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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. 

discussion

Passionate engineer offering funding and tech solutions pro-bono.

My name is Krasi Georgiev and I run an initiative focused on providing funding and tech solutions for stories with a real-world impact. The main reason is that I am passionate...

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Hi Krasi! Greetings from Brazil!



That's a cool journey you've started! Congratulations. And I felt like theSearchLife resonates with the work I'm involved round here. In a nutshell, I live at the heart of the largest remaining of Atlantic forest in the planet - one of the most biodiverse biomes that exist. The subregion where I live is named after and bathed by the "Rio Sagrado" (Sacred River), a magnificent water body with a very rich cultural significance to the region (it has served as a safe zone for fleeing slaves). Well, the river and the entire bioregion is currently under the threat of a truly devastating railroad project which, to say the least is planned to cut through over 100 water springs! 



In face of that the local community (myself included) has been mobilizing to raise awareness of the issue and hopefully stop this madness (fueled by strong international forces). One of the ways we've been fighting this is through the seeking of the recognition of the sacred river as an entity of legal rights, who can manifest itself in court, against such threats. And to illustrate what this would look like, I've been developing this AI (LLM) powered avatar for the river, which could maybe serve as its human-relatable voice. An existing prototype of such avatar is available here. It has been fine-tuned with over 20 scientific papers on the Sacred River watershed.



And right now myself and other are mobilizing to manifest the conditions/resources to develop a next version of the avatar, which would include remote sensing capacities so the avatar is directly connected to the river and can possibly write full scientific reports on its physical properties (i.e. water quality) and the surrounding biodiversity. In fact, myself and 3 other members of the WildLabs community have just applied to the WildLabs Grant program in order to accomplish that. Hopefully the results are positive.



Finally, it's worth mentioning that our mobilization around providing an expression medium for the river has been multimodal, including the creation of a shortfilm based on theatrical mobilizations we did during a fest dedicated to the river and its surrounding more-than-human communities. You can check that out here:



 

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/850179762



 

Let's chat if any of that catches your interest!

Cheers!

Hi Danilo. you seem very passionate about this initiative which is a good start.
It is an interesting coincidence that I am starting another project for the coral reefs in the Philipines which also requires water analytics so I can probably work on both projects at the same time.

Let's that have a call and discuss, will send you a pm with my contact details

There is a tech glitch and I don't get email notifications from here.

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discussion

LoRaWAN IoT gateway, low power and solar cell driven

A friend drew my attention to a LoRaWAN IoT gateway solution that seems to have high applicability potential in remote nature conservation projects using LoRa sensors. It is...

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Lorawan is a great tech for various applications. In essense, a lorawan gateway communicates with a provider endpoint to send through data that is receives. This can then be received by applications with subscriptions to that data over the Internet. Gateways can be had quite cheaply, Seeed Studios has one for around 100 euros. This is just adding a solar charge unit and there must be some sort of Internet communications, be it cell based or otherwise satellite I guess.

You should aware of all of the profiles of Lora and the constraints, it's intended for low bandwidth data. There are several modes of operation, Lora itself uses spread spectrum transmission with error correction. If you use a high degree of error correction you can transmit successfully longer distances, but with a longer period between allowable transmissins. For example, on spreading factor 12 (SF12) I think you may only transmit again 5 minutes or so later. With SF7, you have less power and less error correction and you can retransmit 5 seconds later.

So think it terms of small amounts of information to be transmitted. It's not a network replacement. The same also applies to zigbee or xbee pro, although they would be more suitable for larger amounts of data and can be used as I understand it as a sort of very, very low bandwidth meshed network. But lorawan is really for individual packets of data.

The Things Network has a lot of information regarding Lorawan in general that's well written I think.

The things network can also be used for free up to a certain number of nodes as a understand it.

I’ve used the things network before. It was developed in the Netherlands. The things network can be seen like an ISP. TTN just developed their ISP so to speak.

I'd be happy to chat with you over video to discuss your case and help you with whatever I know if you like.

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discussion

Monitoring setup  in the forest based on the wifi with 2.4 GHz frequency.

I am planning to setup the network using the wireless with frequency 2.4GHz. Can I get the the data for this signal distortion in the forest area?Is there any any special...

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Hi Dilip,

I do not have data about signal distortion in a forest area and with the signal you are intended to use.

However, in a savannah environment, when I put a tour on the highest point of the park, Lora signal (avg 900MHz) is less distorted than WiFi signal (2.4GHz). This is normal as a physics law: the frequency determines the wave length, and the less the length (obviously the less the frequency), the less obstructed the signal.

So, without interfering with your design, I would say that in a forest configuration, WiFi will need more access points deployed and may be more costly, and in your context, even when using LoRa, you will need more gateways than I have in a savannah.

To design the approximate number of gateways, you may need to use terrain Visibility analysis.

To design the cameras deployment, you will need to comply with the sampling methods defined in your research. However, if it is on for surveillance reasons, you may need to rely on terrain visibility analysis also.

Best regards.

I've got quite a lot of experience with wireless in forested areas and over long(ish) ranges.

Using a wifi mesh is totally possible, and it will work.  You will likely not get great range between units.  You will likely need to have your mesh be fairly adaptable as conditions change.

Wireless and forests interact in somewhat unpredictable ways it turns out.  Generally, wireless is attenuated by water in the line-of-sight between stations.  From the Wifi perspective, a tree is just a lot of water up in the air.  Denser forest = more water = worse communications. LoRa @ 900Mhz is less prone to this issue than Wifi @ 2.4Ghz and way less prone than Wifi @ 5Ghz.  But LoRa is also fairly low data rate.  Streaming video via LoRa is possible with a lot of work, but video streaming is not at all what LoRa was build to do, and it does it quite poorly at best.

The real issue I see here is to do with power levels.  CCTV, audio streaming, etc are high data rate activities.  You may need quite a lot of power to run these systems effectively both for the initial data collection and then for the communications.

If you are planning to run mains power to each of these units, you may be better off running an ethernet cable as well.  Alternatively, you can run "power line" networking, which has remarkably good bandwidth and gets you back down to a single twisted pair for power and communications.

If you are planning to run off batteries and/or solar, you may need a somewhat large power system to support your application?

 

I would recommend going with Ubiquity 2.4Ghz devices which have performed relatively well in dense foliage of the California Redwood forests. It took a lot of tweaking to find paths through the dense tree cover as mentioned in the previous posts. 

 

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discussion

Apply to Beta test Instant Detect 2.0

Hi WildLabs,ZSL is looking for Beta testers for Instant Detect 2.0. If you are a conservationist, scientist or wildlife ranger with experience working with innovative...

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Will you accept personal/hobbyist focused on conservation on their small plots of land (10-100 acres)?

I would, and know others, who would happily pay more than the official conservationists rate for the service, which could help to further subsidize the project. (Referring to your statement here: https://wildlabs.net/discussion/instant-detect-20-and-related-cost)

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event

1st Wildlife Scientific Conference 2023

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

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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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

Hi Lisa. 

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

Akiba

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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Link

Alibaba Cloud's Geo Fencing System in the Mara

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? 

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

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@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.

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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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

 

 

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 

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
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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Very nice! Looking forward to checking it out!
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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