutics analysts
19 January 2024 4:18am
Women in conservation technology
17 January 2024 12:58pm
18 January 2024 3:23pm
You could look at WILDLABS' State of Conservation Tech research results! Shows ~⅓ of survey respondents are female (though this is obviously just a subset of the total people/women in conservation tech, the subset being those who filled out the survey).
@EstherGithinji runs some of the WILDLABS Women in Conservation Tech programs so she would have lots of insights into this!
Recycled & DIY Remote Monitoring Buoy
15 January 2024 1:14am
15 January 2024 9:17pm
Hello fellow Brett. Cool project. You mentioned a waterseal testing process. Is there documentation on that?
18 January 2024 10:25am
I dont have anything written up but I can tell what parts we used and how we tested.
Its pretty straightforward, we used this M10 Enclosure Vent from Blue Robotics:
Along with this nipple adapter:
Then you can use any cheap hand held break pump to connect to your enclosure. You can pump a small vacuum in and make sure the pressure holds.
Here's a tutorial video from blue robotics:
Let me know if you have any questions or if I can help out.
A gentle introduction to computer vision-based specimen classification in ecological datasets
26 January 2024 2:20pm
26 January 2024 2:24pm
Cheap camera traps with "Timelapse+" mode?
20 July 2023 3:09pm
7 August 2023 2:57pm
Thank you @mguins and @NickGardner for your praise and addition. I had not thought of the backup possibility, but it sure is a good point, Michelle. I find it amazing how often one reads about and experiences camtrap malfunction. Even the relatively cheap ones are still quite a lot of money for what is, at the end of the day, a relatively simple piece of electronics and a plastic container.
12 August 2023 6:41am
Frank's idea of using 2 camera traps is inspired!
I've fiddled with cheap camera traps a bit, and some (most?) of them use a low power, inaccurate timer for the time lapse function instead of the accurate real time clock. This is ok for Michelle's purpose, but not for Nick's as he needs to specify the exact time of day to trigger.
I made this interface to allow a camera trap to be triggered by an external device. To it you could attach, say, a timer programmed to fire at the desired times, to cause a capture. A $4 DS3231 RTC module could do the job, after the alarm times have been programmed into it with , for example, an Arduino.
17 January 2024 5:56pm
Hi Nick,
Any update from your project? did you find good price value Camera Traps?
We in Indonesia don't have local suppliers for any research grade Camera Traps like Bushnell, Browning or Reconyx. So we need to import them and the price inflated a lot even without the distributor. So, me and my team recently use the China model like GardePro or Meidase one ($40-60). Though we bought it in the US in small quantity if some of our friends travel back to Indonesia. They have more feature than typical Bushnell with same price range. The images are AI upscale, but doesn't really bother us. So I am curious if you found any good Camera Traps to recommend? Thanks!
Cheers,
Dhanu
Using "motion extraction" for animal identification
16 January 2024 3:46pm
17 January 2024 2:54am
Hi Dhanu,
Our group moved to Wildlife Insights a few years back (for a few reasons but mostly ease of data upload/annotation by multiple users) so I haven't tried EcoAssist. This being said, I will look into it as a pre-WildlifeInsights filter to analyze the tens of thousands of images that get recorded when camera traps start to fail, or get confused with sun spots (which can be common at one of our sites, a south-facing slope with sparse canopy cover).
Thanks for sharing!
17 January 2024 5:16am
You are most welcome.
I can only highly recommend joining the online events! They are really inspiring.
- and it is great to "meet" and chat with fellow WildLabbers during the "after hours".
17 January 2024 4:22pm
Very nice video in the link you posted btw:
Here is another less artistic one:
Salesforce Accelerator: AI for Climate
16 January 2024 10:15am
Ethics in Conservation out there?
16 January 2024 9:12am
Two year postdoc - Machine Learning & Bioacoustics
16 January 2024 7:49am
Cold-Weather Soundscapes
Wildlife Conservation for "Dummies"
9 January 2024 10:02pm
10 January 2024 11:24pm
Maybe this is obvious, but maybe it's so obvious that you could easily forget to include this in your list of recommendations: encourage them to hang out here on WILDLABS! I say that in all seriousness: if you get some great responses here and compile them into a list, it would be easy to forget the fact that you came to WILDLABS to get those responses.
I get questions like this frequently, and my recommended entry points are always (1) attend the WILDLABS Variety Hour series, (2) lurk on WILDLABS.net, and (3) if they express a specific interest in AI, lurk on the AI for Conservation Slack.
I usually also recommend that folks visit the Work on Climate Slack and - if they live in a major city - to attend one of the in-person Work on Climate events. You'll see relatively little conservation talk there, but conservation tech is just a small subset of sustainability tech, and for a new person in the field, if they're interested in environmental sustainability, even if they're a bit more interested in conservation than in other aspects of sustainability, the sheer number of opportunities in non-conservation-related climate tech may help them get their hands dirty more quickly than in conservation specifically, especially if they're looking to make a full-time career transition. But of course, I'd rather have everyone working on conservation!
13 January 2024 3:14am
Some good overview papers I'd recommend include:
- Besson, M., Alison, J., Bjerge, K., Gorochowski, T. E., Høye, T. T., Jucker, T., ... & Clements, C. F. (2022). Towards the fully automated monitoring of ecological communities. Ecology Letters, 25(12), 2753-2775.
- Speaker, T., O'Donnell, S., Wittemyer, G., Bruyere, B., Loucks, C., Dancer, A., ... & Solomon, J. (2022). A global community‐sourced assessment of the state of conservation technology. Conservation Biology, 36(3), e13871.
- WILDLABS-led research! Led by @TaliaSpeaker and @StephODonnell
- Lahoz-Monfort, J. J., & Magrath, M. J. (2021). A comprehensive overview of technologies for species and habitat monitoring and conservation. BioScience, 71(10), 1038-1062.
- Tuia, D., Kellenberger, B., Beery, S., Costelloe, B. R., Zuffi, S., Risse, B., ... & Berger-Wolf, T. (2022). Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation. Nature communications, 13(1), 792.
- Stowell, D. (2022). Computational bioacoustics with deep learning: a review and roadmap. PeerJ, 10, e13152.
- I'm biased towards bioacoustics because that's what I focus on, but this regardless this is an excellent horizon scan of AI/ML for conservation and acoustics!
- Borowiec, M. L., Dikow, R. B., Frandsen, P. B., McKeeken, A., Valentini, G., & White, A. E. (2022). Deep learning as a tool for ecology and evolution. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 13(8), 1640-1660.
I'd also encourage you to follow the #tech4wildlife hashtags on social media!
15 January 2024 4:27pm
I'm also here for this. This is my first comment... I've been lurking for a while.
I have 20 years of professional knowledge in design, with the bulk of that being software design. I also have a keen interest in wildlife. I've never really combined the two; and I'm starting to feel like that is a waste. I have a lot to contribute. The loss of biodiversity is terrifying me. So I’m making a plan that in 2024 I’m going to combine both.
However, if I’m honest with you – I struggle with where to start. There are such vast amounts of information out there I find myself jumping all over the place. A lot of it is highly scientific, which is great – but I do not have a science background.
As suggested by the post title.. a “Wildlife Conservation for Dummies” would be exactly what I am looking for. Because in this case I’m happy to admit I am a complete dummy.
Africa Tech Summit London
15 January 2024 10:18am
Africa Climate Tech & Investment Summit
15 January 2024 10:10am
Free Spatial Analysis Course: Going Places with Spatial Analysis
15 January 2024 9:42am
Free Live Training Seminar: Bring Your Imagery to Life with ArcGIS Reality
15 January 2024 9:32am
Information to the young who are the future
8 January 2024 4:35pm
12 January 2024 11:48am
Great work @CathyNj kindly check out the below opportunity. I reckon you may find it useful for your work.
"Join Planet Ed and The Nature Conservancy for the Planet Media Call for Pitches to Shape the Future of Climate Education for Kids!"
13 January 2024 4:08pm
Thank you for this! Will take a look.
Opinions or experience with Firetail movement analysis software?
29 December 2023 9:39pm
9 January 2024 9:15am
Hi Travis!
I'm a developer in the Firetail team and also worked with R a lot during my PhD.
The goals of both projects are quite different. Using Firetail definitely does not mean you can no longer use R or vice versa. Firetail's focus is on the interactive, visual exploration and annotation of your data. It is meant to be used by scientists, conservationists or stakeholders analysing their projects.
It may be used to pinpoint regions/time-windows and visualize data suitable for downstream analysis in R, or generate reports regularily. Firetail won't replace algorithm X using a distinct set of parameters as required by reviewer R, but it will help to understand your data and tell the story.
The basic workflows of Firetail are meant to be intuitive and we seek to support a wide range of data out of the box (plus, 1:1 customer service when you run into problems).
We also implement additional workflows based on ideas that we receive from you all and seek to integrate interfaces to whatever upstream/downstream tools you require for your daily work.
Feel free to contact me ([email protected]) for specific questions or just use this thread :)
Best,
Tobias
12 January 2024 12:48am
Hi Tobias!
This is great to hear. This seems to be exactly what I am looking for as I approach my accelerometry data, looking to identify certain behaviors through thresholds then manually verify. This sounds like a great compliment to what I've done in R with the data so far. Thanks for the info! I will most definitely give this a try!
I may take you up on the offer of emailing you with a couple quick questions once I start (I appreciate that!)
Best,
Travis
13 January 2024 6:10am
Perfect. Looking forward to hearing from you!
How do you access the internet remotely?
24 July 2017 5:29pm
19 December 2023 7:45am
Wow! Those Yeti things are just what are needed for the wild passage project:
12 January 2024 1:32pm
My solution is usually wayyyy more traditional and involves climbing the tallest tree or hiking the highest hill.
That being said, I cant find a clear explanation about how BRCK works and I assumed it used signal repeater, which is illegal in many countries. It is also very prone of lightning strike, which is the reason I did not use it as I live in a very lightning-prone area.
12 January 2024 2:08pm
Trying to make sense of this brick product, the link provided is a bit vague. The front page talks about SIP trunking, so that implies it's all about telephone connectivity. And hence not related to the internet itself. Surely that means you have to already have an Internet connection? If that is the case, would not whatsapp voice calls be just as useful and a lot easier ? I've re-read it a few times and it does not seem to be any product relating to providing remote Internet connectivity??? Seems more like a way to extend your telephone network to a remote one for a business.
How to build my VHF tags from the scratch?
9 January 2019 10:04am
29 December 2022 10:43am
@Tinytx Hello I am interested in details please contact me by email [email protected] thank you
12 January 2024 11:07am
@Tinytx Hi, I am very interested in detail regarding this transmitter, would you mind sharing the information you have, [email protected]
Many thanks
Sam
12 January 2024 1:25pm
Wow! So impressive! Being old enough to precede the existence of personal computers these are the things of my dreams back then :)
Application of a deep learning image classifier for identification of Amazonian fishes
11 January 2024 8:24pm
HWC Tech Challenge update 2020
Testing Raspberry Pi cameras: Results
5 May 2023 5:11pm
5 September 2023 8:16am
And finally for now, the object detectors are wrapped by a python websocket network wrapper to make it easy for the system to use different types of object detectors. Usually, it's about 1/2 a day for me to write a new python wrapper for a new object detector type. You just need to wrap in the network connection and make it conform to the yolo way of expressing the hits, i.e. the json format that yolo outputs with bounding boxes, class names and confidence level.
What's more, you can even use multiple object detector models in different parts of a single captured image and you can cascade the logic to require multiple object detectors to match for example, or a choice from different object detectors.
It's the perfect anti-poaching system (If I say so myself :) )
10 January 2024 11:47pm
Hey @kimhendrikse , thanks for all these details. I just caught up. I like your approach of supporting multiple object detectors and using the python websockets wrapper! Is your code available somewhere?
11 January 2024 6:02am
Yep, here:
Currently it only installs on older Jetsons as in the coming weeks I’ll finish the install code for current jetsons.
Technically speaking, if you were an IT specialist you could even make it work in wsl2 Ubuntu on windows, but I haven’t published instructions for that. If you were even more of a specialist you wouldn’t need wsl2 either. One day I’ll publish instructions for that once I’ve done it. Though it would be slow unless the windows machine had an NVidia GPU and you PyTorch work with it.
New method for improving shape awareness in deep learning
11 January 2024 12:28am
Update 3: Cheap Automated Mothbox
31 December 2023 9:37pm
1 January 2024 9:18pm
This looks amazing! I'm currently work with hastatus bats up in Bocas, it would be really interesting to utilize some of these near foraging sites. Be sure to post again when you post the final documentation on github!
Also, Gamboa......dang I miss that little slice of heaven...
Super cool work Andrew!
Best,
Travis
5 January 2024 8:56pm
Thanks!!!
10 January 2024 11:33pm
Great work! I very much look forward to trying out the MothBeam light. That's going to be a huge help in making moth monitoring more accessible.
And well done digging into the picamera2 library to reduce the amount of time the light needs to be on while taking a photo. That is a super annoying issue!
Jamii Tech Program 2024, Tanzania
10 January 2024 11:12am
SDZWA Conservation Tech Summer Fellowship
9 January 2024 7:04pm
17 January 2024 7:45pm
This is super cool!
I was wondering if the development will further touch marine or aquatic animals, make it like water wheel (even might give burden to aerodynamic). Thank you for sharing!
Best,
Dhanu