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!
Data Science | Remote Sensing | GIS | Geospatial Cloud Computing | Big Data
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Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)
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BearID Project
Conservation biologist using camera traps to develop automated methods of photoID
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PhD Student in Disease Ecology, Taxonomy and biomonitoring in Central Africa
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- @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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Michigan Natural Features Inventory (MNFI)
Wildlife ecologist
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We invite applications for the third Computer Vision for Ecology (CV4E) workshop, a three-week hands-on intensive course in CV targeted at graduate students, postdocs, early faculty, and junior researchers in Ecology...
12 February 2024
The primary focus of the research is to explore how red deer movements, space use, habitat selection and foraging behaviour change during the wolf recolonization process.
10 February 2024
Applications open for a PhD position in plant vibroacoustics at the University of Southampton
8 February 2024
We demonstrate the power of using passive acoustic monitoring & machine learning to survey species, using ruffed lemurs in southeastern Madagascar as an example.
23 January 2024
Article
new paper in Journal of Animal Ecology
17 January 2024
Do you work for a climate organization looking to multiply impact with AI? Apply for the Salesforce Accelerator - AI for Climate! This new philanthropic initiative is dedicated to supporting innovative solutions for...
16 January 2024
Two years in Cape Town, South Africa. Yearly visits to Rwanda. If you love to code, and all things Python/deep learning/tech stuff/ then you'll have an awesome time!
16 January 2024
Given the sharp increase in agricultural and infrastructure development and the paucity of widespread data available to support conservation management decisions, a more rapid and accurate tool for identifying fish...
11 January 2024
Article
An update on @Alasdair and @adanger24's HWC project
11 January 2024
The Conservation Technology Laboratory within the Population Sustainability department is seeking two fellows for summer 2024.
9 January 2024
Here are a few key insights from this year's event that we're carrying into 2024.
2 January 2024
News from a grant to explore potential projects for monitoring biodiversity in latin american countries
16 December 2023
June 2024
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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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 5 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 5 months ago | |
Hahaha, now I see why you were asking ... |
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AI for Conservation | 1 year 6 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 6 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 7 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 8 months ago | |
Hi there Camilo, What an interesting project! If you are looking for a lower cost, but effective tools for acoustic monitoring you might want to look into two options: ... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Data management and processing tools, Sensors, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 year 8 months ago | |
Hi Yvan,If you find something which reaches your expectation and especially the ability to identify individual with plumage patterns I will be intereted.In the same idea that... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 1 year 9 months ago | |
Have you considered creating a Kaggle competition? If you already have lots of images, and some that have been labelled, then this could be a good way to get people working on a... |
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AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps | 1 year 10 months ago | |
Hi everyone, I'm new here! I'm a UX designer and researcher, and an animal lover. Excited to be part of Conservation Tech here at WildLabs... |
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AI for Conservation, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Software and Mobile Apps, Wildlife Crime | 1 year 11 months ago | |
@gracieermi & I are happy to announce the latest update to the Conservation Tech Directory, bringing our total resources in the... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Biologging, Camera Traps, Community Base, Data management and processing tools, Drones, eDNA & Genomics, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 year 11 months ago | |
Thank you so much Netty, I really enjoyed it.Good luck to you all with your work.Keep well! |
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AI for Conservation, East Africa Community | 1 year 11 months ago |
Help - Innovative ways to track elephant movement
28 October 2022 4:50pm
7 November 2022 12:52am
Hi Tyler,
Would like to introduce you to Ceres Tags products
- Ceres Tags products come in boxes of 5, 10 and 24.
- There are some software partners such as Earthranger, Mapipedia and possibly CiboLabs that would be able to assist you with your mapping vegetation requirements
- Ceres Tag does not require any towers, base stations and infrastructure. This allows you to see any movements from the heard outside of their normal herd (boundary alerts), and you will not be disturbing any of the flora and fauna with infrastructure set up.
- For the timing you are looking at, Ceres Wild pings directly to satellite 24 times a day. For Ceres Trace and Ceres Ranch there are 4 within 24 hours. Taking into consideration, when you set up alert areas, you will get them directly to your phone/laptop via your software of choice
- Ceres Ranch is a reusable tag that has just been launched. Use it on this project, remove the tag and then use the tag on your next project
- The software you choose will assist with the history of your animal movements. Ceres Tag is integrated with 11 software partners and in-development with 18 software partners https://cerestag.com/pages/software-partners
- Understanding it is a short-term project, you would be able to use Ceres Tags products without the additional expense of setting up and removing infrastructure- towers, gateways
- With Ceres Tag, you are purchasing the box of tags and picking a suitable software to deliver the information you require. On average, a box of 10 Ceres Trace Tags, is the same as 1 LoRaWAN tower.
Live Q&A Discussion on Ceres Tag: An animal monitoring Solution! | WILDLABS
Hey Everyone,Are you ready for this next Live Q&A Session? If you're looking for an effective animal monitoring solution, you might want to Join us here in a few minutes at 9am EAT|4pm AEST where Lewis Frost, COO of Ceres Tag, will help us unpack the IoT devices they have for animal monitoring.In this session, Lewis will take us through the features of Ceres Tag, some of their interesting projects so far, some models on animal monitoring, factors to consider when choosing an animal monitoring tag, and much more! A few things you need to know about the Live Q&A session:The session will be moderated, but you can ask questions during and after the session e.g. If you need clarification on a question/answer, you are free to ask. To ask a question that is linked to a specific answer, kindly always press the ‘Reply to @Frostl007' button, type in your question then save to post it.To ensure a proper flow of the discussion, kindly be sure to use the 'Reply to @Frostl007' Before moving to each next question, we will give a ~3 minute window to allow you to ask any questions you have, but if you miss that window, you are totally okay asking the question afterwards.If you have any trouble viewing the questions or replies, please try and Refresh the page If you are present in this session and don’t have any comments, we’d be very happy to see you react using an emoji so that we know you are following through the session! I'm really looking forward to an amazing discussion!Thank you,Netty.
wildlabsnet
14 December 2022 10:49am
I just came across this interesting paper in which seismic monotoring of animals like elephants was mentioned.
This is the study refered to:
Seismic savanna: machine learning for classifying wildlife and behaviours using ground‐based vibration field recordings
Our planet is facing its sixth mass extinction, with hundreds of species disappearing largely because of human activity. To mitigate this existential threat of biodiversity loss, we must monitor and ...
ZSL PublicationsCheers,
Lars
CV4Ecology 2023 Applications
1 November 2022 8:01pm
3 November 2022 7:13pm
Hey Sara,
Thanks again for the session today--it was super helpful!
I have access to a pretty large network of camera trappers, and I'm currently surveying them to see who might be willing to share data with me. That being said, I can likely get data-sharing agreements with each of these agencies sorted out before the application deadline, but may not have the data in-hand by this time due to a lack of resources for transferring such large amounts of data.
I've used Azure Storage Explorer before to rapidly transfer large datasets like this, so I think it might be easier to compile all data in one location once we have access to the VMs. Would it be acceptable to apply with the signed data-sharing agreements in mind, and with the intent of organizing all of the data once we acquire access to the computing resources?
4 November 2022 6:02pm
Yes, that's definitely ok! You should just outline your larger plan and where you are at in the process in your application. However, the compute resources are intended to be used for model training and won't be available too far in advance of the school (or at least I can't guarantee they will be) , so you would need to make a plan for pre-summer workshop data storage, wrangling, and curation to get the data ready to train models on. Let me know if you're having issues with that and I can try to help brainstorm.
9 December 2022 8:23pm
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 research.
Tired of trying to manually count how many animals are in your images? Tired of listening to audio files to classify/detect species? Looking to clean and manage your data so that you can more easily access and analyze it? We're happy and eager to help you apply computer vision tools to try to help with these (and more!) tasks!
More info:
Feel free to comment here or message me directly if you have any questions!
PhD - Sensory ecology of vespine wasps
8 December 2022 12:47pm
Post Doctoral Fellow - Computer Vision/Arctic Avian Ecology
7 December 2022 4:21am
New: Satellites for Biodiversity Award
5 December 2022 2:08pm
Connection needed!
15 November 2022 4:23pm
22 November 2022 2:46pm
Maybe she is not based in Asia, but you could check Lily Xu, who gave a presentation at the IUCN World Congress a year ago on using AI against poaching in Cambodia. The project is called Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS).
For a summary of this project and another ( presented by a man ) see
24 November 2022 3:55pm
Thank you so much!
2 December 2022 3:14pm
Hahaha, now I see why you were asking ...
PhD Positions at University of Michigan CSE
23 November 2022 3:02pm
MozFest 2023 call for proposals on Tech & Biodiversity
22 November 2022 11:10am
Dear AI, We Have Trust Issues
14 November 2022 11:09pm
Hierarchical Deep Learning to Improve Automatic Classification of Pests and Biodiversity Monitoring in Agroecosystems
8 November 2022 3:46pm
Spatial Data Analysis, TNC
8 November 2022 11:34am
Senior AI Research Scientist, Earth Species Project
8 November 2022 11:27am
New paper: Integrating machine learning, remote sensing and citizen science to create an early warning system for biodiversity
7 November 2022 7:10pm
Opinion paper describing "how data acquired from remote sensing, citizen science & other monitoring approaches could feed in near-real time to an early warning system for biodiversity that integrates automated red-listing of species with the identification of priority areas for conservation."
Environmental Monitoring: Necessary, Not Sufficient, Sometimes Problematic
28 October 2022 12:51am
ConservationAI
20 October 2022 2:41pm
20 October 2022 7:32pm
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 in like a "what's best" way, just would be great to better understand the the details so that people can assess what to try for their specific use cases & applications!
It would be great to have a comparative specs sheet of sorts! Peter Gyurov started something like that: https://www.notion.so/Camera-Trap-Pipeline-Solution-Comparison-2eac80825c4941b0b2b5fad3daea1cc3. Would be great to add ConservationAI to this list!
Conservation Technology Intern (Vietnam)
19 October 2022 9:22am
Introducing G.AI.A: Artificial Intelligence and Planetary-Scale Environmental Management
13 October 2022 1:48am
Try AI Micro-Internship 2023
11 October 2022 5:42pm
Upcoming WWF Webinar Series: Artificial Intelligence and Conservation
11 October 2022 12:30pm
Artificial Intelligence and Conservation: Ethics
11 October 2022 12:28pm
Artificial Intelligence and Conservation: Prediction
11 October 2022 12:27pm
Artificial Intelligence and Conservation: Where We Are Now
11 October 2022 12:23pm
The Smart Biosphere: How Technology can provide regenerative resources at scale
10 October 2022 12:06pm
Frontiers Symposium: Digital tools for reversing environmental degradation
5 October 2022 10:23am
Multi-day workshop: Machine Learning Advances for Marine Acoustics & Imagery Data
4 October 2022 5:20pm
Audio Across Domains Workshop 2022
3 October 2022 7:54pm
3 October 2022 11:40pm
11 October 2022 2:05pm
18 Sustainability Job Opportunities at Google
3 October 2022 7:09pm
New paper - Rookognise: Acoustic detection & identification of individual rooks in field recordings using multi-task neural networks
3 October 2022 2:35pm
Authors developed system to acoustically identify individual animals (under varying conditions) using combo of multi-scale information integration, multi-channel audio & multi-task learning. Tested on captive group of rooks.
New paper - FathomNet: A global image database for enabling artificial intelligence in the ocean
27 September 2022 9:44pm
Open-source image database that standardizes & aggregates expertly curated labeled underwater data, enabling AI in the ocean. Seeded with existing imagery of marine animals, underwater equipment, debris, etc. & allows for future contributions from distributed data sources.
Conservation Tech Directory - new update!
29 August 2022 2:38pm
23 September 2022 5:26pm
Congrats on the milestone Carly and Gracie!
26 September 2022 10:07pm
Thanks so much!!
4 November 2022 5:24pm
Why would you want to avoid alerting the rangers ?
You don't need high tech for this; elephants leave very obvious tracks and sign.