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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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Happywhale: AI-Powered Whale Identification

Happywhale
In this Conservation Tech Showcase case study from Happywhale, you’ll learn about how AI tools are helping researchers and citizen scientists identify and protect humpback whales. 

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AI for Conservation Office Hours: 2023 Review

Jake Burton
We've now wrapped our 2023 AI for Conservation Office Hours, where we helped conservationists connect with AI experts to get tailored expert advice on AI and ML problems in their projects

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Crowdsourcing individual ID for pop dyn?

Hi! I'm trying to estimate abundance and survival in freshwater fish populations (trout and salmon) using AI for individual recognition from crowdsourced data: https://www.usgs....

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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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Using computer vision to understand bee vision

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.

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Looking to contribute

Hi everybody 👋🏽,I'm a UX designer, and I design interfaces and improve user experiences/flows. I would love to contribute to conservation tech / climate tech, especially saving...

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Artificial Intelligence and Conservation with Lily Xu

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.

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AI Animal Identification Models

Hi Everyone,I've recently joined WILDLABS and I'm getting to know the different groups. I hope I've selected the right ones for this discussion...I am interested in AI to identify...

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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.

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.

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Feathered forecast: Tech tools comb weather data for bird migrations

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.

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Congo Basin activity?

greetings - I am helping coordinate a visit by the incoming director of national parks for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in mid-late June. He is very interested to...

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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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event

Camera traps, AI, and Ecology

3rd International Workshop in Jena, Germany (7. - 8. September 2023)

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Are you ready for the event next week!? 17 talks, 4 sessions, 4 invited speakers - check out the schedule if you want more information:...
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Segment Anything

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?

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Who's going to ESA in Portland this year?

So who is going to be at the Ecological Society of America meeting this year in Portland, August 6-11th?It will be my first time at the conference, so I won't know many people...

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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.

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Rhino horns in medicine 

Hi everyone,I'm new here :)I'm doing my thesis of biology bachelor about Rhino poaching. I wanted to ask here if yu have some articles about Lab data of the inefficiency of the...

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