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!
Cornell University
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- @volkankorkmaz
- | volkan
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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- @tmcgrath
- | He / Him
Geographer, Program Manager, Engineering Manager
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Dzanga-Ndoki national park biodiversity monitoring
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- @derekrisch
- | He/Him
I'm a conservation ecologist working on invasive mammalian species. Use a variety of monitoring methods which provide an enormous amount of data (yay!) but require a lot of effort to process (nay!). Love keeping up to date on newest tech.
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World Wide Fund for Nature/ World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
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- @cleo
- | She/Her
Southern African Wildlife College
I am ecologist working in African conservation areas who loves wildlife & wild landscapes. I increasingly recognize that conservation is about people, especially those living in & around protected areas. Finding ways to benefit marginalized people is my passion.
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Article
In this article from BearID Project, Director and Software Developer Ed Miller walks us through using their application to identify individual bears from photographs. Ed shows us how to easily use BearID remotely in the...
21 July 2020
Put your acoustic monitoring skills to the test in The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Birdsong Identification Kaggle Competition. Participants will compete to identify as many bird vocalizations as possible in in...
8 July 2020
Conservation technology largely consists of two categories: tools to monitor and study wildlife and their habitats, and solutions to mitigate or prevent negative human impacts. The fight against poaching in particular...
4 June 2020
A couple months ago, we introduced you to the Footprint Identification Technique (FIT), a non-invasive way to build an identification algorithm from both wild and captive animals by photographing footprints. Today, we'...
3 June 2020
Funding
The 2020 Hackaday Prize competition has begun! This year, Conservation X Labs has partnered with the Hackaday Prizes as one of four nonprofits seeking tech-based solutions to urgent challenges. Conservation X Labs'...
26 May 2020
Article
We're excited to welcome the WildTrack FIT group to our community! Today, we'd like to introduce you to the Footprint Identification Technique (FIT) and share how you can incorporate this tracking method into your field...
6 May 2020
Funding
Want to compete in the iWildCam 2020 competition identifying species in camera trap images to support biodiversity monitoring efforts and automatic species classification model improvements? Because the Workshop on Fine...
4 May 2020
The 2020 Arm Research Summit is accepting submissions from all research disciplines focusing on the role of technology in solving global challenges. Submissions should reflect the potential of sustainable, secure, and...
24 April 2020
Article
At the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference, we announced the WILDLABS Tech Hub, an accelerator programme created to support the development and scaling of groundbreaking technological solutions addressing the ...
13 April 2020
Article
At the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference, we announced the WILDLABS Tech Hub, an accelerator program created to support the development and scaling of groundbreaking technological solutions addressing the ...
26 March 2020
Trapped inside during the COVID-19 quarantine and looking to engage with conservation science without leaving your desk? Citizen science projects like those on Zooniverse offer a great opportunity to impact scientific...
18 March 2020
Machine learning is rapidly expanding as a useful field research tool, but its complexity can intimidate even seasoned tech conservationists. Edge Impulse aims to make machine learning solutions accessible,...
16 March 2020
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61 Products
Recently updated products
15 Products
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Bluesky have a commercial tree crown dataset available covering most of Great Britain (England, Wales and parts of Scotland). There is a canopy layer with approximate outlines of... |
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AI for Conservation, Drones | 1 year 6 months ago | |
Rainforest Connection's (RFCx) Guardian devices may be of interest. They are solar-powered and have connectivity options for Wifi, GSM and satellite transfer. They've previously... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Connectivity, Data management and processing tools, Protected Area Management Tools, Sensors | 1 year 6 months ago | |
My original background is in ecology and conservation, and am now in the elected leadership of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware which convenes researchers developing open... |
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AI for Conservation, Biologging, Camera Traps, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools, Drones, Emerging Tech, Sensors | 1 year 6 months ago | |
Hi Sophie, Can you please help me or get in touch in developing a system where we are able to detect an Elephant? Would like to discuss more about it. Kindly treat this as urgent!! |
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AI for Conservation | 1 year 7 months ago | |
Hello All - @sarabeery et Al have just put a pre-print out on their educational insights into teaching Computer Vision to ecologists. I... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Early Career, Emerging Tech | 1 year 7 months ago | |
The Conservation Technology Lab at San Diego Zoo seeks undergrads for summer projects in computer vision, machine learning, bioacoustics,... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education | 1 year 7 months ago | |
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 |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Emerging Tech, Ethics of Conservation Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Remote Sensing & GIS, Sensors | 1 year 8 months ago | |
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... |
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Conservation Tech Training and Education, AI for Conservation | 1 year 8 months ago | |
Hahaha, now I see why you were asking ... |
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AI for Conservation | 1 year 8 months ago | |
Hi all, one of the 8 MozFest 2023 spaces is 'Tech & Biodiversity', and the organisers seek input for an event on the intersection of... |
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AI for Conservation, Ethics of Conservation Tech, Open Source Solutions | 1 year 8 months ago | |
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... |
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AI for Conservation, Emerging Tech | 1 year 9 months ago | |
Thanks so much!! |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Biologging, Camera Traps, Community Base, Data management and processing tools, Drones, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 year 10 months ago |
Webinar: Citizen Science Online
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26 March 2020 12:00am
WILDLABS Tech Hub: Poreprint
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26 March 2020 12:00am
Enter the Zooniverse: Try Citizen Science for Yourself!
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18 March 2020 12:00am
Tutorial: Train a TinyML Model That Can Recognize Sounds Using Only 23 kB of RAM
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16 March 2020 12:00am
Accepting Applications: ArcGIS Solutions for Protected Area Management
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4 March 2020 12:00am
Competition: Plastic Data Challenge
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3 March 2020 12:00am
Call for Nominations: Tusk Conservation Awards
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3 March 2020 12:00am
Hawai'i Conservation Conference
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28 February 2020 12:00am
Competition: The Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge
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26 February 2020 12:00am
Listening to Nature: The Emerging Field of Bioacoustics
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24 February 2020 12:00am
Team for Building of ML app for horse identification and conservation
20 February 2020 11:09pm
HWC Tech Challenge Update: Thermal Elephant Alert System
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17 February 2020 12:00am
ICEI2020: 11th International Conference on Ecological Informatics
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14 February 2020 12:00am
Seafood fund seeks ideas for innovation projects up to £250k
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11 February 2020 12:00am
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Recording: Acoustic Monitoring
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5 February 2020 12:00am
AI for camera trap public data
17 December 2019 9:20pm
A New Cloud Platform Unveils the Most Diverse Camera Trap Database in the World
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17 December 2019 12:00am
[ARCHIVED] Workshop on Deep Learning Methods and Appliocations for Animal Re-Identification
25 November 2019 6:24pm
WACV2020 AI for Animal Re-ID: Deep Learning Methods and Applications for Animal Re-Identification
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25 November 2019 12:00am
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Recording: Drones
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9 November 2019 12:00am
Camera Trapping: Incredibly Useful Resources List
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5 November 2019 12:00am
Who wants to learn Python? Courses to get you started coding
2 May 2016 3:13pm
1 March 2019 9:20am
Hello everyone what are you wating for..
All US, UK, India users can enroll courses from Intellipaat (the largest IT trainng company)
check some of thier superb training list:
29 October 2019 4:52pm
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 excellent resources, and he's a strong proponent for (and creator of) open source educational tools in general.
Lucy
Plant-Powered Camera Trap Breakthrough
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15 October 2019 12:00am
Using Artificial Intelligence to Track Birds’ Dark-of-Night Migrations
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9 October 2019 12:00am
Camera Trap Technology Symposium (Recordings): Bringing Developers and Users Together
2 September 2019 12:00am
ICCB 2019: 5 Key Discussions about the Future of Conservation Tech
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21 August 2019 12:00am
Conservation biologists find new applications for AI tools
5 August 2019 2:57pm
Automated Identification of Indonesian Rhinos
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27 July 2019 12:00am
[ARCHIVED] Position: UI/UX Machine Learning Engineer
8 July 2019 11:27pm
[ARCHIVED] Position: Senior Computer Vision Research Engineer
8 July 2019 10:42pm
31 August 2017 9:06am
A couple of years ago I completed the Coursera course Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python) with Charles Severance. I found it really well paced and well taught. He's a very personable tutor, and has also written a free book Python for Everybody, available as a PDF.
I found the Coursera course on R Programming with Roger Peng to be more difficult to follow, but I'm not sure whether that was down to the teaching style or the language itself. For R, I'd definitely recommend the best place to get started is swirl - Learn R, in R!
Happy coding