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!
- @leonardoscarpa
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I'm Leonardo, I'm a biologist, and I'm passionate about movement ecology. Another of my hobbies is GIS. I have a master's degree in this topic, which I complement with the use of technology such as drones, camera traps and acoustic receivers
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Software engineer
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Society for Conservation GIS
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Aspiring data scientist with a passion to work for the environment
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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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- @womble
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AI Researcher, mostly NLP, with 30+ years experience. Recently consulted for a company ding drone image analysis and Google Cloud
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- @Thomas_Luypaert
- | He/him
Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)
Ecological monitoring enthusiast with a focus on ecological and conservation research
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Working in relation to ecosystem services
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- @jdomingo
- | He/Him
I am an enthusiast for nature, technology development, biodiversity conservation and nature inspired design. I posses a technical and environmental background, and I am looking to explore the potential that advance technology has to empower the field of nature conservation.
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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.
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- @eccrc25
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- @och3k
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Careers
The Smithsonian National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute is seeking a Program Manager to help coordinate multiple organizations in an effort to integrate movement data & camera trap data with global...
22 April 2024
The Smithsonian National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to help us integrate movement data & camera trap data with global conservation policy.
22 April 2024
Join the Seeed Vision Challenge, an opportunity for conservation innovators to harness the power of AI vision sensors for environmental monitoring and protection.
10 April 2024
Full-Stack Software Developer (Python/React) - Specializing in AI/ML for Wildlife Conservation
5 April 2024
Article
Article from Ars Technica about how difficult it is to detect and avoid kangaroos...
3 April 2024
18 month postdoc research position, Netherlands, EU-funded
28 March 2024
Article
You’re invited to the WILDLABS Variety Hour, a monthly event that connects you to conservation tech's most exciting projects, research, and ideas. We can't wait to bring you a whole new season of speakers and...
22 March 2024
Join our multi-national team at the AI for Biodiversity Change Global Climate Center! We're hiring a Research Data Manager & Tech Coordinator at Ohio State. Support cutting-edge research on climate change &...
15 March 2024
Catch up on the conservation tech discussions and events that happened during World Wildlife Day 2024!
7 March 2024
EcoAssist introduces a free African species identification model for camera trap images, capable of recognising 30 species.
5 March 2024
Join us to help prevent biodiversity loss! Understory is hiring a postdoc to lead R&D Development on generalizing Computer Vision models for vegetation identification across space/time/phenotypes.
29 February 2024
Join the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) in pioneering environmental and ecological monitoring! 🌍💡 As part of ERIN’s Observatory for Climate, Environment, and Biodiversity (OCEB), you'll be at the...
26 February 2024
May 2024
September 2024
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October 2024
November 2023
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Hi Phani,An entry point might be to participate in a challenge related to conservation on:KaggleDrivenDataFruitPunchMax Planck Institute of Animal BehaviorYou could also reach out... |
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AI for Conservation | 1 day 6 hours ago | |
You can also do these things or feed it your own sources that it must not hallucinate from (and keeps confidential) if you have the paid-for version. |
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AI for Conservation, Emerging Tech | 1 day 8 hours ago | |
SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR WILL ALSO DETECT AND LOCATE CHAINSAWS, MOTORBIKES, BICYLCLES, FIREARMS, MACHETES in fact anything metal. I have been concentrating on trying to get... |
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AI for Conservation, Drones, Emerging Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Wildlife Crime | 1 day 9 hours ago | |
I'm not an expert in this field, but have been doing some self study for a local project... Resolving animals in an image is not purely height related - but rather a combination... |
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AI for Conservation | 1 day 16 hours ago | |
[oops, the same reply got submitted twice and there doesn't seem to be a "delete" button] |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 1 day 19 hours ago | |
Hi @zhongqimiao ,Might you have faced such an issue while using mega detectorThe conflict is caused by:pytorchwildlife 1.0.2.13 depends on torch==1.10.1pytorchwildlife 1.0.2.12... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Open Source Solutions | 1 day 19 hours ago | |
Hey Sol, No problem at all. Depending on your configuration, the Audiomoth software would have to work on a PCB with an ESP32 chip which is the unit on the audiomoth/... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 3 days 22 hours ago | |
Hi, this is pretty interesting to me. I plan to fly a drone over wild areas and look for invasive species incursions. So feral hogs are especially bad, but in the Everglades there... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Open Source Solutions, Software and Mobile Apps | 4 days ago | |
Gotcha, well I look forward to seeing future iterations and following along with your progress!! |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, AI for Conservation, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions | 6 days 4 hours ago | |
Hi everyone!@LashaO and @holmbergius from the Wild Me team at ConservationX Labs gave a superb talk at last month's Variety Hour,... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 1 week 1 day ago | |
Thanks Carly! I will keep anyone interested in this project posted on this platform. Cheers |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation | 1 week 1 day ago | |
Greetings Everyone, We are so excited to share details of our WILDLABS AWARDS project "Enhancing Pollinator Conservation through Deep... |
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AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 2 weeks 3 days ago |
San Diego Zoo needs Summer Undergraduates!!
19 December 2022 1:58pm
Join NASA’s harmful algal bloom ML challenge and win prizes!
15 December 2022 7:56pm
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.
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:
Cheers,
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
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.