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
- | he/him
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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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- @lhughey
- | she/her
Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
I am an ecologist and program manager with experience leading collaborative research projects in international settings. I specialize in the application of animal tracking data to conserve migratory species on a changing planet.
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- @tobiaspetri
- | him/his
Schäuffelhut Berger GmbH
data scientist/algorithmic dev - caught fire for movement ecology
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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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Consultancy opportunity at ZSL for an experienced monitoring specialist to support species monitoring in rewilding landscapes across Europe
31 January 2023
The Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB)
25 January 2023
Are you stuck on an AI or ML challenge in your conservation work? Apply now for the chance to receive tailored expert advice from data scientists! Applications due 27th January 2023
18 January 2023
WILDLABS and Fauna & Flora International are seeking an early career Vietnamese conservationist for 12-month paid internship position to grow and support the Southeast Asia regional community in our global...
11 January 2023
This position focuses on the ecology aspect of the project, while a second PhD in Ilmenau will be dealing with programming/AI development. Because of the high temporal resolution of our data, we can investigate how land...
9 January 2023
Careers
We are looking for someone who enjoys the craft of making to come and help run our London based lab.
5 January 2023
Seeking Software Engineer for Marine Science Lab a UC Santa Barbara
19 December 2022
Using satellite imagery to detect and classify the severity of cyanobacteria blooms in small, inland water bodies.
15 December 2022
a technology-led solution to understanding the honeybees of the wasp world
8 December 2022
The University of Alaska Fairbanks is seeking a research Post Doctoral Fellow to work in collaboration with the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The position will focus on using Machine...
7 December 2022
Conservation partnership launches new award to advance biodiversity conservation from space
5 December 2022
Interested in a PhD exploring the potential of AI? Please consider applying to Realize Lab at the University of Michigan CSE.
23 November 2022
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54 Products
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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A new COST action has been announced which will focus on the use of computer vision for monitoring insects.InsectAI will run for 4 years... |
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AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps | 11 months 1 week ago | |
Carly, that would be great! Thanks! I work with soundscapes and love the work of Rainforest Connection! I'll send you an email (@CUNY) to coordinate! |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Drones, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech, Remote Sensing & GIS | 1 year ago | |
Hi Donya! You might check out the Conservation Tech Directory to see what projects/organizations/tools best align with your interests and skills. |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Drones | 1 year ago | |
Hey everyone, I am super excited to share two announcements with the Community!🏆🌍 Our flagship Data4Good project - Mbaza AI... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 1 year ago | |
That sounds like a really neat project! Do fish get re-caught often enough that individual ID is useful? Is sample bias (more data from popular spots) an issue? |
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AI for Conservation, Citizen Science, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 year 1 month ago | |
Hi everybody 👋🏽,I'm a UX designer, and I design interfaces and improve user experiences/flows. I would love to contribute to conservation... |
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AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Emerging Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict | 1 year 1 month ago | |
Thanks Bas! I'll look into SSD vs RCNNs, I'd never heard of an SSD. |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 1 year 1 month ago | |
greetings! i sent you a PM regarding this, feel free to contact me however is most convenient for you - regards,chris |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Climate Change, East Africa Community, Wildlife Crime | 1 year 1 month ago | |
I'm looking for any recommendations for any entry level/internship remote roles/companies in the United States that are focused in... |
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AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Early Career, Remote Sensing & GIS | 1 year 1 month ago | |
Hi everyone! and thanks @StephODonnell for the invite :)I’m a software engineer working on MLOps, and currently studying for a part-time... |
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AI for Conservation, Open Source Solutions | 1 year 1 month ago | |
Indeed, I'll be there too! I like to meet new conservation friends with morning runs, so I will likely organize a couple of runs, maybe one right near the conference, and... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps, Remote Sensing & GIS | 1 year 2 months ago | |
Hi everyone! The Fine Grained Visual Categorization Workshop (FGVC) is hosting its 10th rendition at CVPR this June in Vancouver. A huge... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Marine Conservation | 1 year 2 months ago |
AI Animal Identification Models
30 March 2023 5:01am
25 April 2023 2:08pm
Hi David
It appears that you have been looking for existing models, however, most existing models are trained on either COCO or some other very generic dataset. So, if you want to identify just animals, you may be better off training your own model. It seems no one in this thread mentioned yet that it is possible to do transfer learning on existing models, which keeps most of the "visual part" of the model as is, but just changes the classification part so it can identify other things. This way you can take an existing model trained on COCO and in a fraction of the time it takes to train a full model, just retrain that for your animals.
Also have a look at your requirements for the inferencing stage. Some models take long in training but are superfast in inference and others are slow in both cases but very accurate, etc. If you want semi-realtime inferencing, you are probably looking at single shot detectors (SSD), and not RCNNs.
26 April 2023 7:34pm
Thanks Bas! I'll look into SSD vs RCNNs, I'd never heard of an SSD.
Feathered forecast: Tech tools comb weather data for bird migrations
26 April 2023 2:50pm
Since its launch in 1999, the BirdCast project has used weather radar data to track and forecast bird migrations across the U.S. In recent years, technology such as cloud computing and machine learning have helped make the work of researchers in the project easier and more automated. The BirdCast project is now working on integrating radar data with human observations and bioacoustics to help identify the bird species traversing the skies.
Congo Basin activity?
30 March 2023 9:14pm
25 April 2023 5:08pm
greetings!
i sent you a PM regarding this, feel free to contact me however is most convenient for you -
regards,
chris
Looking for entry level remote role in GIS/environmental analysis in the United States
22 April 2023 12:05am
Catch up with The Variety Hour: April 2023
21 April 2023 10:42am
Call for survey participants (AI/ML practitioners)
19 April 2023 3:17pm
Camera traps, AI, and Ecology
14 April 2023 10:08am
7 June 2023 9:42am
1 August 2023 10:46am
1 September 2023 8:06am
Segment Anything
13 April 2023 9:16pm
Our lead engineer just shared this tool for segmenting images and we're excited to test it out on our fishy & underwater pix. Has anyone else used it?
Project Manager, Rainforest Connection (RFCx)
12 April 2023 1:09pm
The 59th Annual Meeting of Illinois Chapter of The Wildlife Society
12 April 2023 5:24am
Who's going to ESA in Portland this year?
31 March 2023 9:27am
4 April 2023 9:58am
That sounds great. I think you should encourage people to bring a bit of tech with them, can be a good conversation starter/ice-breaker
4 April 2023 4:04pm
Good idea! I've got a ransom assortment of different acoustic recorders I can bring along
5 April 2023 11:58pm
Indeed, I'll be there too! I like to meet new conservation friends with morning runs, so I will likely organize a couple of runs, maybe one right near the conference, and one somewhere in a nearby park where we can look for wildlife. The latter would probably be at an obscenely early hour, so we can drive somewhere, ideally see elk (there are elk within 25 minutes of Portland!), and still get back in time for the morning sessions.
Computer Vision Competitions on Natural-World datasets
5 April 2023 4:26pm
Rhino horns in medicine
2 April 2023 2:22pm
Updates about Arbimon for Ecoacoustics - free, cloud based analytical tool
31 March 2023 11:09am
31 March 2023 3:43pm
Yes please reach out with any questions on acoustic monitoring, Arbimon, RFCx, etc.!
The WILDLABS Variety Hour: March 2023 - YouTube
30 March 2023 4:04pm
If you missed our Variety Hour show yesterday, do not fear! It's already live on youtube for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!
BearID Interview with AWS
29 March 2023 12:35am
Ed Miller of the BearID Project shared this great interview on Twitter and gave WILDLABS a shoutout! If you're new to the AI for Conservation community, you'll want to learn about the BearID Project, which began as a collaboration because of connections made through WILDLABS, and has gone on to set a great standard for machine learning projects in conservation.
AI has critical role to play in helping tackle the climate crisis, new Turing white paper finds
27 March 2023 12:04pm
Four key recommendations for how data science and AI can be better harnessed to tackle climate change:
1. Apply cutting-edge data science and AI to environmental decision-making.
2. Foster a community of AI specialists, environmental researchers and stakeholders across domains and sectors.
3. Build robust digital pipelines to allow researchers to share, store and analyse the vast amounts of data being collected about the environment.
4. Develop digital twins to model and understand the systems that will help us to decarbonise our society.
Catch up with The Variety Hour: March 2023
23 March 2023 11:09am
ARSET - Fundamentals of Machine Learning for Earth Science
21 March 2023 4:49pm
Ol Pejeta Conservancy and Mbaza AI
16 March 2023 7:18pm
Computer Science student looking to work for wildlife
5 March 2023 10:04pm
14 March 2023 2:00pm
Great information! Thank you for sharing this. I actually have Masters in Zoology and have done some field work in Marine Conservation. Since then I have worked in Science education and eventually switched to Software Programming. My dream has always been to work in Conservation, however life happened and I had to give up on this pipe dream. I currently work as a Developer in a contractor role for the Federal Government. Would someone with my experience have an advantage in conservation Tech?
14 March 2023 2:58pm
I think the real demand in conservation tech is for transdisciplianry individuals. If you look at all the stand-out people in this space they are people who occupy multiple domains that are traditionally isolated. These are people who talk fluently in computer science and ecology, for example. Not only this, they are also people who create and imagine in ways that intertwin ideas and concepts across these domains. Its these people, thinking in these ways, that lead to innovations that really move us forward. Some of these people started out where you are now, having crossed domains through their career and then seeing opportunities to bring these skills together in imaginative ways.
14 March 2023 9:53pm
I couldn't agree more with both of these comments tom! I'm reading hundreds (literally hundreds) of applications for open WILDLABS roles at the moment, and the ones that stand out are those where it's really clear they're following genuine curiosity across different disciplines. If you're in conservation, it's the evidence of interest in tech (courses, projects, things you're trying and learning yourself). For tech, it's getting into conservation - all the things you mentioned.
Proposals wanted for Innovation in Practice
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6 March 2023 10:34pm
Moveapps EMAC23 Coding Challenge – Participate now!
3 March 2023 7:45am
Underwater Fish Datasets from the Mediterranean
15 August 2022 11:45pm
26 September 2022 9:32pm
Not sure if audio data would be of any use to you, but if so FishSounds has some - I just tried their search function and there is a location tag for 'Mediterranean & Black Sea'.
You might try reaching out to the folks at Name that Fish, Innovasea, or perhaps an entity on the Fisheries Tech list would have Mediterranean stuff?
21 October 2022 7:52am
Hi,
If this is still relevant, you can try reaching out to the Belmaker lab, they do BRUV surveys in the eastern Mediterranean and have hours of video, some of it I believe is annotated. Particularly, Shahar might be helpful, he's the PhD student running point on the project.
2 March 2023 2:03pm
We have made available our underwater videos on YouTube as a playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnhVZKKy8WkZKriCIV6r7upWhHNVrU_7L
It's about 1.113 short video clips with annotation and each is linked to the corresponding www.iNaturalist.org observations. The iNaturalist.org observations are research quality and have been uploaded to GBIF.org. The observations have been made between 2014 and 2022 around the Ionian Islands (Greece).
If you would need the original videos please contact me.
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Elephant Recognition
14 January 2023 10:01am
14 January 2023 3:39pm
I can be reached at [email protected]
16 January 2023 2:30pm
Hi Simon,
i've popped you an email too, but actually sharing some more information here about what you're after will mean you'll be able to get better help from our full community.
What are you looking for in particular? It sounds like there is particular piece of software you've seen that could be useful in your work - do you know what it's called? What do you need to do - image recognition, call recognition? Alerts when calls happen or are you looking for something more detailed? The more you tell us about what you're trying to do the better we'll be able to help!
Steph
26 February 2023 1:44pm
Hi Steph,
This should be a simple project. Recently I came across a website with a sample video I am not sure whether it was from the wild Labs website. Where a camera is seen spotting a raccoon and giving an alert saying raccoon detected. My expectations are on similar lines, the only difference here is to change the raccoon to an elephant or a tiger. Please advice.
The Arbimon newsletter is back!
23 February 2023 11:34pm
Tropical pilot of insect camera traps
22 February 2023 12:17pm
Texas Chapter of The Wildlife Society’s Annual Meeting 2023
20 February 2023 10:56pm
Operation Pangolin launches to save world's most trafficked wild mammal
16 February 2023 7:51pm
17 February 2023 1:50am
20 April 2023 12:53am
Thanks Dan, that is very helpful. No zebras here but I did see four deer wandering through the streets this morning. Quite wild at times here!
I am totally willing to try an image classifier if it reports multiple objects it identifies in a scene. I will give this a go.
I think 1 fps would be quite acceptable actually, and in some perspective actually advantageous in reducing how much data is getting logged.
I tried upgrading my existing object detector model to YOLOv8 following the links you sent, but I don't think it is possible to upgrade the model on the framework I'm using (ml5js) so I think I will have to try a different framework.
Thank you.