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!
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Technologist & Wildlife Photographer at Google
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- @Romain
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Biologist in Geneva
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Petnerup
Animal tech startup founder
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World Wide Fund for Nature/ World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
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I've been working in IT for the past four years and Cybersecurity for the past year and a half. I'm looking to leverage my technical skills towards conservation purposes. I'm new on this journey and excited to jump of volunteer activities where I'm able!
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- @Riley
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I'm a Data Scientist at Western EcoSystems Technology. I am interested in AI processing and statistical modeling of acoustic data and camera trap and drone imagery.
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- @Mumonkan
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Wild Me
Software Engineer for Wildlife Conservation
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Cornell University
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- @volkankorkmaz
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I have been working at the Underwater Association , to protect nature since 94 . Since 1992, I have been a PADI diving instructor
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Smart Parks
Founder of Smart Parks - www.smartparks.org / Founder of OpenCollar - https://opencollar.io
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The Project Manager will work to implement acoustic monitoring projects in countries worldwide with some of the biggest stakeholders in conservation tech and biodiversity monitoring!
12 April 2023
New paper in Journal of Animal Ecology
24 March 2023
💙 Exciting news from Appsilon! Our flagship project, Mbaza AI, is expanding its impact on nature and biodiversity conservation. We’ve teamed up with the 🦏 Ol Pejeta Conservancy to build a model for classifying images of...
16 March 2023
The Innovation in Practice edition of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is still seeking proposals about conservation technology
6 March 2023
Article
Rainforest Connection (RFCx) is bringing back the Arbimon newsletter for 2023! We're excited to share new features and tools of the platform, what's coming up, and some insights into our projects on bioacoustic...
23 February 2023
New technology enabling the automated monitoring of moths has been put to rigorous testing in tropical conditions in Panama by an international team of researchers
22 February 2023
Researchers and conservationists are embarking on a bold initiative to save the world's most trafficked wild mammal — the pangolin
16 February 2023
A machine learning-based solution that can segment the Prosomes and Lipid sacs with sufficient accuracy helps to recognize the ecological plasticity of key Arctic copepods. It allows scientists to learn more about the...
15 February 2023
Technology to End the Sixth Mass Extinction. Salary: $104k-144K; Location: Washington DC or Seattle WA, potential hybrid; 5+ years of Full stack development experience; Deadline March 15th - view post for full job...
10 February 2023
Careers
The British Antarctic Survey’s Artificial Intelligence Lab is looking to hire a machine learning engineer/researcher.
10 February 2023
You will develop and apply novel approaches and machine learning techniques for the detection, classification and identification of marine fauna from passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) validated with paired visual...
10 February 2023
Careers
On the AST Skylight team, you will work with talented engineers, domain experts, and product managers to uncover illegal fishing by developing the tools that help countries around the globe combat this problem.
10 February 2023
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54 Products
Recently updated products
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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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 | 8 years ago | |
Hi folks! The team at Skytruth (responsible for Global Ocean Watch) are looking for a machine learning developer. It might be of... |
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AI for Conservation | 8 years 4 months ago | |
Hi, I am jason Holmberg from WildMe.org. I am one of the developers of Wildbook (wildbook.org), an open source data management platform for wildlife research. I'm... |
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AI for Conservation | 8 years 4 months ago | |
I'd like to suggest our open source package Wildbook (http://www.wildbook.org) as a base data management platfor for this. I agree with the above that there are a number of... |
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AI for Conservation | 8 years 4 months ago | |
Over the past year the open data GDELT Project (http://gdeltproject.org/), which monitors local news coverage worldwide in... |
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AI for Conservation | 8 years 5 months ago |
Mangrove soundscape
27 August 2022 4:57pm
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:
FrontPage
Welcome to the cutting edge of underwater acoustic recording technology. SoundTrap hydrophones combine the latest low power electronics with meticulously crafted software to create instruments that perform in a league of their own. Check them out here…
SonarPoints - these are also a great instrument option:
page/sonarpoint | Desert Star Systems
The SonarPoint system is the third generation of Desert Stars passive underwater acoustics monitoring toolkits.
Desert Star SystemsSenior Conservation Technology Expert Position (Consultancy) with the Global Wildlife Program
22 September 2022 5:35pm
Catch Up with the Variety Hour: October 2022
22 September 2022 1:59pm
WIA After Hours: Episode #5 - AI for Wildlife Conservation and Imageomics with Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf
21 September 2022 6:53pm
Listen to Tanya Berger-Wolf's conversation about AI for Wildlife Conservation and imageomics with Lauren Burke on the Women In Analytics After Hours Podcast.
Amazon Sustainability call for proposals — Fall 2022
20 September 2022 11:37am
Google.org commitment on using AI to accelerate progress on global development goals
16 September 2022 6:31pm
Research Software Engineer, Climate & Sustainability, IBM
16 September 2022 2:18pm
CamTrap Ecology meets AI conference
14 September 2022 4:47pm
Join the BirdNET team!
9 September 2022 2:43pm
Postdoc: Interpretable ML for species-based image classification
1 September 2022 9:34pm
New paper - 'soundClass: An automatic sound classification tool for biodiversity monitoring using machine learning'
1 September 2022 8:53pm
Silva et al -
- R package to train convolutional neural networks & employ them to classify sounds
- sound event classification pipeline, from annotating recordings to automating
trained networks
- case studies with bat & whale echolocation calls, bird songs
Introducing G.AI.A: Artificial Intelligence and Planetary-Scale Environmental Management
31 August 2022 10:25pm
Mara Predators Hackathon
30 August 2022 1:28pm
Research Associate in Conservation Ecology at QUT
29 August 2022 2:54pm
Conservation Technology Research Internship
26 August 2022 4:58pm
Postdoc in the application of AI for wildlife conservation & management
26 August 2022 11:47am
Online Hackathon: Predators conservation in the Maasai Mara
22 August 2022 10:32am
Ceres Wild Rhino application
22 August 2022 1:29am
29 September 2022 4:05am
Lead Software Engineer for ARISE
19 August 2022 8:22am
Lead Software Engineer, Wildlife Insights
10 August 2022 11:06pm
Research Technician - Unoccupied Aircraft Systems Pilot and Geospatial Analyst
10 August 2022 10:40pm
Building a simple AI-powered, human-in-the-loop system to manage wildlife camera trap images & annotations
10 August 2022 8:12pm
Hi folks! I built out a human-in-the-loop annotation platform for Felidae Conservation Fund, a SF-Bay Area nonprofit last Fall using MegaDetector. I'm looking for feedback from this amazing community around areas of collaboration, especially data/software resources we can share!
3yr Postdoctoral Associate: Remote Sensing and Unoccupied Aircraft Systems
10 August 2022 5:29pm
Catch Up with the WILDLABS Variety Hour: August 2022
10 August 2022 11:44am
Technology may solve climate change problems, but it’s also causing them | VentureBeat
8 August 2022 11:26am
Interesting thought piece from Mark Minevitch (AI for Good) et al. on the promise of AI and other ICT innovation to deliver on climate challenges, existing ICT sector emissions - and the three types of carbon lock-in which need to be actively managed (behavioural, digital, infrastructure).
'The danger is that the promises of digital technology can blind us to its less-recognized contributions to climate woes. Emissions from the ICT sector already rival those of the airline industry. Moreover, the few studies done so far (a,b,c) suggest the ICT sector’s emissions will at least double to 2-3 GTCO2e and if the rise in global GHG emissions is limited to 1.5˚C by 2030, contribute approximately 10% of the global GHG burden — nearly equal to that of the automotive industry. And these are cautious estimates.'
Can deep learning identify seabirds? (species, within-species, individual)
25 May 2022 8:24pm
21 June 2022 4:55pm
Update: I asked the same question on twitter so I'm sharing answers I got there:
With quality photos and good labeled training data, I would say definitely doable! @ultralytics and their #YOLOv5 models would be a cool place to start!
— Abram B. Fleishman (@abfleishman) May 26, 2022
Let's chat! We've been training models to run on trail cameras as images/videos are captured, and have worked on migratory birds along coastlines (more info: https://t.co/NzW4GO2Wqp)
— Henrik Cox (@henrik_cox) June 1, 2022
Have a look at this paper:https://t.co/pmvrmvJAuS
— Damien R. Farine (@DamienFarine) May 27, 2022
Individual identification needs tens of pictures per individual of known individuals as training data, which will be the challenge here.
21 June 2022 5:41pm
Hi Yvan,
I dropped this into the AI for Conservation slack group as well, you got this reply this morning:
Steph
8 August 2022 11:12am
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 Ultralytics, there is :
Lobe | Machine Learning Made Easy
Download the free, easy to use app that helps you train custom machine learning models and ship them in your app.
lobe_aiWhich could probably answer your first and second requirements.
And find here a great website showing all the IA-based camera software, you may find solutions or contact throw this list:
Everything I know about ML and camera traps
This is a list of everything I know about machine learning and camera traps, which is presumably just a subset of what’s out there… email me with updates, or submit pull requests. Help me keep this page up to date! And tell me what I got wrong about your software and your papers!
Tiger, Tiger, in the Night... Now Visible in Real Time
5 August 2022 4:07pm
What is embedded ML, anyway?
5 August 2022 3:48pm
Biological Data Science Summer Workshop
5 August 2022 3:03pm
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.