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AI for Conservation / Feed

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used in the field to analyse information collected by wildlife conservationists, from camera trap and satellite images to audio recordings. AI can learn how to identify which photos out of thousands contain rare species; or pinpoint an animal call out of hours of field recordings - hugely reducing the manual labour required to collect vital conservation data.

discussion

Open, challenging dataset for audio classification

Radek Osmulski

27 March 2020 10:52am

Hi! Do you know of an open audio dataset that could be used for audio classification? I am a part of a group of students doing the fast.ai deep learning course right now. I...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

27 March 2020 11:51am

Hi Radek, 

I'm sure others can help here, but check out our recent virtual meetup (it'll be posted here in about an hour), the speakers - particularly Dave Watson - shared open datasets that might be what you're looking for. 

Over on Twitter, Jesse Alston is collating a google sheet so that people can advertise data sets that grad students can use to finish theses. @arik 's reply here might be of particular interest: 'We have been recording 24/7 soundscapes in remote US locations like Yellowstone NP and rural central Wisconsin with multiple GPS synced recorders. Our goal is to study wolf and coyote vocalisations, but if anyone can make use of these data for their own studies, drop me a line!.'

Hope this helps!

Steph 

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discussion

Automated species detection from camera traps

Mark Brown

30 January 2020 8:43am

Hello. I'm looking into the possibility to automatically identify species from camera traps. This is for work based in the Middle East, mainly the United Arab Emirates and...

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Musab

25 March 2020 2:59pm

I see. Im interested and would like to help. I will need the images to train the network. As many as possible. 
if you dont have them yet, try to find similar images preferably of the same species. I will use them to test the performance of the detection.

Alexandros Kellaris

25 March 2020 6:49pm

I'm not familiar with camera traps, but there are a couple of options:

1) If the animals tend to cover most part of the image, then you can train a CNN classifier to distinguish between species (available with the keras-Tensorflow modules in Python)

2) If, however, the animals only cover a small part of the image (e.g. in the distance), it might be better to use an object detector (I've used YOLOv2 in the past for fish detection), which however is not that straightforward, especially with Python (I used MATLAB)

In any case, keras-Tensorflow classification with Python might be the most straightforward option for your goal. You should also certainly have a look at Google's Wildlife Insights platform which is specialized for species classification from camera trap images.

Radek Osmulski

27 March 2020 10:33am

This can be done, happy to help :) But I think I need to understand the situation a little bit more.

Do you already have the data for training / inference? Do you have any example images with the species in them annotated? Say a still from the camera with a tiger and a csv file referencing that file and annotating that there is a tiger in the image?

Would you like someone to do the developing and training of the deep learning model for you? I work as an AI research engineer at the Earth Species project and I am also a part of a community of deep learning practitioners where we apply cutting edge research to various problems. Here you can check a little initiative I started a couple of days ago to teach people how to work with audio (there is a related forum thread but unfortunately it is in closed forums for the time being as it is associated with a course that is under way). My main point is this - if you have the data and would like someone to help you out on the modelling part, I can coordinate this.

 

Alternatively, if you cannot release the data, I can point you to materials that can get you started to carry out the work yourself.

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event

Webinar: Citizen Science Online

SciStarter

26 March 2020 12:00am

Join WILDLABS community member Dr. Meredith Palmer from Snapshot Safari and other researchers from various disciplines in SciStarter's webinar, Citizen Science Online! Speakers will celebrate this April's Citizen...

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article

WILDLABS Tech Hub: Poreprint

WILDLABS Team

26 March 2020 12:00am

At the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference, we announced the WILDLABS Tech Hub, an accelerator program created to support the development and scaling of groundbreaking technological solutions addressing the ...

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article

Enter the Zooniverse: Try Citizen Science for Yourself!

Ellie Warren

18 March 2020 12:00am

Trapped inside during the COVID-19 quarantine and looking to engage with conservation science without leaving your desk? Citizen science projects like those on Zooniverse offer a great opportunity to impact scientific...

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funding

Competition: Plastic Data Challenge

The Incubation Network

3 March 2020 12:00am

Are you ready for the Plastic Data Challenge? This global contest wants your innovative ideas for improving the plastic waste management and recycling chain in South and Southeast Asia. Participants can consider...

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funding

Call for Nominations: Tusk Conservation Awards

Tusk

3 March 2020 12:00am

The 2020 Tusk Awards are now accepting nominations of outstanding individuals who have made a significant impact on conservation in Africa. These nominations offer the rare and exciting opportunity to honor your peers...

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event

Hawai'i Conservation Conference

Hawaiʻi Conservation Alliance

28 February 2020 12:00am

The Hawai'i Conservation Conference is accepting abstracts in several categories, including emerging technological advances in the conservation field. This is an exciting opportunity to present your latest research to...

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funding

Competition: The Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge

Conservation X Labs

26 February 2020 12:00am

Conservation X Labs welcomes you to enter the Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge, a competition aimed at finding new and innovative solutions to the environmental problems caused by mining operations. This competition...

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article

Listening to Nature: The Emerging Field of Bioacoustics

Adam Welz

24 February 2020 12:00am

Researchers are increasingly placing microphones in forests and other ecosystems to monitor birds, insects, frogs, and other animals. As the technology advances and becomes less costly, proponents argue, bioacoustics is...

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article

HWC Tech Challenge Update: Thermal Elephant Alert System

Anne Dangerfield

17 February 2020 12:00am

The Arribada Initiative is back with an update on their thermal elephant alert system which aims to reduce human-elephant conflict (HEC). The success of their system rests on the ability of a camera to accurately...

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event

WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Recording: Acoustic Monitoring

WILDLABS Team

5 February 2020 12:00am

The fourth and final event in Season 3 of the WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Series is now available to watch, along with notes that highlight key takeaways from the talks and discussion. In the meetup, speakers David Watson, ...

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discussion

AI for camera trap public data

Ann

17 December 2019 9:20pm

Wildlife Insights launched their online platform hosting over 4 million camera trap images. They use AI to automatically classify the animals in the images.  Their website is...

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event

WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Recording: Drones

WILDLABS Team

9 November 2019 12:00am

The second event in Season Three of the WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Series is now available to watch, along with notes that highlight key takeaways from the talks and discussion. In the meetup, Craig Elder, Dr. Claire Burke...

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article

Camera Trapping: Incredibly Useful Resources List

Ariel Hammond

5 November 2019 12:00am

Ahead of the upcoming Camera Trapping Sympoisum, organiser Arie Hammond has compiled a list of key resources for camera trapping, covering everything from reading lists for beginners to data sets, models and tools for...

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discussion

Who wants to learn Python? Courses to get you started coding

John Probert

2 May 2016 3:13pm

Hello all,    I found a Youtube video that shows how to code in Python in six lines, powered by Google. Enjoy!   Regards, John

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Thomas Starnes

31 August 2017 9:06am

A couple of years ago I completed the Coursera course Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python) with Charles Severance. I found it really well paced and well taught. He's a very personable tutor, and has also written a free book Python for Everybody, available as a PDF.

I found the Coursera course on R Programming with Roger Peng to be more difficult to follow, but I'm not sure whether that was down to the teaching style or the language itself. For R, I'd definitely recommend the best place to get started is swirl - Learn R, in R!

Happy coding

abhishek27

1 March 2019 9:20am

Hello everyone what are you wating for..

All US, UK, India users can enroll courses from Intellipaat (the largest IT trainng company)

check some of thier superb training list:

Tableau certification

Spark training

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article

Plant-Powered Camera Trap Breakthrough

Alasdair Davies

15 October 2019 12:00am

Microbial fuel cells, developed by Plant-powered Camera Trap Challenge winners Plant-E, have been used successfully with Xnor.ai's energy harvesting camera technology to capture what are thought to be the world's first...

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