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!
- @ttopa
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Recent Environmental Science and Data Science graduate looking to learn more about the conservation tech world. www.TeodoroTopa.com
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I am the executive director of FishEye Collaborative, a non-profit leveraging emergent underwater listening technologies to grow our understanding of marine ecosystems. I am also the president of FishEye Acoustics, a marine tech company developing a new class of acoustic sensors.
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- @AnnabelL
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- @tutgut5
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Michigan Natural Features Inventory (MNFI)
Wildlife ecologist
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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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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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Vote for your favorite submissions that best demonstrate conservation impact, novel innovation/discovery, and strong storytelling of the work and the sector.
12 August 2024
Climate Change AI calls for applications for Innovation Grants regarding AI/ML research projects. Eligible applicants are principal investigators at accredited universities in OECD member countries.
12 August 2024
To celebrate our 9th Annual #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge happening this week, we’re taking a look at past and current submissions that feature the fastest growing areas of conservation tech: movement ecology, AI,...
7 August 2024
WILDLABS is thrilled to announce the launch of a Horizon Scan on emerging priorities in Bioacoustics, supported by the Moore Foundation and in collaboration with Colorado State University. This project aims to identify...
5 August 2024
We are recruiting an (extendable) 2-year postdoc in my group to develop new technologies (cameras, microphones, deep learning, etc) to track earthworm activity in the field.
16 July 2024
The Reversing Environmental Degradation in Africa and Asia (REDAA) Programme is seeking a consultant to look into current issues with AI to develop a better shared understanding of how AI and related technologies could...
11 July 2024
Aerial seeding with drones has great potential in forest restoration but faces enormous challenges to be efficient and scalable. Current protocols use blanket seeding throughout the area to be restored, meaning a high...
20 June 2024
Come join us at AIMS, and work on deep learning for bioacoustics research!
14 June 2024
The AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge initiative from the Bezos Earth Fund has opened a call for proposals for "exploring new ideas for multiplying the impact of climate and nature efforts using modern AI"
12 June 2024
The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance's Burrowing Owl Recovery Program and Conservation Technology Lab seek a postdoctoral research associate to develop bioacoustic tools for monitoring the western burrowing owl...
11 June 2024
Come and do the first research into responsible AI for biodiversity monitoring, developing ways to ensure these AIs are safe, unbiased and accountable.
11 June 2024
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Thank you so much! Now everything is in the hands of amazing organizations and companies! But the first results of the Disaster Management cohort are bringing a very optimistic... |
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AI for Conservation, Climate Change, Early Career, East Africa Community, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech, Ending Wildlife Trafficking Online, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Open Source Solutions | 2 weeks 1 day ago | |
great! |
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AI for Conservation | 2 weeks 2 days ago | |
interesting!!! |
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AI for Conservation, Biologging, Data management and processing tools | 2 weeks 2 days ago | |
so great!!! |
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Software and Mobile Apps, AI for Conservation, Biologging | 2 weeks 2 days ago | |
Great!!! |
+32
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AI for Conservation, Drones, Emerging Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Wildlife Crime | 2 weeks 2 days ago | |
@bluevalhalla thanks for sharing the awesome video, sounds like a great project! |
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AI for Conservation | 2 weeks 5 days ago | |
Hi everyone, I am conducting a research project as part of my MSc in Environment and Development at the London School of Economics. I... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Ethics of Conservation Tech | 3 weeks 3 days ago | |
@cmwainaina please take a look |
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Biologging, AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Connectivity, Data management and processing tools, East Africa Community, Emerging Tech, Ethics of Conservation Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Marine Conservation, Protected Area Management Tools, Remote Sensing & GIS, Sensors, Software and Mobile Apps | 3 weeks 4 days ago | |
Glad to announce that a new tutorial is available on Firetail: |
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AI for Conservation, Biologging | 1 month 1 week ago | |
The use of synthetic training data such as interpolated sequence values is common, but fraught with the issue of your synthetic signal generating features that are not true to... |
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Data management and processing tools, AI for Conservation | 1 month 2 weeks ago | |
In that case, you might want to keep an eye on the project from @Lars_Holst_Hansen |
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Camera Traps, AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Early Career, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Protected Area Management Tools | 2 months ago | |
No worries! I'll be trying the other one to see how it works. Thank you for your help! |
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AI for Conservation | 2 months 1 week ago |
Upcoming AI for Conservation Events and Webinars
29 October 2020 10:57am
Tech Tutors: How do I train my first machine learning model?
18 June 2020 1:19pm
8 October 2020 9:45pm
Hi Wildlabbers,
Just popping in to share this very cool primer for beginners to embedded machine learning from our tutor Daniel Situnayake! If you're interested in learning more about the basics of TinyML, this is a great resource.
-Ellie
Training Opportunity: HarvardX TinyML Course
![](/sites/default/files/screen_shot_2020-09-30_at_2.43.53_pm-.png)
30 September 2020 12:00am
Webinar: Advances in Fisheries Electronic Monitoring
![](/sites/default/files/screen_shot_2020-09-21_at_11.31.25_am-.png)
21 September 2020 12:00am
Tech Tutors: Review Session
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3 September 2020 12:00am
Sustainable Fishing Challenges: Fishing Gear Innovations
![](/sites/default/files/danbio-.jpeg)
19 August 2020 12:00am
Challenge: ElephantEdge
![](/sites/default/files/screen_shot_2020-08-11_at_3.09.29_pm-.png)
11 August 2020 12:00am
Event: StreamingScience's #Tech4Wildlife Thursdays
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3 August 2020 12:00am
Automated Fish Identification and Abundance Using Artificial Intelligence
![](/sites/default/files/screen_shot_2020-07-28_at_4.14.37_pm-.png)
28 July 2020 12:00am
BearID To Go
![](/sites/default/files/bearid-.jpg)
21 July 2020 12:00am
Competition: Cornell Birdcall Identification
![](/sites/default/files/screen_shot_2021-04-19_at_5.54.18_pm-.png)
8 July 2020 12:00am
Tech Tutors: How do I get started using ML for my camera traps? Building Accurate Project-Specific Models
25 June 2020 12:02am
25 June 2020 6:01pm
26 June 2020 2:32pm
Hi everyone!
We've now posted Sara's session to our youtube channel, and I've also popped it up the top of this thread.
The collaborative notes worked really well! I've now updated them to capture what happened in the chat - it should be a helpful companion to go alongside the recording. The notes have links, projects, and key discussions we saw in the chat, and summarise the questions Sara coverd in the discussion as well as the Qs we weren't able to get to (40mins overtime was our limit!). If your question was one of the outstanding ones and you'd like to have it answered, please drop it in the discussion below.
The notes now also have the participant check ins (such an awesome range of places, projects and interests!) - I'm sharing these as seeing what other people are doing might help you connect with each other. If you see someone you want to connect with, try and find them using our member direcyour people tab. If you can't, email Ellie and she will see if that person is happy to hear from you before connecting you.
Reminder, registration is open for Carlos' tutorial next week: How do I perform automated recordings of bird assemblages? Register here.
Thanks everyone!
Steph
2 July 2020 8:58pm
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 develop high schooler’s interest in AI?
How do I scale up acoustic surveys with Audiomoths?
![](/sites/default/files/screen_shot_2020-06-25_at_5.57.36_pm-.png)
25 June 2020 12:00am
How do I perform automated recordings of bird assemblages?
![](/sites/default/files/carlos_pic_1-.jpg)
19 June 2020 12:00am
How do I train my first machine learning model?
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9 June 2020 12:00am
How do I get started using Machine Learning for my camera traps?
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9 June 2020 12:00am
Innovator Interview: Hack the Poacher
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4 June 2020 12:00am
The Perfect Paw Print: Collecting Data with FIT
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3 June 2020 12:00am
Competition: 2020 Hackaday Prize
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26 May 2020 12:00am
WILDLABS Tech Tutors: Season One
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19 May 2020 12:00am
Get To Know FIT
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6 May 2020 12:00am
Competition: iWildCam 2020
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4 May 2020 12:00am
Training Course: Quantitative Analysis of Marine & Coastal Drone Data
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29 April 2020 12:00am
Call for Submissions – Arm Research Summit 2020
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24 April 2020 12:00am
WILDLABS Tech Hub: WWF PandaSat
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13 April 2020 12:00am
Webinar 11PST 3/20 - Deep Learning for Airborne Tree Detection
17 March 2020 1:28am
17 March 2020 3:52pm
Thanks Ben. I'll see what I can do.
24 March 2020 9:57am
Hello Ben. Unfortunately I couldn't make it on Friday. It would be great if I could take a look at your slides. I'm interested in trying to count mangrove trees. I have some WorldView 2 data. Do you think I could use DeepForest for this?
31 March 2020 4:21am
DeepForest docs are here.
https://deepforest.readthedocs.io/
Welcome to have a look. My experience is that individual trees cannot be distinguished in satellite imagery. The coarest resolution we've had success with is 0.3m. However, the deepforest weights may still useful as a starting location. If there are visible objects in your image that you want to detect, collecting a few hundred training data samples and retraining the model for 2-3 epochs could be useful. See the link for details. Happy to help, submit issues on the github repo is something isn't clear/doesn't work. Everything is in dev.
WILDLABS Community Call Recording: Rainforest X-PRIZE
30 March 2020 12:00am
Open, challenging dataset for audio classification
27 March 2020 10:52am
27 March 2020 11:51am
Hi Radek,
I'm sure others can help here, but check out our recent virtual meetup (it'll be posted here in about an hour), the speakers - particularly Dave Watson - shared open datasets that might be what you're looking for.
Over on Twitter, Jesse Alston is collating a google sheet so that people can advertise data sets that grad students can use to finish theses. @arik 's reply here might be of particular interest: 'We have been recording 24/7 soundscapes in remote US locations like Yellowstone NP and rural central Wisconsin with multiple GPS synced recorders. Our goal is to study wolf and coyote vocalisations, but if anyone can make use of these data for their own studies, drop me a line!.'
Hope this helps!
Steph
27 March 2020 12:25pm
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 much for this!
Radek
Help collate list of Ecology/Conservation Data Sets for grad students
27 March 2020 12:07pm
Automated species detection from camera traps
30 January 2020 8:43am
25 March 2020 2:59pm
I see. Im interested and would like to help. I will need the images to train the network. As many as possible.
if you dont have them yet, try to find similar images preferably of the same species. I will use them to test the performance of the detection.
25 March 2020 6:49pm
I'm not familiar with camera traps, but there are a couple of options:
1) If the animals tend to cover most part of the image, then you can train a CNN classifier to distinguish between species (available with the keras-Tensorflow modules in Python)
2) If, however, the animals only cover a small part of the image (e.g. in the distance), it might be better to use an object detector (I've used YOLOv2 in the past for fish detection), which however is not that straightforward, especially with Python (I used MATLAB)
In any case, keras-Tensorflow classification with Python might be the most straightforward option for your goal. You should also certainly have a look at Google's Wildlife Insights platform which is specialized for species classification from camera trap images.
27 March 2020 10:33am
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 example images with the species in them annotated? Say a still from the camera with a tiger and a csv file referencing that file and annotating that there is a tiger in the image?
Would you like someone to do the developing and training of the deep learning model for you? I work as an AI research engineer at the Earth Species project and I am also a part of a community of deep learning practitioners where we apply cutting edge research to various problems. Here you can check a little initiative I started a couple of days ago to teach people how to work with audio (there is a related forum thread but unfortunately it is in closed forums for the time being as it is associated with a course that is under way). My main point is this - if you have the data and would like someone to help you out on the modelling part, I can coordinate this.
Alternatively, if you cannot release the data, I can point you to materials that can get you started to carry out the work yourself.
29 October 2020 11:02am
AI for Climate Forum: Lightning Talks
Bonnie Lei, Microsoft AI for Earth - 4pm GMT, October 30
Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wO6ek5dTSMOmYqeMCDbkoQ
As part of the AI for Climate Forum 2020, we will host a series of Lighting Talks with industry leaders, academic representatives and researchers, NGO leaders, and policymakers; that will share ideas about the future of conservation and the harnessing of exponential technologies in the fight against climate change.
Next Guests:
October 30: Bonnie Lei, Head of Global Strategic Partnerships at AI for Earth/ Microsoft
November 6: Jenny Lawton, Startup Founder, and Innovation Expert