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Anyone can become a citizen scientist - even experts! If you're excited about exploring new areas of conservation tech, contributing to projects, or developing and launching your own citizen science projects or apps, this is the group for you.

discussion

Sharing interesting DIY or low-cost projects?

Surfing psychedelic chicken

12 July 2023 9:03pm

Hi all first post here, I just stumbled onto this forum. I really liked the video with Tom August shared in another thread here that I happened to see just now, especially the...

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Pen-Yuan Hsing

28 July 2023 5:43pm

Thanks for starting this thread @Surfingpsychedelicchicken! 

I've been working with folks mostly in the Gathering for Open Science (GOSH) community on giving wildlife camera traps stereovision capabilities. See this thread for our extensive discussion on the subject. Stereovision allows camera traps to capture spatial data about the scene in addition to images of wildlife, and this piece of information can greatly help estimate population size.

Recently, one of my colleagues developed a 3D-printed addon that could provide that function. It's looking promising and we're at 95% for a crowdfunding campaign on Experiment.com with just under a week left (also posted here). Sorry to sound self-promoting, but I genuinely believe we've got something going here, and would definitely appreciate some support big or small!

Happy to discuss more here or in the other threads linked to.

P.S. I love your point about anti-disciplinarity!

Kim Hendrikse

16 August 2023 12:46pm

Super duper getting that mesh network working. Valuable resources. I have been working with IP camera systems since 2008 and have tried a lot of them. Ubiquiti itself is a great networking brand, the only comment I have about their cameras though is that they do not support a motion jpeg (mjeg) stream of any sort. What this means is that in order to get a still image for use in an AI computer vision system you have to waste GPU power somewhat getting the still. Generally speaking I would suggest to new things that have in their mind future AI integration is to choose a camera that supports an mjpeg stream with a custom frame rate. For example, I have 15x cameras around my home. They are all being analyzed in real time with the highest scoring object detector (Currently)  (That is published using the coco dataset from microsoft) yolov6. I also double check matches sometimes with yolov7 to provide extra resilience to false positives.

For this I tend to consume an mjpeg camera stream at 640x480 resolution at a frame rate of just 6 frames per second. That means that any system that is performing local object detection on something like the jetson series SBCs do not have to use any of their capacity first decoding mpeg streams to images.

Andrew Quitmeyer

31 August 2023 9:46pm

Hi! @Surfingpsychedelicchicken ! yeah we run a conference kind of about this (well actually i've been helping run two conferences about this!) Dinacon and the GOSH gathering! Thanks @StephODonnell !

www.dinacon.org is about an anti-disciplinary gathering of people to explore field biology and design and it's a long form conference (minimum stay 7 days, whole conference is 1 month+)

 

GOSH is another group kind of like wildlabs here, a bit less focused on field tech, but still has lots of international folks working on open science hardware of many sorts

And they also have an "unconference" that happens every couple of years (last year it was in panama) that is more traditional (4-5 days) but chock full of wonderful folks!

 

 

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discussion

Seedbank Project on iNaturalist

Arky

25 August 2023 4:28am

Am helping a conservation project use iNaturalist for their work in bio-diversity monitoring and also citizen science, STEM program with schools.Looking to connect with anyone who...

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article

#Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Judges' Panel Honorees

WILDLABS Team

4 August 2023 10:00am

Please join us in celebrating this year’s top #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge Honorees as chosen by our panel of leading conservation organization judges, and enjoy the story contained within these entries about how our...

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discussion

Interested in being part of the Enduata Emaa CBO's Green Planet Ambassadors Project in Amboseli? 

Esther Githinji

5 July 2023 10:28am

About the Enduata Emaa Community Based OrganizationEnduata Emaa Community-based Organization was founded in 2021 by its Chairman Samuel...

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Esther Githinji

25 July 2023 1:14pm

@richardturere Hello :) and a warm welcome to WILDLABS! Here is the link to @Lekato Samuel Lekato - Founder and Chairman, Enduata Emaa CBO. Sam is interested in conservation technology focused on how to keep wild animals away from community homesteads in Amboseli and I reckon your Lion Lights could help. I'll let you two take on the conversation from here. Thanks! 

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article

CCIPH: Empowering Communities in Biodiversity Efforts

Center for Conservation Innovation Philippines Inc.

13 July 2023 10:00am

In this Conservation Tech Showcase case study from the Center for Conservation Innovation Philippines Inc. (CCIPH), you’ll learn how uses technology to conduct critical biodiversity assessments and empower local...

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article

Osa Conservation: A Multi-Tech Toolbox of Solutions

Osa Conservation

22 June 2023 10:42am

In this Conservation Tech Showcase case study from Osa Conservation, you’ll learn about how technology is aiding their long-term efforts to prevent wildlife crime, protect critical species, and build a climate-adaptive...

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discussion

Animal tracking stories

Wildlife Drones

22 May 2023 2:19am

Do you have a wild animal tracking story that involves adventure or misadventure? Share it with us! From going around in circles for hours to discovering predators instead of your...

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article

Happywhale: AI-Powered Whale Identification

Happywhale

16 May 2023 10:00am

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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discussion

Crowdsourcing individual ID for pop dyn?

Than Hitt

1 May 2023 5:36pm

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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Phil Mitchell

5 May 2023 6:15pm

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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discussion

Data upload solution for a citizen science project?

Jim Lovell

21 September 2022 8:55pm

Hi everyone. I’m looking to build a web-based data upload server for a citizen science project and am wondering if there are out-of-the box solutions available or if there...

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Pshemek Zdroik

20 October 2022 10:54am

If you have a server and can host a solution, install on the server your own instance of  Next Cloud, Pydio  or similar - it's exactly what you need without reinventing the wheel. 

 

Sebastian Büttrich

23 October 2022 8:25am

Strongly supporting the Nextcloud/owncloud suggestion -
apart from bringing everything you list in your requirements, it would give you a lot of features that might be useful as the project grows (versioning, failover for lost/failed data, sharing, ..)

Available for more advice, if needed.

Frank van der Most

19 January 2023 5:21pm

Hi Jim, could you please update us on your final choice and experience so far?

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Link

Crowdfunding Aerial Baseline Study of Ghost Gear in Koh Phangan, Thailand

Sol Milne

18 December 2022 11:06am

We are developing a project in Thailand, using drones to locate lost & discarded fishing gear across Koh Phangan, Thailand.
We're 86% there & only need $1500 to get us over the line. If you can help us, we would really appreciate it!
This project uses drones to create a baseline survey of lost fishing gear & document effects of entanglement on marine species.
We are working with Core Sea & Koh Phangan Sea Guardians to develop a locally led method for ongoing monitoring for discarded fishing gear, using drones.
Thank you, Sol, Tania & Kat

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