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Connectivity / Feed

Advancements in communications networks that connect sensors and enable data retrieval across landscapes are revolutionizing conservation fieldwork. As the infrastructure that helps our core tools talk to each other in even the most remote places, the importance of connectivity cannot be overstated. Whatever solutions you're working with - and on whatever scale - this group is the place to discuss all things related to connectivity in conservation, from fiber-optic cables to LoRa to Swarm. 

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Insight; a secure online platform designed for sharing experiences of conservation tool use.

Cleo Graf

7 November 2023 1:01pm

A secure platform designed for those working to monitor & protect natural resources. Insight facilitates sharing experience, knowledge & tools to increase efficiency & effectiveness in conservation. By sharing we reduce time & money spent to find, test, & implement solutions.

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Welcome to Insight

Wildlife crime refers to any illegal activity that involves the taking, trading, or possession of wild animals and plants, or their parts and derivatives.

Insight
event

1st Wildlife Scientific Conference 2023

Esther Githinji

25 September 2023 11:10am

Don't miss the Wildlife Research & Training Institute (WRTI) 1st Wildlife Scientific Conference to be held in Naivasha, Kenya, under the theme: “Use of Wildlife Science for enhanced Biodiversity Conservation and...

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discussion

Recommendations for Personnel Trackers in challenging terrain

Lisa Mayinje

18 August 2023 2:22pm

Hi WildLabs community, I support a few wildlife areas in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. The terrain can be very challenging here with deep narrow valleys and thick...

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Emma Richards

22 August 2023 1:31pm

Hi Lisa,

Not my area of expertise either and hopefully I'm not way off base here as it's not a cheap tracker but...have you looked at near vertical incident skywave (NVIS) radio systems?  I was trialling them in Nouabalé-Ndoki - we didn't have the terrain issues but we did have vegetation issues - and they worked really well over long distances.  Also possible to integrate with Earthranger if I recall correctly.  

Hope this is of at least a little help.

 

Best,

 

Emma

Akiba

17 September 2023 1:33pm

Hi Lisa. 

Did you ever find a solution for this? Would love to chat more about the use case and requirements.

Akiba

Lars Holst Hansen

18 September 2023 8:10am

Have you tried or considered Garmin Inreach or Zoleo trackers?

I have experience with Garmin Inreach in relatively rugged terrain in Greenland (probably not as steep as what you have).

They work relatively well. One disadvantage with the early models is that the tracking data can not be downloaded directly from the devices as .gpx but needs to take the detour over the Garmin cloud. The newer models have direct download of tracks available.

I like the fact that the Garmin units are proper standalone handheld GPS units to be used for navigation and waypoint marking and you can also relatively easily share your own location and even points of interest with team members in the field (by sending geotagged messages - not actual waypoints, unfortunately). 

Garmin Inreach is listed as an EarthRanger partner at https://www.earthranger.com/partner but I have no idea if there is any possibility of real integration.

Cheers,

Lars

 

 

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Alibaba Cloud's Geo Fencing System in the Mara

Esther Githinji

1 September 2023 12:27pm

Wilson Sairowua, Tracking Manager at Mara Elephant Project (MEP) narrates how tech4change, Alibaba Cloud's Geo Fencing System paired with collaring has helped to mitigate human-elephant conflict across Maasai Mara and has facilitated a 72% increase in elephants in the Mara region

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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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discussion

Camera trap. Snow Leopard reserve Kyrgyzstan. Solar+4G+Video. System upgrade.

Luciano Foglia

15 December 2022 3:32pm

Hi everyone, My name is Luciano Foglia. I'm working on a project in Central Asia where we need to provide internet access to an area of a mountain range with very extreme...

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Luciano Foglia

16 March 2023 6:05am

Hi Kumar

I wanted to contact you about the possibility of collaborating in the project I mentioned before. Where is good to contact you? [email protected] ? You can also email me from our website www.baiboosun.com 

Looking forward from hearing from you

Luciano Foglia

 

 

Toby

24 March 2023 9:14pm

Look into evorta.  

It is an Australian company that is doing exactly this.  

You can.

  • Have an offline camera that can be trained to ID specific species, 
  • send you just the photos of those species via satellite 
  • Or if you can get 4g send you all the photos to their online database. 
  • They also have an online database that allows you to analyse the data in real time. 
  • They can also hack normal camera traps so they can send photos back to the main unit to process and send valid photos.  That way you only need one ‘smart’ camera.  All the rest can be your exsisting cameras. You just need to use your sd card slot.  

Here is an article here  

 Best to contact him through email.  

I’ll send it to you privately 

Lars Holst Hansen

25 March 2023 1:11pm

The eVorta website is still VERY empty but will be worth keeping an eye out for for sure. At first, from the notes above, I thought that this was Edge AI but in the article linked to it seems that the ML and animal ID happens after 4G download of the images. 

I will just throw a link to relatively recent paper where a standard cameratrap was "hacked" and Edge AI ID could send alerts via Iridium: Real-time alerts from AI-enabled camera traps using the Iridium satellite network and here is more from some of the authors of that paper: 

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article

Download Now: A Best Practice Guide to Satellite Technologies for Tracking Wildlife

Zoological Society of London

17 February 2023 10:29am

The Zoological Society of London, with the support of WILDLABS and the UK Space Agency, are proud to publish this new guide to satellite technologies for tracking wildlife.

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Lars Holst Hansen

17 February 2023 11:34am

Very nice! Looking forward to checking it out!
Stephanie O'Donnell

20 February 2023 9:34am

We had this comment come in to our team from @Redfoxmeek so I'm passing along the helpful resource: Hi Folks- Thanks for the manual, can I also draw your attention to...
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discussion

Commercially available connected audio sensors

geoffc

2 February 2023 3:08pm

Hi - can anyone advise if there is a commercially made passive audio recorder that can be powered by solar/battery and have 3g/4g connectivity - ideally with compression on the...

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Lars Holst Hansen

2 February 2023 3:55pm

Hi!

I am not aware of any such connected loggers/recorders but they would be nice. 

The AudioMoths have been revolutionary in providing audologging at a low cost but they take a lot of "data muling" (carrying SD cards in and out of the field sites) and swapping of batteries.

Cheers,

 

geoffc

2 February 2023 7:50pm

Hi Lars, thanks for the response. We are using lots of Song Meter Micro's atm and they have proved to be resilient. Just need something which doesn't involve going on site regularly - but get the data off. 

Carly Batist

3 February 2023 7:04pm

Rainforest Connection's (RFCx) Guardian devices may be of interest. They are solar-powered and have connectivity options for Wifi, GSM and satellite transfer. They've previously been used for detecting e.g., gunshots or chainsaws (using edge computing) and then sending positive detections/alerts to folks on the ground. RFCx also hosts Arbimon, a free, no-code software platform that facilitates analysis of audio data as well. Happy to chat more if you'd like to talk further about it! 

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Link

New paper - Real-time alerts from AI-enabled camera traps using the Iridium satellite network: A case-study in Gabon, Central Africa

Carly Batist

13 January 2023 12:12am

Sending real-time alerts from ecological sensors such as camera traps in areas with poor data connectivity is complex and involves integrating a large number of potentially complex hardware and software components. Our results demonstrate that these components can be successfully integrated to achieve reliable, near real-time alerts from camera traps under challenging field conditions.

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discussion

Workshop Invite: Building Partnerships between Conservation Tech and the UK Space Sector

Stephanie O'Donnell

22 September 2022 3:50pm

Hi everyone, In collaboration with our partners over at the Satellite Applications Catapult, we are hosting an in person workshop to build strategic partnerships for...

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Vance Russell

5 December 2022 3:10pm

Hi Steph,

If it's not too late, I'm very interested in this workshop.

Best,

V

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discussion

Rainforest SigFox available for use

Roland Kays

26 August 2022 6:09pm

Hi EveryoneJust FYI that right now we now have a SigFox gateway running to create an IoT network at the Los Amigos field station in lowland Peruvian Amazon.  Amazing forest,...

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Carly Batist

26 September 2022 10:20pm

Hi Roland,

This is really amazing, great to hear about your set-up! I'm just wondering what the overall cost was to set up this system? Just thinking in terms of setting up something similar in other parks and what they should expect with regard to price. Would also be great to hear about the overall effort, e.g., hours/team members required. It would be great to have this act as a blueprint for other organizations/research stations wishing to deploy a similar system within their respective national parks/areas/etc.! 

Antoine Ede

10 October 2022 8:33am

Hi Rolland,

Interested too, but why did you choose SigFox (a private network) rather than LoRa (open network)? 

Sigfox currently has some financial troubles that, don't know what it will become in the long term.

Roland Kays

18 October 2022 11:55am

Hi Everyone,

We chose sigfox becuase it seems to have better range and is plug-play, whereas LoRa requires more custom programming and updating.  Getting a gateway cost us $2000 for a year's lease + deposit. We covered solar power.  There are also some 'minigateways' you can purchase but I don't know how they compare in range (plan to test).  So far we are happy with the performance, in that it has worked consistency with no outages  (once we stabilized the power supply).  I think the annual costs are about $10 per tag.  We are working on a paper that will describe this in more detail.  So far just using for tracking tags but also looking at a trap sensor.

cheers

Roland

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article

Ceres Wild Rhino application 

Kim Lane

22 August 2022 1:29am

An update on Ceres Tags products that are being used in conservation 

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Kim Lane

29 September 2022 4:05am

Some updates and a news report on the Malilangwe Trust application of devices; Ceres Trace and Ceres Wild
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article

CERES TAG

Kim Lane

22 July 2022 3:36am

Ceres Tag sends just in time alerts and GPS location to have the power to track and trace.

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article

Fast Company Feature: Smart Parks

Stephanie O'Donnell

14 July 2022 4:19pm

“It’s such a massive leap forwards knowing where every rhino is every morning and every evening.” Fast Company writes about Smart Parks, a Netherlands-based organization with technological solutions against poaching.

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careers

Service Designer

Catherine Greene

13 July 2022 9:05am

Love design, passionate about conversation? Want to make sure that  technologies that are being developed actually meet the needs of the people who use them? Come and work for us! 

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