With new technologies revolutionizing data collection, wildlife researchers are becoming increasingly able to collect data at much higher volumes than ever before. Now we are facing the challenges of putting this information to use, bringing the science of big data into the conservation arena. With the help of machine learning tools, this area holds immense potential for conservation practices. The applications range from online trafficking alerts to species-specific early warning systems to efficient movement and biodiversity monitoring and beyond.
However, the process of building effective machine learning tools depends upon large amounts of standardized training data, and conservationists currently lack an established system for standardization. How to best develop such a system and incentivize data sharing are questions at the forefront of this work. There are currently multiple AI-based conservation initiatives, including Wildlife Insights and WildBook, that are pioneering applications on this front.
This group is the perfect place to ask all your AI-related questions, no matter your skill level or previous familiarity! You'll find resources, meet other members with similar questions and experts who can answer them, and engage in exciting collaborative opportunities together.
Just getting started with AI in conservation? Check out our introduction tutorial, How Do I Train My First Machine Learning Model? with Daniel Situnayake, and our Virtual Meetup on Big Data. If you're coming from the more technical side of AI/ML, Sara Beery runs an AI for Conservation slack channel that might be of interest. Message her for an invite.
Header Image: Dr Claire Burke / @CBurkeSci
Explore the Basics: AI
Understanding the possibilities for incorporating new technology into your work can feel overwhelming. With so many tools available, so many resources to keep up with, and so many innovative projects happening around the world and in our community, it's easy to lose sight of how and why these new technologies matter, and how they can be practically applied to your projects.
Machine learning has huge potential in conservation tech, and its applications are growing every day! But the tradeoff of that potential is a big learning curve - or so it seems to those starting out with this powerful tool!
To help you explore the potential of AI (and prepare for some of our upcoming AI-themed events!), we've compiled simple, key resources, conversations, and videos to highlight the possibilities:
Three Resources for Beginners:
- Everything I know about Machine Learning and Camera Traps, Dan Morris | Resource library, camera traps, machine learning
- Using Computer Vision to Protect Endangered Species, Kasim Rafiq | Machine learning, data analysis, big cats
- Resource: WildID | WildID
Three Forum Threads for Beginners:
- I made an open-source tool to help you sort camera trap images | Petar Gyurov, Camera Traps
- Batch / Automated Cloud Processing | Chris Nicolas, Acoustic Monitoring
- Looking for help with camera trapping for Jaguars: Software for species ID and database building | Carmina Gutierrez, AI for Conservation
Three Tutorials for Beginners:
- How do I get started using machine learning for my camera traps? | Sara Beery, Tech Tutors
- How do I train my first machine learning model? | Daniel Situnayake, Tech Tutors
- Big Data in Conservation | Dave Thau, Dan Morris, Sarah Davidson, Virtual Meetups
Want to know more about AI, or have your specific machine learning questions answered by experts in the WILDLABS community? Make sure you join the conversation in our AI for Conservation group!
- @lhughey
- | she/her
Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
I am an ecologist and program manager with experience leading collaborative research projects in international settings. I specialize in the application of animal tracking data to conserve migratory species on a changing planet.
- 3 Resources
- 8 Discussions
- 3 Groups
- @tobiaspetri
- | him/his
Schäuffelhut Berger GmbH
data scientist/algorithmic dev - caught fire for movement ecology
- 5 Resources
- 14 Discussions
- 8 Groups
An Environmental sciences and Management graduate from SUA, passionate and eager to drive change to the Environment, making World a better place for present and future generations.
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 10 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 5 Groups
- @Alino
- | Alain
I am a zoologist and I am interested in biodiversity and the conservation of insects and mammals
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 3 Groups
Dr JOhn Read is founder and CEO of Conservation Innovation company Thylation, and founder and director of several adaptive management conservation projects . www.ecologicalhorizons.com, www.thylation.com, www.johnlread.com
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 4 Groups
- @honeyBadger
- | she/her
Software developer looking for ways to contribute to animal conservation
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 3 Groups
San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
Lead, San Diego Zoo Conservation Technology Lab
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 2 Groups
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology
Undertake and develop biodiversity monitoring
- 0 Resources
- 10 Discussions
- 4 Groups
Fauna & Flora
Remote Sensing Scientist
- 2 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 6 Groups
Ocean Science Analytics
Marine mammal ecologist and online technical trainer
- 1 Resources
- 29 Discussions
- 6 Groups
- @Becky_Heath
- | She/ Her
University of Cambridge & Imperial College London
Interdisciplinary scientist working in field data collection methods and tropical agriculture
- 0 Resources
- 9 Discussions
- 7 Groups
We demonstrate the power of using passive acoustic monitoring & machine learning to survey species, using ruffed lemurs in southeastern Madagascar as an example.
23 January 2024
Article
new paper in Journal of Animal Ecology
17 January 2024
Do you work for a climate organization looking to multiply impact with AI? Apply for the Salesforce Accelerator - AI for Climate! This new philanthropic initiative is dedicated to supporting innovative solutions for...
16 January 2024
Two years in Cape Town, South Africa. Yearly visits to Rwanda. If you love to code, and all things Python/deep learning/tech stuff/ then you'll have an awesome time!
16 January 2024
Given the sharp increase in agricultural and infrastructure development and the paucity of widespread data available to support conservation management decisions, a more rapid and accurate tool for identifying fish...
11 January 2024
Article
An update on @Alasdair and @adanger24's HWC project
11 January 2024
The Conservation Technology Laboratory within the Population Sustainability department is seeking two fellows for summer 2024.
9 January 2024
Here are a few key insights from this year's event that we're carrying into 2024.
2 January 2024
News from a grant to explore potential projects for monitoring biodiversity in latin american countries
16 December 2023
SEE Shell is an innovative phone app that uses machine learning to identify products made from the shell of the critically endangered hawksbill sea turtle.
14 December 2023
Outstanding chance for a motivated and ambitious individual to enhance their current project support skills by engaging with a diverse array of exciting projects in the field of biodiversity science.
11 December 2023
The Wildlife Society features a new paper where TrailGuard cameras have been used with tigers
9 December 2023
June 2024
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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In case you missed it, last year the British Ecological Society published A Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution... |
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AI for Conservation | 6 years 2 months ago | |
Hey Steffen, I know you've had a student working on this challenge for the past year - how is this project progressing? If you (or your student) have a moment,... |
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AI for Conservation | 6 years 7 months ago | |
Hi Kate, It's really exciting to hear that you've now launched the challenge, congratulations on getting to this point! It's going to be interesting to... |
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AI for Conservation | 6 years 8 months ago | |
If you're interested, you can check out the live recordings from past events (links below take you to the videos): August: The Blockchain The Blockchain's potential... |
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AI for Conservation | 6 years 8 months ago | |
Hypraptive and Brown Bear Research Network collaboration to develop a deep learning, brown bear face identification system: BearID Project. [Disclosure: I am a member of... |
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AI for Conservation | 6 years 9 months ago | |
It looks like they haven't updated for a couple of years do you know if it is still active or are they changing to a different system like tensor flow? |
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AI for Conservation | 6 years 9 months ago | |
Here' s a press release we put out today talking about how we're using a deep convolutional neural network to find and curate whale... |
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AI for Conservation | 7 years ago | |
For those interested: in the acoustics channel I have posted news on our sound event recognition sensor, using conv-net: https://... |
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AI for Conservation | 7 years 1 month ago | |
Ah! Thanks for posting this Tom. It's such a well designed, simple to understand video series, and the backing track is utterly delightful. Given the... |
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AI for Conservation | 7 years 2 months ago | |
Hello all, I'm looking at using a combination of machine learning and satellite imagery to identify and count individual animals,... |
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AI for Conservation | 7 years 7 months ago | |
We are working on the identification of the threats along the flyway of the Egyptian vulture, endangered vutlure species migrating from... |
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AI for Conservation | 7 years 11 months ago | |
Hi Jason, Thanks for sharing this demo, it's interesting to see the fluke id process in action. Is this part of the flukebook project? How do you see the project... |
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AI for Conservation | 7 years 11 months ago |
Looking for entry level remote role in GIS/environmental analysis in the United States
22 April 2023 12:05am
Catch up with The Variety Hour: April 2023
21 April 2023 10:42am
Call for survey participants (AI/ML practitioners)
19 April 2023 3:17pm
Camera traps, AI, and Ecology
14 April 2023 10:08am
1 August 2023 10:46am
1 September 2023 8:06am
Segment Anything
13 April 2023 9:16pm
Our lead engineer just shared this tool for segmenting images and we're excited to test it out on our fishy & underwater pix. Has anyone else used it?
Project Manager, Rainforest Connection (RFCx)
12 April 2023 1:09pm
The 59th Annual Meeting of Illinois Chapter of The Wildlife Society
12 April 2023 5:24am
Who's going to ESA in Portland this year?
31 March 2023 9:27am
4 April 2023 9:58am
That sounds great. I think you should encourage people to bring a bit of tech with them, can be a good conversation starter/ice-breaker
4 April 2023 4:04pm
Good idea! I've got a ransom assortment of different acoustic recorders I can bring along
5 April 2023 11:58pm
Indeed, I'll be there too! I like to meet new conservation friends with morning runs, so I will likely organize a couple of runs, maybe one right near the conference, and one somewhere in a nearby park where we can look for wildlife. The latter would probably be at an obscenely early hour, so we can drive somewhere, ideally see elk (there are elk within 25 minutes of Portland!), and still get back in time for the morning sessions.
Computer Vision Competitions on Natural-World datasets
5 April 2023 4:26pm
Rhino horns in medicine
2 April 2023 2:22pm
Updates about Arbimon for Ecoacoustics - free, cloud based analytical tool
31 March 2023 11:09am
31 March 2023 3:43pm
Yes please reach out with any questions on acoustic monitoring, Arbimon, RFCx, etc.!
The WILDLABS Variety Hour: March 2023 - YouTube
30 March 2023 4:04pm
If you missed our Variety Hour show yesterday, do not fear! It's already live on youtube for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!
BearID Interview with AWS
29 March 2023 12:35am
Ed Miller of the BearID Project shared this great interview on Twitter and gave WILDLABS a shoutout! If you're new to the AI for Conservation community, you'll want to learn about the BearID Project, which began as a collaboration because of connections made through WILDLABS, and has gone on to set a great standard for machine learning projects in conservation.
AI has critical role to play in helping tackle the climate crisis, new Turing white paper finds
27 March 2023 12:04pm
Four key recommendations for how data science and AI can be better harnessed to tackle climate change:
1. Apply cutting-edge data science and AI to environmental decision-making.
2. Foster a community of AI specialists, environmental researchers and stakeholders across domains and sectors.
3. Build robust digital pipelines to allow researchers to share, store and analyse the vast amounts of data being collected about the environment.
4. Develop digital twins to model and understand the systems that will help us to decarbonise our society.
Catch up with The Variety Hour: March 2023
23 March 2023 11:09am
ARSET - Fundamentals of Machine Learning for Earth Science
21 March 2023 4:49pm
Ol Pejeta Conservancy and Mbaza AI
16 March 2023 7:18pm
Computer Science student looking to work for wildlife
5 March 2023 10:04pm
14 March 2023 2:00pm
Great information! Thank you for sharing this. I actually have Masters in Zoology and have done some field work in Marine Conservation. Since then I have worked in Science education and eventually switched to Software Programming. My dream has always been to work in Conservation, however life happened and I had to give up on this pipe dream. I currently work as a Developer in a contractor role for the Federal Government. Would someone with my experience have an advantage in conservation Tech?
14 March 2023 2:58pm
I think the real demand in conservation tech is for transdisciplianry individuals. If you look at all the stand-out people in this space they are people who occupy multiple domains that are traditionally isolated. These are people who talk fluently in computer science and ecology, for example. Not only this, they are also people who create and imagine in ways that intertwin ideas and concepts across these domains. Its these people, thinking in these ways, that lead to innovations that really move us forward. Some of these people started out where you are now, having crossed domains through their career and then seeing opportunities to bring these skills together in imaginative ways.
14 March 2023 9:53pm
I couldn't agree more with both of these comments tom! I'm reading hundreds (literally hundreds) of applications for open WILDLABS roles at the moment, and the ones that stand out are those where it's really clear they're following genuine curiosity across different disciplines. If you're in conservation, it's the evidence of interest in tech (courses, projects, things you're trying and learning yourself). For tech, it's getting into conservation - all the things you mentioned.
Proposals wanted for Innovation in Practice
6 March 2023 10:34pm
Moveapps EMAC23 Coding Challenge – Participate now!
3 March 2023 7:45am
Underwater Fish Datasets from the Mediterranean
15 August 2022 11:45pm
26 September 2022 9:32pm
Not sure if audio data would be of any use to you, but if so FishSounds has some - I just tried their search function and there is a location tag for 'Mediterranean & Black Sea'.
You might try reaching out to the folks at Name that Fish, Innovasea, or perhaps an entity on the Fisheries Tech list would have Mediterranean stuff?
21 October 2022 7:52am
Hi,
If this is still relevant, you can try reaching out to the Belmaker lab, they do BRUV surveys in the eastern Mediterranean and have hours of video, some of it I believe is annotated. Particularly, Shahar might be helpful, he's the PhD student running point on the project.
2 March 2023 2:03pm
We have made available our underwater videos on YouTube as a playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnhVZKKy8WkZKriCIV6r7upWhHNVrU_7L
It's about 1.113 short video clips with annotation and each is linked to the corresponding www.iNaturalist.org observations. The iNaturalist.org observations are research quality and have been uploaded to GBIF.org. The observations have been made between 2014 and 2022 around the Ionian Islands (Greece).
If you would need the original videos please contact me.
Elephant Recognition
14 January 2023 10:01am
14 January 2023 3:39pm
I can be reached at [email protected]
16 January 2023 2:30pm
Hi Simon,
i've popped you an email too, but actually sharing some more information here about what you're after will mean you'll be able to get better help from our full community.
What are you looking for in particular? It sounds like there is particular piece of software you've seen that could be useful in your work - do you know what it's called? What do you need to do - image recognition, call recognition? Alerts when calls happen or are you looking for something more detailed? The more you tell us about what you're trying to do the better we'll be able to help!
Steph
26 February 2023 1:44pm
Hi Steph,
This should be a simple project. Recently I came across a website with a sample video I am not sure whether it was from the wild Labs website. Where a camera is seen spotting a raccoon and giving an alert saying raccoon detected. My expectations are on similar lines, the only difference here is to change the raccoon to an elephant or a tiger. Please advice.
The Arbimon newsletter is back!
23 February 2023 11:34pm
Tropical pilot of insect camera traps
22 February 2023 12:17pm
Texas Chapter of The Wildlife Society’s Annual Meeting 2023
20 February 2023 10:56pm
Operation Pangolin launches to save world's most trafficked wild mammal
16 February 2023 7:51pm
17 February 2023 1:50am
Zooplankton Prosome and Lipid Sac Segmentation
15 February 2023 1:44pm
AI, sensors enhance wildfire detection
15 February 2023 10:27am
A pilot program in Oregon’s Willamette Valley will test how well artificial intelligence-enabled sensors can identify and characterize wildfires, which will help with responder resource allocation and boost community resilience.
Hiring Full Stack Developer at Conservation X Labs
10 February 2023 5:35pm
7 June 2023 9:42am