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!
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 10 Groups
- @Namukuru
- | Her/ she
I am an Environmentalist with a background in Data Science. I envision a world where development is founded upon sustainability. I believe in executing projects that leverage innovation to enhance the well-being of the environment, the people, and the economy; simultaneously.
- 1 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 3 Groups
- @matt_hron
- | He/Him
Wildlife Protection Solutions (WPS)
Product Manager at Wildlife Protection Solutions
- 0 Resources
- 7 Discussions
- 8 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 8 Groups
- @DominiqueP
- | She/her
TRAFFIC
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 1 Groups
University of Adelaide
- 0 Resources
- 10 Discussions
- 17 Groups
- @pbull
- | he/him
DrivenData
Engineer and AI for Good leader working on bringing machine learning tools to social impact organizations.
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 8 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 4 Groups
- @ronanwallace
- | He/Him
Research scientist developing conservation technology in environmental monitoring and cultural preservation.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 5 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 4 Groups
- @PierreBonnet
- | Pierre
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2828-4389
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 6 Groups
Care for Wild Rhino Sanctuary
Technology Manager at Care for Wild Rhino Sanctuary
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 7 Groups
As UNGA begins, Google.org is committing $25M to accelerate progress towards the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Applications are now open for nonprofits and social enterprises.
16 September 2022
IBM Research Scientists are charting the future of Artificial Intelligence, creating breakthroughs in quantum computing, discovering how blockchain will reshape the enterprise, and much more. Join a team that is...
16 September 2022
Join my brand new group at MIT in Fall 2023!!
12 September 2022
Careers
The BirdNet team are seeking to fill three roles, including an Ecologist, Data scientist and an Embedded Systems Engineer based in Germany.
9 September 2022
At the Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée center. The project will pursue two different methodological goals: (1) explore the use of natural language bottlenecks describing visible traits or other visual...
1 September 2022
This is the first in a series by David Thau on the promise and challenges to using AI and machine learning to create a planetary environmental management system.
31 August 2022
Article
APPLY NOW! The Sovereign Nature Initiative has partnered with the Kenya Wildlife Trust to experiment with emerging technologies to support their predators' conservation work.Challenges will focus on:1. Lion...
30 August 2022
This project is part of the Conservation AI Network. We aim to help threatened species & manage invasive species using leading edge analytics and artificial intelligence algorithms. The primary purpose of the...
29 August 2022
Boost cons tech capacity at an international NGO! Fauna & Flora International is offering a paid three-month internship to consolidate and share best practices for the application of emerging hardware and software...
26 August 2022
The Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Environmental Studies (WFE), SLU, Umeå, is looking for a postdoc with strong interests in wildlife conservation technology.
26 August 2022
Article
An update on Ceres Tags products that are being used in conservation
22 August 2022
Careers
Job opening at ARISE, an innovative program in the Netherlands to build a digital infrastructure for biodiversity data and services
19 August 2022
August 2024
event
September 2024
event
event
event
October 2024
November 2024
November 2023
October 2023
event
61 Products
Recently updated products
15 Products
Recently updated products
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
---|---|---|---|---|
Hi, I would just like to introduce our Project BEESWAX7 and announce that today we acheived two milestones for success; we recorded bee... |
|
AI for Conservation | 5 years 1 month ago | |
There's a discussion over in camera traps about the design of a device to run autonomously (in an inaccessible location) with reliable... |
|
AI for Conservation | 5 years 1 month ago | |
I got to help TNC launch fishnet.ai over the weekend, a home for training data for fisheries monitoring & computer vision AI. We have a... |
|
AI for Conservation | 5 years 2 months ago | |
Please consider submitting to this workshop and/or challenge which may be relevant to your work: Call for Papers and Call... |
|
AI for Conservation | 5 years 2 months ago | |
yep! Drop me an email at [email protected] and I'll get you a link. Steph |
|
AI for Conservation | 5 years 2 months ago | |
Artificial intelligence & Machine Learning Algorithms are transforming data analysis, but little is known about how they... |
|
AI for Conservation | 5 years 4 months ago | |
Hi Colin, At the BearID Project, we are working on a similar problem for brown bears. We are currently using machine learning methods developed for human facial recognition (... |
|
AI for Conservation | 5 years 5 months ago | |
Hi Ollie, Great article, thank you! I mostly work with responsible AI in other contexts, at Doteveryone.org.uk and the Trust & Technology Initiative at the... |
|
AI for Conservation | 5 years 5 months ago | |
In case you missed it, last year the British Ecological Society published A Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution... |
|
AI for Conservation | 6 years 4 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,... |
|
AI for Conservation | 6 years 9 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... |
|
AI for Conservation | 6 years 10 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... |
|
AI for Conservation | 6 years 10 months ago |
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 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 :
Which 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:
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
Wild Me is hiring
Identify animal from Image
2 August 2022 1:37am
2 August 2022 2:54am
Hi Jitendra.
If they are still images, many people are using Megadetector to analyze their images. I'm not sure how it will do in species classification, but it can tell you if there are images of interest in the shots. Others here can probably give you more detailed instructions on how to use it to batch process camera trap images.
2 August 2022 10:24am
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 solution
CERES TAG
22 July 2022 3:36am
Earth Species Project - Senior AI Research Scientist
15 July 2022 6:40pm
The Foes and Floes of Labelling Aerial Pictures Manually
13 July 2022 12:43am
PyTorch Developer/Data Scientist at Pl@ntNet
7 July 2022 5:27pm
Hello there
1 July 2022 5:00pm
Intro webinar - The Biodiversity Digital Twin: a new solution to support protection & restoration of ecosystems
30 June 2022 1:22am
New Conservation Tech Directory update
27 June 2022 4:45pm
Live Q&A on AI models to process Camera Trap Imagery: All about WildID
21 June 2022 6:49am
23 June 2022 11:35am
Nothing too much more to share about WildID - I think you've had an earful already! But just to say that we really do enjoy working with our users, so don't be shy to get in touch for any questions, or think you would be bothering us if you need support. We're excited to bring more projects on board and extend our training sets to new locations, camera types and species.
For those in regions outside Africa, we are considering releasing a version of WildID that uses MegaDetector from Microsoft AI - so it will classify your images into empties, and then human, vehicle and animal (just those three classes). You would then be able to define your own species list, and edit the animal pictures to the correct species. Still a fair amount of work for you to edit, but you are probably doing the work already, and at least you would have an easy interface in which to do it, and particularly empties excluded already for you. Get in touch with us if this would be of use to you.
23 June 2022 11:43am
Thank you so much Kate for the excellent answers, explanations, insights and pointers; This was nothing short of Amazing!
Thank you all for joining us in this discussion; I hope this has been helpful and you now have a solution for processing your 1 million + camera trap imagery. If you have any questions for Kate, please feel free to drop them in this discussion thread- she is more than happy to answer. If you’d like to reach out to Kate directly, you can Direct message her here or send her an email at: [email protected]
Thank you!
23 June 2022 11:45am
Thank you so much Netty, I really enjoyed it.
Good luck to you all with your work.
Keep well!
Live Q&A session on AI models for Processing Camera Trap Imagery:A highlight of WildID.
22 June 2022 1:42pm
Bird Acoustic Solution
9 June 2022 11:31pm
11 June 2022 1:16pm
There are a bunch of different options for detecting calls in audio data, from proper statistical platforms such as R/Python, to bespoke software such as Arbimon, Kaleidoscope & Raven. Edge Impulse also an online ML model-building interface, but this is more focused on then deploying the models onto devices for edge computing. Arbimon has template matching features that are a good way to start finding detections to build a training dataset, I have used it for this in the past. Arbimon is online & free. Kaleidoscope has a clustering function which is again a good first step to start picking out the low-hanging fruit of detections so to speak. It's a desktop app, but this is not free ($400/yr). Raven also has some automated features - template & band-limited entropy detectors. It's also a desktop app and not free ($100-$800 depending on 1-year or permanent license and whether non-profit or not; not sure where a government agency would fit into that).
There is always the ubiquitous split between biologists who traditionally are taught to use R and tech/computer folks who are taught to use Python, but for ML, Python's ecosystem is really well set up. Not sure what the level of programming you/your dept has, but there are a TON of free resources online for learning it if you were interested.
Relevant Python bioacoustics packages potentially of use - Acoustic_Indices, scikit-maad, Ketos, OpenSoundscape (as well as the obvious ML ones such as TensorFlow)
Some R packages as well - soundecology, bioacoustics, monitoR, warbleR, gibbonR
@tessa_rhinehart has created a fabulous list of bioacoustics software that you can find here: https://github.com/rhine3/bioacoustics-software.
You can also turn to articles that have already done similar things and reach out to the authors to discuss their methods. I've got a (totally un-exhaustive) list of papers on passive acoustic monitoring, with a section on 'analyses' that you might find useful to start with; I can email it to you if you'd like. Working on a PAM training materials page on my website that it will be available at shortly as well (will post the link to Wildlabs when it's live!).
Hope this is helpful!
16 June 2022 9:27am
Hi,
Look at this publication (below) and download the BirdNet app. The computer code is provided to train ML algorithm that will allow you to tailor the model with your own data.
Thanks, Mrigesh
20 June 2022 1:00am
Thank you @carlybatist , @Freaklabs and @MK . The inputs are very useful and I am progressing on my project based on that. Appreciate a lot.
Cofounder needed
9 June 2022 4:23pm
17 June 2022 1:14pm
What about developing a drone conservation training course for field conservation staff teaching specific skills for specific research needs.
17 June 2022 6:54pm
How exciting @Joyeeta ! I'd love to learn more about the companies and projects you worked on, can you share more info about them?
I once chatted to an entrepreneurial advisor with a couple of my conservation tech ideas, and he said my ideas are good/impactful but don't make for a product worth millions of $$$ of turnover per year that would interest investors. So I am very curious about how you got your conservation tech businesses off the ground!
18 June 2022 8:33pm
Some folks doing work in this space - Wildlife Drones, Conservation Drones, UAV Wild, AfricanDrones, Oceans Unmanned, Geonadir.
Silverstrand Capital Biodiversity Accelerator+
17 June 2022 11:03am
Multiple Roles with Rainforest Connection
16 June 2022 9:15am
Join Seeed’s “IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Planet 2022” on Hackster to Get 100 Free Hardware and to Win $14,000+ in Prizes!!
14 June 2022 11:04am
Join Seeed’s “IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Planet 2022” on Hackster to Get 100 Free Hardware and to Win $14,000+ in Prizes!!!
14 June 2022 9:14am
Switch to Conservation IT
10 June 2022 1:47am
11 June 2022 1:39pm
Do you have any particular areas of interest within using AI for conservation tech? e.g., camera trapping, tracking/telemetry, passive acoustic monitoring, eDNA, etc.
You might also check out the Conservation Tech Directory to see what other kinds of companies, organizations, etc. are involved in those different spaces and which are best aligned with what would want to do.
11 June 2022 3:10pm
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
2 postdoc positions: AI for Biodiversity Monitoring
11 June 2022 2:40pm
TAI4ES: Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science, 2022 summer school
4 June 2022 11:31am
21 June 2022 4:55pm
Update: I asked the same question on twitter so I'm sharing answers I got there: