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!
Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB), Technical University of Munich (TUM)
Behavioral Ecologist
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 14 Groups
Data scientist with expertise in Computer vision and remote sensing and a passion to work for the environment.
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 3 Groups
- @MattyD797
- | He/Him
PhD Student | Cornell University | Smithsonian Institution; My focus is in computational ecology within fishery acoustics
- 0 Resources
- 12 Discussions
- 12 Groups
Wildlife Drones
Wildlife Drones has developed the world’s most innovative radio animal-tracking system using drones so you can track your radio-tagged animals like never before.
- 15 Resources
- 8 Discussions
- 32 Groups
- @aardrop
- | he/him
Naturalist and technologist working to support the people behind nature
- 0 Resources
- 4 Discussions
- 2 Groups
- @emcandler
- | she/her
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 6 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 6 Groups
- @lobrien
- | he/him
Low K-Shot Animal Reidentification pipelines
- 0 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 5 Groups
International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
Key Biodiversity Areas Programme Officer, IUCN
- 0 Resources
- 89 Discussions
- 8 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 1 Groups
British Antarctic Survey (BAS)
Machine learning researcher at the British Antarctic Survey
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 5 Groups
- @womble
- | he/him
AI Researcher, mostly NLP, with 30+ years experience. Recently consulted for a company doing drone image analysis and Google Cloud
- 0 Resources
- 5 Discussions
- 6 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
event
event
event
61 Products
Recently updated products
15 Products
Recently updated products
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
---|---|---|---|---|
Hi Wildlabbers, This week is the last episode of Tech Tutors Season 2! Elizabeth Bondi tackled the question "How do I... |
|
AI for Conservation, Drones | 3 years 6 months ago | |
Thanks Carly, These are great ideas. The movebank recommendation reminds me of some work from Save the Elephants that used its transparency to exonerate an elephant that had... |
|
AI for Conservation | 3 years 6 months ago | |
This works very well, and can remove the movie strip icons from the edges of the thumbnails, which obscure animals just coming into the frame. https://icaros.en.softonic... |
|
AI for Conservation | 3 years 6 months ago | |
Dan's comments about the need for technologists and conservationists to manage and share (properly annotated) data struck a chord with me, it was right at the end of the... |
|
AI for Conservation, Data management and processing tools | 3 years 6 months ago | |
Hi Alex, that sounds great! Feel free to email me at [email protected], that may be simpler. |
|
AI for Conservation | 3 years 6 months ago | |
Hi. Just watched the Youtube version (I'm in the unable to watch live hemisphere) and wanted to say that was a great talk. I wish it could have gone for another hour. I liked... |
|
AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 3 years 6 months ago | |
I know I'm very late, but I only discovered this recently. Is your team still active/accepting new members? |
+24
|
AI for Conservation | 3 years 7 months ago | |
Hi @pmnguyen1224 , thanks for reaching out and checking out the system! We would love to help ensure that you're able to get pattern matching to work for... |
|
Acoustics, AI for Conservation | 3 years 7 months ago | |
Hi Andrew, Yo need to train a lightweight DNN model for bird flocks which can then be deployed on Raspberry Pi. For initial starters, you can look into the below tutorial:... |
|
AI for Conservation | 3 years 8 months ago | |
This is great, thanks for sharing. |
|
AI for Conservation | 3 years 9 months ago | |
AI for Climate Forum: Lightning Talks Bonnie Lei, Microsoft AI for Earth - 4pm GMT, October 30 Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/... |
|
AI for Conservation | 3 years 9 months ago | |
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... |
|
AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 3 years 10 months ago |
GRO is the story of what on Earth is going on
5 May 2023 1:50pm
Using computer vision to understand bee vision
5 May 2023 1:10am
Here's an innovative project from the Harvey Mudd College Bee Lab that could help us understand how bees view their environments, and thus better protect bee habitat. This project uses computer vision and drone imagery to replicate "bee vision" of flowers and how it differs from a human's view of the same habitat.
[Recordings Now Available!) EarthRanger User Conference
27 April 2023 5:52am
Looking to contribute
27 April 2023 2:41am
Artificial Intelligence and Conservation: Closing Session
26 April 2023 8:54pm
Artificial Intelligence and Conservation with Lily Xu
26 April 2023 8:41pm
WWF's recent Fuller Seminar Series on Artificial Intelligence and Conservation featured some familiar faces from the WILDLABS community, including our past Tech Tutor Lily Xu! Check out her presentation talking about AI-based causal reasoning and how it can be applied to conservation challenges.
AI Animal Identification Models
30 March 2023 5:01am
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.
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.
29 April 2023 3:35pm