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AI for Conservation / Feed

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used in the field to analyse information collected by wildlife conservationists, from camera trap and satellite images to audio recordings. AI can learn how to identify which photos out of thousands contain rare species; or pinpoint an animal call out of hours of field recordings - hugely reducing the manual labour required to collect vital conservation data.

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AI for Forest Elephants Challenge

FruitPunch AI is hosting the AI for Forest Elephants Challenge. Together with 50+ AI enthusiasts and experts from all over the globe, we will apply AI to detect gunshots and elephant rumbles on sound monitoring...

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Interview for Technologies in Conservation

Dear Wildlabs community, my name is Nikolas and I am a Master's Student from Lisbon. Like many of you, I grew up with a great passion for the wildlife that we are surrounded...

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I'd be happy to chat with you if you wanted! My expertise is within passive acoustic monitoring particularly. The Conservation Tech Directory might be useful for you in identifying relevant actors within the space.

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 source tech for science. I am not working on a specific piece of technology right now, but am happy to contribute some higher-level views for your interview if that helps.

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African elephant facial or body recognition software

Hi Guys   I am a volunteer at a large Eastern Cape South African Game reserve. We have in excess of 700 elephants that are presently being photographed and...

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In DRCongo and just discovering this now. We operate in Lomami National Park, very remote regions, and our issue includes individual recognition of bonbos and forest elephants from camera trap data.  Tim van Dam's comment hit home for me in that we have NO internet acces in the field sites, with internet, but not much access to cloud based propgram only in the cities of KIndu and Kisangani, over 100km from the field sites. We would liketo be able to download and use software, and even participate in testing some applications, but time lags are involved since data has to come out of thefield to move into the propgrams.  I think basically we can do a lot with low tech solutions, and selectively move up the analytical chain but there is no question that we will remain with some fundamental connectivity problems....Is anyone esle facing thes kinds of constraints? Can anyone suggest some basic "recognition software" and a working group to allow us to get into this area and see what we can produce and contribute? John Hart www.bonoboincongo.com  

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This article in Seattle Times does pretty much a smiliar thing with Bears and you may find some solutiosn from their work

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/training-facial-recognition-on-some-new-furry-friends-bears/

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New paper - An evaluation of platforms for processing camera-trap data using artificial intelligence

We review key characteristics of four AI platforms—Conservation AI, MegaDetector, MLWIC2: Machine Learning for Wildlife Image Classification and Wildlife Insights—and two auxiliary platforms—Camelot and Timelapse—that incorporate AI output for processing camera-trap data. We compare their software and programming requirements, AI features, data management tools and output format. We also provide R code and data from our own work to demonstrate how users can evaluate model performance.

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Help - Innovative ways to track elephant movement

Hi, I am working on a study to track wild elephant movement within an overlayed matrix of crop fields. We seek to understand how various landscape variables impact crop-raiding...

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Why would you want to avoid alerting the rangers ?

You don't need high tech for this; elephants leave very obvious tracks and sign. 

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. 

 

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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CV4Ecology 2023 Applications

Hi all! The 2023 CV4Ecology Summer Workshop is open for applications, deadline December 15th 2022.  I'm opening up this thread for potential students to ask questions or find...

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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? 

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.

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: 

https://cv4ecology.caltech.edu/call_for_applications.html

Feel free to comment here or message me directly if you have any questions!

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Connection needed!

Hi everyone -- I'm hoping to connect with a woman who is based in Asia (South or South East Asia) and is working on AI / machine learning to prevent and reverse environmental...

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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 

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Dear AI, We Have Trust Issues

Dave Thau
This essay is the third in a series on the promise and challenges of using AI and machine learning to create a planetary environmental management system.  

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Spatial Data Analysis, TNC

The Nature Conservancy
Working with a team of conservation practioners, scientists, and technologists, the Spatial Data Analyst uses leading-edge earth observation data in new and effective ways to inform conservation practice locally,...

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ConservationAI

The conservation AI platform allows you to upload your media for automatic species detection using our trained AI models. The platform uses cutting edge computer vision techniques...

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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!

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