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!
American Museum of Natural History
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Ecological Consultant focussing on the use of UAV and GIS to advance applied ecological reasearch
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My main interest is in the application of geospatial technology for ecology and conservation
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- @bradnahill
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SEE Turtles
Brad has worked in sea turtle conservation & ecotourism for 20+ years. He is the lead writer of Sea Turtle Research and Conservation and co-author of the Worldwide Travel Guide to Sea Turtles. He has won the President's Award from the International Sea Turtle Society.
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- @ZoeDagan
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I'm Zoe, an ecologist at the intersection of SaaS, conservation, and community science. I build programs and advance projects that accelerate solutions to our most urgent climate and conservation challenges.
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I help conservation scientists spend less time on boring stuff.
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2023 Bachelor Degree Graduate from the College of African Wildlife Management, Mweka.
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Field Biologist at Yayasan Cikananga Konservasi Terpadu, Indonesia, with experience and interest mainly in ornithology, citizen science and bioaccoustic
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- @emilydorne
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DrivenData
Lead Data Scientist and developer of zamba, a tool for automatic species classification from camera traps
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PhD Candidate in autonomous marine biodiversity modelling
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Are you creative, love new challenges and have experience developing software? The Wildlife Insights team is hiring! Join a diverse team of ecologists, data scientists, engineers and machine learning experts to protect...
10 August 2022
The Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing (MaRRS) Lab at Duke University seeks a highly motivated UAS pilot and geospatial analyst to support the ongoing development of new and existing research and conservation programs,...
10 August 2022
The Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing (MaRRS) Lab at Duke University seeks a highly motivated postdoctoral researcher to support the ongoing development of new and existing research and conservation programs, both...
10 August 2022
Press Release for International Tiger Day – July 29th, 2022: For the first time ever, wild tigers and their prey have been detected by AI-powered, cryptic cameras that transmit the images to the cell phones and...
5 August 2022
Article
A gentle introduction to the exciting field of embedded machine learning.
5 August 2022
Article
Ceres Tag sends just in time alerts and GPS location to have the power to track and trace.
22 July 2022
The Earth Species Project (ESP) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to decoding animal communication and translating non-human language.
15 July 2022
This WhaleSeeker article discusses how reliable distribution data depends on accurate labelling from survey images, and how AI can improve this process.
13 July 2022
The Pl@ntNet team is looking for a data scientist with strong skills in python and pytorch development. Pl@ntNet is a citizen observatory of plant biodiversity & research platform at the crossroads of data science,...
7 July 2022
7 July 2022
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61 Products
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15 Products
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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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: ... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Data management and processing tools, Sensors, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 year 10 months ago | |
Hi Yvan,If you find something which reaches your expectation and especially the ability to identify individual with plumage patterns I will be intereted.In the same idea that... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 2 years ago | |
Have you considered creating a Kaggle competition? If you already have lots of images, and some that have been labelled, then this could be a good way to get people working on a... |
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AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps | 2 years ago | |
Hi everyone, I'm new here! I'm a UX designer and researcher, and an animal lover. Excited to be part of Conservation Tech here at WildLabs... |
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AI for Conservation, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Software and Mobile Apps, Wildlife Crime | 2 years 1 month ago | |
@gracieermi & I are happy to announce the latest update to the Conservation Tech Directory, bringing our total resources in the... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Biologging, Camera Traps, Community Base, Data management and processing tools, Drones, eDNA & Genomics, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 2 years 1 month ago | |
Thank you so much Netty, I really enjoyed it.Good luck to you all with your work.Keep well! |
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AI for Conservation, East Africa Community | 2 years 1 month ago | |
Thank you @carlybatist , @Freaklabs and @MK . The inputs are very useful and I am progressing on my project based on that. Appreciate a lot. |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation | 2 years 1 month ago | |
Some folks doing work in this space - Wildlife Drones, Conservation Drones, UAV Wild, AfricanDrones, Oceans Unmanned, Geonadir. |
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Drones, AI for Conservation, Citizen Science, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech | 2 years 1 month ago | |
Dear Community,Together with Hackster.io, Seeed Studio is very happy to jointly organize “IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Plant... |
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AI for Conservation, Connectivity, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 2 years 2 months ago | |
Thanks Carly. No special areas of interest for now although that will happen over time. Thanks so much for your reply. I will check the Conservation Tech directory out. Soumya |
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AI for Conservation | 2 years 2 months ago | |
Fascinating article, combining machine learning and acoustical signals to correlate coral reef health.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Marine Conservation | 2 years 2 months ago | |
We've now wrapped our first run of AI for Conservation Office Hours and you can read my review of how it went and lessons learned here. Given the ... |
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AI for Conservation | 2 years 8 months ago |
Education Paper on Computer Vision for Ecology
9 January 2023 5:30am
Job: maker / workshop technician
5 January 2023 10:53am
Job: Software Engineer at Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory
19 December 2022 7:59pm
San Diego Zoo needs Summer Undergraduates!!
19 December 2022 1:58pm
Join NASA’s harmful algal bloom ML challenge and win prizes!
15 December 2022 7:56pm
Help - Innovative ways to track elephant movement
28 October 2022 4:50pm
7 November 2022 12:52am
Hi Tyler,
Would like to introduce you to Ceres Tags products
- Ceres Tags products come in boxes of 5, 10 and 24.
- There are some software partners such as Earthranger, Mapipedia and possibly CiboLabs that would be able to assist you with your mapping vegetation requirements
- Ceres Tag does not require any towers, base stations and infrastructure. This allows you to see any movements from the heard outside of their normal herd (boundary alerts), and you will not be disturbing any of the flora and fauna with infrastructure set up.
- For the timing you are looking at, Ceres Wild pings directly to satellite 24 times a day. For Ceres Trace and Ceres Ranch there are 4 within 24 hours. Taking into consideration, when you set up alert areas, you will get them directly to your phone/laptop via your software of choice
- Ceres Ranch is a reusable tag that has just been launched. Use it on this project, remove the tag and then use the tag on your next project
- The software you choose will assist with the history of your animal movements. Ceres Tag is integrated with 11 software partners and in-development with 18 software partners https://cerestag.com/pages/software-partners
- Understanding it is a short-term project, you would be able to use Ceres Tags products without the additional expense of setting up and removing infrastructure- towers, gateways
- With Ceres Tag, you are purchasing the box of tags and picking a suitable software to deliver the information you require. On average, a box of 10 Ceres Trace Tags, is the same as 1 LoRaWAN tower.
14 December 2022 10:49am
I just came across this interesting paper in which seismic monotoring of animals like elephants was mentioned.
This is the study refered to:
Cheers,
Lars
CV4Ecology 2023 Applications
1 November 2022 8:01pm
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?
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
![](/sites/default/files/2022-10/LOBhbatz_400x400_0.jpg)
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
![](/sites/default/files/screen_shot_2020-12-17_at_5.16.51_pm-.png)
8 November 2022 11:34am
Senior AI Research Scientist, Earth Species Project
![](/sites/default/files/screen_shot_2021-04-27_at_5.11.40_pm_0-.png)
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
![](/sites/default/files/2022-10/LOBhbatz_400x400_0.jpg)
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)
![](/sites/default/files/screen_shot_2020-11-25_at_1.02.56_pm-.png)
19 October 2022 9:22am
Introducing G.AI.A: Artificial Intelligence and Planetary-Scale Environmental Management
![](/sites/default/files/2022-10/LOBhbatz_400x400_0.jpg)
13 October 2022 1:48am
Try AI Micro-Internship 2023
11 October 2022 5:42pm
Upcoming WWF Webinar Series: Artificial Intelligence and Conservation
![](/sites/default/files/wwf_master_logo_light_background-.jpeg)
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
4 November 2022 5:24pm
Why would you want to avoid alerting the rangers ?
You don't need high tech for this; elephants leave very obvious tracks and sign.