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!
- @jdomingo
- | He/Him
I am an enthusiast for nature, technology development, biodiversity conservation and nature inspired design. I posses a technical and environmental background, and I am looking to explore the potential that advance technology has to empower the field of nature conservation.
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- 9 Discussions
- 2 Groups
Wildlife Drones
Wildlife Drones has developed the world’s most innovative radio animal-tracking system using drones so you can track your radio-tagged animals like never before.
- 11 Resources
- 8 Discussions
- 32 Groups
- @eccrc25
- | she/they
- 0 Resources
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- 5 Groups
- @och3k
- | she/her
- 0 Resources
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- @rowan
- | they / them
Octophin Digital
Jack of all Trades. I've been a zoo keeper, a conservation geneticist and a web developer who specialises in conservation projects and orgs.
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 15 Groups
Allen Institute for AI
Communications for EarthRanger and Skylight
- 7 Resources
- 5 Discussions
- 10 Groups
CIBIO-InBio
I am a PhD student working on wolf bioacoustics. I am combining Audiomoths and Deep Learning into more efficient wolf monitoring protocols. My main field of interest is population ecology.
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- 3 Groups
- @nadyam
- | she/her
Michigan State University
Conservation geneticist at Michigan State University. Co-founder of iCatch. Solving problems in monitoring, traceability, and enforcement through rapid species identification tech.
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 6 Groups
Passionate advocate for nature and experienced communicator, looking to explore opportunities to leverage technology in wildlife and marine conservation
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- 0 Discussions
- 7 Groups
Technologist and Visual storyteller focusing on social, conservations issues.
- 0 Resources
- 31 Discussions
- 16 Groups
PhD Candidate in autonomous marine biodiversity modelling
- 0 Resources
- 10 Discussions
- 8 Groups
Behavioural ecologist @CNRS in France - working mostly on ungulates in Europe and Africa
- 0 Resources
- 4 Discussions
- 4 Groups
Join the Seeed Vision Challenge, an opportunity for conservation innovators to harness the power of AI vision sensors for environmental monitoring and protection.
10 April 2024
Full-Stack Software Developer (Python/React) - Specializing in AI/ML for Wildlife Conservation
5 April 2024
Article
Article from Ars Technica about how difficult it is to detect and avoid kangaroos...
3 April 2024
18 month postdoc research position, Netherlands, EU-funded
28 March 2024
Article
You’re invited to the WILDLABS Variety Hour, a monthly event that connects you to conservation tech's most exciting projects, research, and ideas. We can't wait to bring you a whole new season of speakers and...
22 March 2024
Join our multi-national team at the AI for Biodiversity Change Global Climate Center! We're hiring a Research Data Manager & Tech Coordinator at Ohio State. Support cutting-edge research on climate change &...
15 March 2024
Catch up on the conservation tech discussions and events that happened during World Wildlife Day 2024!
7 March 2024
EcoAssist introduces a free African species identification model for camera trap images, capable of recognising 30 species.
5 March 2024
Join us to help prevent biodiversity loss! Understory is hiring a postdoc to lead R&D Development on generalizing Computer Vision models for vegetation identification across space/time/phenotypes.
29 February 2024
Join the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) in pioneering environmental and ecological monitoring! 🌍💡 As part of ERIN’s Observatory for Climate, Environment, and Biodiversity (OCEB), you'll be at the...
26 February 2024
SNTech are recruiting for 3 roles to assist us to develop computer vision pipelines for underwater monitoring
15 February 2024
We invite applications for the third Computer Vision for Ecology (CV4E) workshop, a three-week hands-on intensive course in CV targeted at graduate students, postdocs, early faculty, and junior researchers in Ecology...
12 February 2024
April 2024
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Yeah we got it about as bare bones as possible for this level of photo resolution and duration in the field. The main costs right now are: Pi- $80Pijuice -$75Battery - $... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, AI for Conservation, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions | 1 minute 57 seconds ago | |
Sorry, been busy and only saw this message now. Definitely am interested you can WhatsApp me 072 4725318 |
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AI for Conservation, Drones, Emerging Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Wildlife Crime | 48 minutes 19 seconds ago | |
Got it. We should definitely be able to handle those images. That said, if you're just looking for counts, then I'd recommend running Megadetector which is an object detection... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Open Source Solutions, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 day 15 hours ago | |
Hi everyone!@LashaO and @holmbergius from the Wild Me team at ConservationX Labs gave a superb talk at last month's Variety Hour,... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 1 day 22 hours ago | |
Hi everyone! @zhongqimiao was kind enough to join Variety Hour last month to talk more about Pytorch-Wildlife, so the recording might be of interest to folks in this thread. Catch... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Open Source Solutions | 1 day 22 hours ago | |
Thanks Carly! I will keep anyone interested in this project posted on this platform. Cheers |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation | 1 day 23 hours ago | |
Hi Matthew,Thanks for your advice, this is really helpful!I'm planning to use it in a seagrass meadow survey for a series of ~20 drops/sites to around 30 m, recording for around... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 4 days 2 hours ago | |
Hi Johnathan!Here are a few examples where UAVs and AI has been used to spot animals. https://www.mdpi.com/2504-446X/7/3/179#:~:text=These%20vehicles%20follow%20flight%... |
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AI for Conservation | 4 days 14 hours ago | |
Greetings Everyone, We are so excited to share details of our WILDLABS AWARDS project "Enhancing Pollinator Conservation through Deep... |
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AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 1 week 4 days ago | |
EcoAssist is an application designed to streamline the work of ecologists dealing with camera trap images. It’s an AI platform that... |
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Software and Mobile Apps, AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 2 weeks 2 days ago | |
We could always use more contributors in open source projects. In most open source companies Red Hat, Anaconda, Red Hat and Mozilla, people often ended up getting hired largely... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Early Career, Marine Conservation | 3 weeks 4 days ago | |
Hi @timbirdweather I've now got them up and running and winding how I can provide feedback on species ID to improve the accuracy over time. It would be really powerful to have a... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Citizen Science, Emerging Tech | 1 month ago |
CV4Ecology 2023 Applications
1 November 2022 8:01pm
4 November 2022 6:02pm
Yes, that's definitely ok! You should just outline your larger plan and where you are at in the process in your application. However, the compute resources are intended to be used for model training and won't be available too far in advance of the school (or at least I can't guarantee they will be) , so you would need to make a plan for pre-summer workshop data storage, wrangling, and curation to get the data ready to train models on. Let me know if you're having issues with that and I can try to help brainstorm.
9 December 2022 8:23pm
Quick reminder that the deadline for applications is just shy of a week away.
This workshop is particularly geared to teach ecologists computer vision tools to apply to their research.
Tired of trying to manually count how many animals are in your images? Tired of listening to audio files to classify/detect species? Looking to clean and manage your data so that you can more easily access and analyze it? We're happy and eager to help you apply computer vision tools to try to help with these (and more!) tasks!
More info:
Feel free to comment here or message me directly if you have any questions!
PhD - Sensory ecology of vespine wasps
8 December 2022 12:47pm
Post Doctoral Fellow - Computer Vision/Arctic Avian Ecology
7 December 2022 4:21am
New: Satellites for Biodiversity Award
5 December 2022 2:08pm
Connection needed!
15 November 2022 4:23pm
22 November 2022 2:46pm
Maybe she is not based in Asia, but you could check Lily Xu, who gave a presentation at the IUCN World Congress a year ago on using AI against poaching in Cambodia. The project is called Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS).
For a summary of this project and another ( presented by a man ) see
24 November 2022 3:55pm
Thank you so much!
2 December 2022 3:14pm
Hahaha, now I see why you were asking ...
PhD Positions at University of Michigan CSE
23 November 2022 3:02pm
MozFest 2023 call for proposals on Tech & Biodiversity
22 November 2022 11:10am
Dear AI, We Have Trust Issues
14 November 2022 11:09pm
Hierarchical Deep Learning to Improve Automatic Classification of Pests and Biodiversity Monitoring in Agroecosystems
8 November 2022 3:46pm
Spatial Data Analysis, TNC
8 November 2022 11:34am
Senior AI Research Scientist, Earth Species Project
8 November 2022 11:27am
New paper: Integrating machine learning, remote sensing and citizen science to create an early warning system for biodiversity
7 November 2022 7:10pm
Opinion paper describing "how data acquired from remote sensing, citizen science & other monitoring approaches could feed in near-real time to an early warning system for biodiversity that integrates automated red-listing of species with the identification of priority areas for conservation."
Environmental Monitoring: Necessary, Not Sufficient, Sometimes Problematic
28 October 2022 12:51am
ConservationAI
20 October 2022 2:41pm
20 October 2022 7:32pm
Out of curiosity, what are the similarities/differences between your platform and other image classification ones such as Wildlife Insights, WildID, ZambaCloud? I don't mean that in like a "what's best" way, just would be great to better understand the the details so that people can assess what to try for their specific use cases & applications!
It would be great to have a comparative specs sheet of sorts! Peter Gyurov started something like that: https://www.notion.so/Camera-Trap-Pipeline-Solution-Comparison-2eac80825c4941b0b2b5fad3daea1cc3. Would be great to add ConservationAI to this list!
Conservation Technology Intern (Vietnam)
19 October 2022 9:22am
Introducing G.AI.A: Artificial Intelligence and Planetary-Scale Environmental Management
13 October 2022 1:48am
Try AI Micro-Internship 2023
11 October 2022 5:42pm
Upcoming WWF Webinar Series: Artificial Intelligence and Conservation
11 October 2022 12:30pm
Artificial Intelligence and Conservation: Ethics
11 October 2022 12:28pm
Artificial Intelligence and Conservation: Prediction
11 October 2022 12:27pm
Artificial Intelligence and Conservation: Where We Are Now
11 October 2022 12:23pm
The Smart Biosphere: How Technology can provide regenerative resources at scale
10 October 2022 12:06pm
Frontiers Symposium: Digital tools for reversing environmental degradation
5 October 2022 10:23am
Multi-day workshop: Machine Learning Advances for Marine Acoustics & Imagery Data
4 October 2022 5:20pm
Audio Across Domains Workshop 2022
3 October 2022 7:54pm
3 October 2022 11:40pm
11 October 2022 2:05pm
18 Sustainability Job Opportunities at Google
3 October 2022 7:09pm
New paper - Rookognise: Acoustic detection & identification of individual rooks in field recordings using multi-task neural networks
3 October 2022 2:35pm
Authors developed system to acoustically identify individual animals (under varying conditions) using combo of multi-scale information integration, multi-channel audio & multi-task learning. Tested on captive group of rooks.
New paper - FathomNet: A global image database for enabling artificial intelligence in the ocean
27 September 2022 9:44pm
Open-source image database that standardizes & aggregates expertly curated labeled underwater data, enabling AI in the ocean. Seeded with existing imagery of marine animals, underwater equipment, debris, etc. & allows for future contributions from distributed data sources.
Conservation Tech Directory - new update!
29 August 2022 2:38pm
23 September 2022 5:26pm
Congrats on the milestone Carly and Gracie!
26 September 2022 10:07pm
Thanks so much!!
Mangrove soundscape
27 August 2022 4:57pm
29 August 2022 2:47pm
You might check out the devices listed in the Conservation Tech Directory - you can search for 'acoustic recorder' or 'ARU' or something like that.
The most common off-the-shelf models (other than Frontier Labs' BARLTs mentioned above😊) are Open Acoustic Devices Audiomoths & Hydromoths (which may be particularly useful for you since they come in completely watertight cases that can be stuck underwater for deployments), Wildlife Acoustics' SongMeter series, and Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Swift units.
30 August 2022 10:10pm
Camilo--
Are you interested only in airborne sounds or do you want to deploy hydrophones? That decision would inform a lot of other decisions about your purchase of equipment, as would having a clearer picture of your budget.
23 September 2022 5:39pm
Hi there Camilo,
What an interesting project! If you are looking for a lower cost, but effective tools for acoustic monitoring you might want to look into two options:
SoundTraps - are very commonly used and perform quite well:
SonarPoints - these are also a great instrument option:
3 November 2022 7:13pm
Hey Sara,
Thanks again for the session today--it was super helpful!
I have access to a pretty large network of camera trappers, and I'm currently surveying them to see who might be willing to share data with me. That being said, I can likely get data-sharing agreements with each of these agencies sorted out before the application deadline, but may not have the data in-hand by this time due to a lack of resources for transferring such large amounts of data.
I've used Azure Storage Explorer before to rapidly transfer large datasets like this, so I think it might be easier to compile all data in one location once we have access to the VMs. Would it be acceptable to apply with the signed data-sharing agreements in mind, and with the intent of organizing all of the data once we acquire access to the computing resources?