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!
- @jcturn3
- | He/Him
Colorado State University
I am a graduate student at Colorado State University working to develop novel acoustic technology for remotely monitoring wildlife.
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- @devizeskayak
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Technical Specialist at FFI: loves data management, maps, remote sensing & GIS for conservation
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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.
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- @IsobelAshbey
- | She/her/hers
Running a Tech for Good initiative at Cambridge Consultants, looking for organisations who need help developing new technology for conservation
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- @cnaumu
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- @Alino
- | Alain
I am a zoologist and I am interested in biodiversity and the conservation of insects and mammals
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Dr JOhn Read is founder and CEO of Conservation Innovation company Thylation, and founder and director of several adaptive management conservation projects . www.ecologicalhorizons.com, www.thylation.com, www.johnlread.com
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- @honeyBadger
- | she/her
Software developer looking for ways to contribute to animal conservation
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Check out this round-up of three of the latest conservation tech studies and news. See more conservation tech news by subscribing to our bi-monthly digest.
24 March 2022
We're proud to introduce the first WILDLABS On the Edge Fellows for 2022, Loretta Schindlerova and Meredith Palmer! Working alongside expert Edge Impulse mentors, these two fellows will use embedded machine learning to...
10 February 2022
We have a big vision for our Fellowships & Awards Programme: to create a better way for the tech industry to more meaningfully and impactfully engage with our conservation community. As we open our first fellowships...
28 January 2022
This article provides a review of deep learning (predominantly ML) used in marine ecology and considerations for its future directions in conservation. In plain language, the authors provide a methodology for training...
20 December 2021
This study breaks ground in outlining a methodology for a system of low-cost, long-term camera traps (Dispersed Environment Acquatic Cameras) that can be deployed over large spatial scales in remote marine environments...
30 November 2021
In pursuit of saving the Monarch butterflies, Carlo Mondavi- pioneer of the Monarch challenge- was inspired to develop the world's first fully electric smart tractor tractor with co-founder and Chief Executive, Praveen...
29 November 2021
Article
This research article explores the challenges of achieving environmental data justice, with the continued advancement in technology and growth in available data. The author emphasises the necessity to prioritise ...
26 November 2021
In Ellie Warren's interview with Sara Beery as part of the Technical Difficulties Editorial Series, they discussed how the hype surrounding machine learning impacts our perceptions of failure, and how conservationists...
23 November 2021
CAIMAN is a product from the Sensing Clues Foundation that automatically classifies animals on images from camera traps. It aims to be available by the end of 2021, contact the Sensing Clues team for more details. This...
18 November 2021
The GEO-Microsoft Planetary Computer Programme invites the GEO community to be among the early adopters of Microsoft's Planetary Computer. The Programme will support a number of 12-month projects that use The Planetary...
4 November 2021
On 3rd November 2021, Earthranger Announced Giraffe Conservation Foundation and Lion Guardians as the inaugral Conservation Tech Award Recipients. The two organizations are Harnessing the Power of Technology to Protect...
3 November 2021
The Centre for Statistics in Ecology, Environment and Conservation, a research group within the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Cape Town, is now hiring for a funded postdoc or PhD postion with...
1 November 2021
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Great talk! I thoroughly enjoyed it. Some high schoolers have done small AI projects(s) and have interest in the wildlife. What resources would you all suggest to further... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 4 years 1 month ago | |
DeepForest docs are here. https://deepforest.readthedocs.io/ Welcome to have a look. My experience is that individual trees cannot be distinguished in satellite... |
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AI for Conservation | 4 years 4 months ago | |
Steph, thank you so much for this, this is wonderful :) Really, really apreciate you sharing this with me :) Diving into all of the wonderful resources from you, thank you so very... |
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AI for Conservation | 4 years 4 months ago | |
A call put out over on Twitter by Jesse Alston might be of interest here - both for conservationists and grad students. Looks like... |
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AI for Conservation | 4 years 4 months ago | |
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... |
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AI for Conservation | 4 years 4 months ago | |
Hi there this post on Conservation X labs recently came up on designing softwarre for individual horse recognition: https://... |
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AI for Conservation | 4 years 5 months ago | |
Wildlife Insights launched their online platform hosting over 4 million camera trap images. They use AI to automatically classify the... |
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AI for Conservation | 4 years 7 months ago | |
Hey everyone! My colleagues and I are hosting a workshop on Animal Re-ID, and the submission deadline is a little less than a month... |
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AI for Conservation | 4 years 8 months ago | |
Chuck's Python for Everyone course is available these days at www.py4e.com, and he's also created a course called Web Apps for Everyone www.wa4e.com. Both... |
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AI for Conservation | 4 years 9 months ago | |
Hi all! This is a great article summarizing new applications for AI for conservation, and highlights @vsahai 's work with... |
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AI for Conservation | 5 years ago | |
Wild Me (wildme.org) is looking to retain a UI/UX Machine Learning Engineer to help translate advanced ML into beautiful interfaces... |
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AI for Conservation | 5 years 1 month ago | |
Wild Me (wildme.org) is looking to hire a second, Masters or PhD-level Senior Computer Vision Engineer to focus on individual ID of... |
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AI for Conservation | 5 years 1 month ago |
Using IoT and Machine Learning to help protect Kenya's Rivers
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21 October 2021 12:00am
Tech Tutors: How do I analyze large acoustic datasets using PAMGuard?
14 October 2021 3:42pm
How do I analyze large acoustic datasets using PAMGuard?
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7 October 2021 12:00am
Call for Papers: Special Issue on Computer Vision Approach for Animal Tracking and Modeling
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20 September 2021 12:00am
Tech Tutors: How do I use AI to fight wildlife crime?
1 September 2021 10:59pm
Which are major open challenges that AI can help to solve in nature conservation ?
28 April 2021 9:15am
13 August 2021 10:04pm
Elizabeth Bondi has work on detection from thermal imagery taken by drones! I'd look at her papers :)
27 August 2021 10:51am
Looks good, but what is the added value compared to other examples as Obsidentify and Plantnet?
AI/ML Engineer Job at Dryad
26 August 2021 2:45pm
Widening the Bottleneck: Can Citizen Science Accelerate Conservation?
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19 August 2021 12:00am
Open positions in ML & conservation/climate sci
18 August 2021 2:22pm
Geo for Good Lightning Talks: Nature Conservation
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17 August 2021 12:00am
Building Sustainable Support with Edge Impulse
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13 August 2021 12:00am
Accessible Tech and Real Impact with the WILDLABS Fellowship: On the Edge
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9 August 2021 12:00am
WILDLABS Community Call: August 12th
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4 August 2021 12:00am
Tech Tutors: How do I get started with Wildlife Insights?
29 July 2021 12:04am
Wildlife Insights Launches
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27 July 2021 12:00am
Tech Tutors: How do I get started with Megadetector?
22 July 2021 3:34pm
Opportunity: Lead an ML Workshop
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21 July 2021 12:00am
How do I get started with Wildlife Insights?
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19 July 2021 12:00am
How do I get started with Megadetector?
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7 July 2021 12:00am
How do I choose the right camera trap(s) based on interests, goals, and species?
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6 July 2021 12:00am
WILDLABS Tech Tutors: Season 3
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6 July 2021 12:00am
BearID Featured: Artificial Intelligence & Other New Technology In Bear Research
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1 July 2021 12:00am
PhDs (or MSc) in tech + nature conservation ?
28 April 2021 9:16am
26 May 2021 5:09pm
I think programming and machine learning are what I wish I did in uni the most. Particularly Python coding. Most biologists use R/Rstudio but Python is more popular in the tech world. And machine learning is taking over everything, conservation included, so it's definitely a high-demand skill.
26 May 2021 9:14pm
carlybatist, I can help with python. Is there anything you or people in your network may need help?
About ML - can you tell 3 main challenges you'd think as priority in conservation, that ML can be helpful ? Also, anything that also small NGOs may struggle to work on, due to limited budget / IT capacity, and so they may benefit from freelancers ? Large NGOs or international agencies will likely work with established companies. I'ìd like to know if there could be a niche were I can interact directly with NGOs and philantropic institutions, both for supporting with services, as well for listening to feedback to project proposals that could benefit from mutual collaborations (e.g. tech pilot + fundraising = startup and product iterations with lower costs).
Also, can you mention a few activities / roles that may offer both outdoor + analytics / tech skills ?
Piorirty is outdoor for me. But since I have a few tech skills and management skills, im trying to trade them!
26 May 2021 10:04pm
You should join the Key Conservation app, which connects people and NGO's for specific needs, whether funding, time, or skills (programming included). Organizations can list particular things they need and you can get day-to-day updates on progress.
In terms of how ML is used in conservation, it's mostly to process the large datasets yielded by conservation tech (camera traps, passive acoustics, biologging, remote sensing/GIS). Annotating detections (which pictures have animals, which species a call belongs to, where deforestation is happening through satellite imagery, etc.).
And lots of freelancing opportunities come up in Wildlabs - the community threads and the biweekly digest. Twitter is also great for finding those kinds of opportunities, search by relevant keywords or hashtags (e.g., #tech4wildlife). I would also start following conservation tech organizations on LinkedIn and Twitter or subscribing to their newsletters or listservs so you don't miss opportunities as they come up.
New Papers: Methods in Ecology and Evolution
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23 April 2021 12:00am
New Papers: Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation
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22 April 2021 12:00am
BirdCLEF 2021 Kaggle Challenge
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19 April 2021 12:00am
Looking for animal emotions data for ML
17 March 2021 12:43pm
26 March 2021 4:06pm
There is a TON of research on ML algorithms for all this!
For facial rec-
BearID project - http://bearresearch.org/ (individual facial rec for grizzlies)
AnimalFACS (facial action coding system) - http://www.chimpfacs.com/ (the model started with chimps but they now have versions for orangutans, gibbons, macaques, dogs, cats, and horses)
A lot of the gesture/facial expression literature is focused on primates, particularly apes, so if you do a Google Scholar search on that, you'll loads of papers that have looked into this as well.
For vocals -
Carlson, N. V., Kelly, E. M., & Couzin, I. (2020). Individual vocal recognition across taxa: a review of the literature and a look into the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 375(1802), 20190479.
Turesson, H. K., Ribeiro, S., Pereira, D. R., Papa, J. P., & de Albuquerque, V. H. C. (2016). Machine learning algorithms for automatic classification of marmoset vocalizations. PloS one, 11(9), e0163041.
Wijers, M., Trethowan, P., Du Preez, B., Chamaillé-Jammes, S., Loveridge, A. J., Macdonald, D. W., & Markham, A. (2020). Vocal discrimination of African lions and its potential for collar-free tracking. Bioacoustics, 1-19.
Clink, D. J., Crofoot, M. C., & Marshall, A. J. (2019). Application of a semi-automated vocal fingerprinting approach to monitor Bornean gibbon females in an experimentally fragmented landscape in Sabah, Malaysia. Bioacoustics, 28(3), 193-209.
Spillmann, B., van Schaik, C. P., Setia, T. M., & Sadjadi, S. O. (2017). Who shall I say is calling? Validation of a caller recognition procedure in Bornean flanged male orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii) long calls. Bioacoustics, 26(2), 109-120.
Hantke, S., Cummins, N., & Schuller, B. (2018, April). What is my dog trying to tell me? The automatic recognition of the context and perceived emotion of dog barks. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp. 5134-5138). IEEE.
Totakura, V., Janmanchi, M. K., Rajesh, D., & Hussan, M. T. (2020). Prediction of Animal Vocal Emotions Using Convolutional Neural Network. International Journal of Scientific & Technology Research, 9(2), 6007-6011.
Other -
Neethirajan, S., Reimert, I., & Kemp, B. (2021). Measuring Farm Animal Emotions—Sensor-Based Approaches. Sensors, 21(2), 553.
Hong, W., Kennedy, A., Burgos-Artizzu, X. P., Zelikowsky, M., Navonne, S. G., Perona, P., & Anderson, D. J. (2015). Automated measurement of mouse social behaviors using depth sensing, video tracking, and machine learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(38), E5351-E5360.
26 March 2021 7:44pm
Thank you VERY much for that, Carly. I really appreciate it. I have only heard of the bear research project and was not aware of the others. This is very helpful.
FYI: Most studies I am aware of use ML with facial recognition software. I am interested to find out if there are recognition software/research for facial-gesture-voice-speech as this will be more accurate to read animals that have less elastic facial expressions than primates or humans.
The 2021 #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Community Highlights
25 March 2021 12:00am
Event: tinyML for Good: Conservation & Climate
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22 March 2021 12:00am
Allen Coral Atlas - using machine learning to map coral reefs
17 March 2021 6:48pm
4 August 2021 5:00pm
I would perhaps ask this in a new thread, so the rest of the community can see it! (as opposed to a reply here, where only the people in the conversation are notified of more replies).