Powerful conservation tech tools are gathering more data in the field than ever before. But without equally powerful and effective data management and processing tools, that data - no matter how groundbreaking or interesting - will not be able to reach its full potential for impact.
Data management can sometimes seem intimidating to conservationists, especially those just getting started in the world of conservation tech or experimenting with new data collection methods. While every community member's workflow and preferred data management and processing methods may be different, this group can serve as a resource to explore what works for others, share your own advice, and develop new strategies together.
Below are a few WILDLABS events dealing with datasets collected from various conservation tech tools:
Nicole Flores: How do I get started with Wildlife Insights?
Jamie Macaulay: How do I analyse large acoustic datasets using PAMGuard?
Sarah Davidson: Tools for Bio-logging Data in Conservation
Whatever conservation tech tools you work with, and whatever your preferred data management methods, we hope you'll find something helpful and effective in this group when you become a member!
- @Angele
- | She/Her
Working on IPLCs and applying data/geospatial tools for a conservation/carbon forestry project in the Philippines 🌿
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 8 Groups
- @tmcgrath
- | He / Him
Geographer, Program Manager, Engineering Manager
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 8 Groups
- @StephODonnell
- | She / Her
WILDLABS
I'm the Community Manager at WILDLABS
- 142 Resources
- 622 Discussions
- 30 Groups
- @Morgane
- | Her/She
I am a highly motivated and passionate young professional, working for NGOs and nonprofits. Technologies, systems and change communications are my expertise and I am constantly looking to push the envelope of what a collaborative digital ecosystem looks like.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 3 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 7 Discussions
- 18 Groups
- @LucyD
- | She/Her
Software developer and wildlife ecologist
- 0 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 5 Groups
Applied ML for Sustainable Fisheries, Co-Founder of OnDeck Fisheries AI
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 4 Groups
- @cleo
- | She/Her
Southern African Wildlife College
I am ecologist working in African conservation areas who loves wildlife & wild landscapes. I increasingly recognize that conservation is about people, especially those living in & around protected areas. Finding ways to benefit marginalized people is my passion.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 14 Groups
- @tobiaspetri
- | him/his
data scientist/algorithmic dev - caught fire for movement ecology
- 3 Resources
- 8 Discussions
- 7 Groups
I'm a Mechanical Engineer and I have been involved in test and measurement, IT maintenance consulting, database development, field installation, field maintenance, systems analysis, theater composition and an active synthesist. Currently engaged in conservation volunteer work
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 7 Groups
- @jcbotsch
- | he/him
I'm a population and community ecologist studying the effects of global change on insect populations.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 6 Groups
IT specialist, Natural Resource Mamgement Researcher, Human-Wildlife-Conflict Manager and GIS student
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 4 Groups
Funding
With $60,000, $30,000, and $10,000 grants available for 14 outstanding projects, the support of engineering and technology talent from Arm (the leading semiconductor design company), and access to the world’s biggest...
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TagRanger® is a state-of-the-art wildlife finding, monitoring and tracking solution for research, conservation and environmental professionals. With superior configurability for logging data, reporting location and...
23 November 2023
Yale University & Map of Life Rapid Assessments - XPRIZE
8 November 2023
Yale University & Map of Life Rapid Assessments - XPRIZE
8 November 2023
handling one-value-per-line formats for burst and continuous data
27 October 2023
With the rising threats to biodiversity such as wildlife crime, climate change and human-wildlife conflict today, wildlife monitoring technologies have become vital to study movement ecology, behaviour patterns, changes...
25 October 2023
Have you created a successful career in tech and are ready to do something good with your skills and experience? If yes, then join Open Earth's Earthshot mission to build open source digital systems and solutions to...
25 October 2023
Careers
The Institute of Zoology (IoZ), the research division of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), is seeking to fill three new permanent positions by recruiting outstanding early-career researchers as Research Fellows (...
20 October 2023
Listen in on our interview with Mara Elephant Project’s Tracking Manager, Wilson Sairowua, as he explains how MEP is using software, geofencing and drone technologies to resolve human-elephant conflict across Maasai...
20 October 2023
Competition Funded PhD Position at University of St Andrews School of Mathematics and Statistics
20 October 2023
Competition funded PhD Position at University of St Andrews School of Mathematics and Statistics
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Competition funded PhD Position at University of St Andrews School of Mathematics and Statistics
20 October 2023
December 2023
event
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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camtrapR has a function that does what you want. i have not used it myself but it seems straightforward to use and it can run across directories of images:https://jniedballa.... |
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Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools, Open Source Solutions, Software and Mobile Apps | 5 hours 40 minutes ago | |
Hi @GermanFore ,I work with the BearID Project on individual identification of brown bears from faces. More recently we worked on face detection across all bear species and ran... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 month ago | |
Stefano Puliti joined Variety Hour to share his work using 3D photogrammetric data from UAVs for pre- and post-harvest inventory of forest... |
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Climate Change, Data management and processing tools, Drones, Remote Sensing & GIS | 1 month 4 weeks ago | |
We use Kobo as well - it is amazing!!! |
+6
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Data management and processing tools, Software and Mobile Apps | 2 months 1 week ago | |
'Gundi, meaning “glue” in Swahili, is a technology platform that allows conservationists to seamlessly integrate any hardware with any... |
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Data management and processing tools, Sensors, Software and Mobile Apps | 2 months 3 weeks ago | |
I wish to share an update on my MSc thesis project, that contributes to the field of decoding animal communication. In my work I... |
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Acoustics, Data management and processing tools, Early Career | 2 months 4 weeks ago | |
Hi Lev,We always need more hands in conservation, from whichever field! Engineering, computer science, AI/ML, ecology, environmental science, communications, statisticians, etc.... |
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Community Base, Data management and processing tools, Marine Conservation, Protected Area Management Tools | 4 months 3 weeks ago | |
Also, for more help, here is the link to the website where an old report is shown. Navy Marine Species Monitoring :: Time-lapse Camera Surveys of Pinnipeds in Southeastern Virginia |
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Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools | 5 months 1 week ago | |
I think it's best to look at it as analogous to the GDPR. One of the main reasons for the existence of GDPR is to protect individuals' fundamental rights and freedoms,... |
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Data management and processing tools | 6 months 2 weeks ago | |
The Wildlife Insights team is running a survey to learn more about camera trap data management practices, and in particular to understand... |
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Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools | 7 months ago | |
GeoNadir and OpenDroneMap might be of interest for drones?The Conservation Tech Directory might have some additional projects/tools of note. |
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Data management and processing tools, Drones | 7 months 2 weeks ago | |
Hi Kate- ARISTA Lab (Advanced Research in Inclusion & STEAM Accessibility) is actively working on this through their eclispse soundscape project. I recommend reaching out to... |
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Acoustics, Data management and processing tools | 7 months 4 weeks ago |
Automatic extraction of temperature/moon phase from camera trap video
29 November 2023 1:15pm
1 December 2023 2:38pm
Do you need to do this for just one project? And do you use the same camera make/model for every deployment? Or at least a finite number of camera makes/models? If the number of camera makes/models you need to worry about is finite, even if it's large, I wouldn't try to solve this for the general case, I would just hard-code the pixel ranges where the temperature/moon information appears in each camera model, so you can crop out the relevant pixels without any fancy processing. From there it won't be trivial, exactly, but you won't need AI.
You may need separate pixel ranges for night/day images for each camera; I've seen cameras that capture video with different aspect ratios at night/day (or, more specifically, different aspect ratios for with-flash and no-flash images). If you need to determine whether an image is grayscale/color (i.e., flash/no-flash), I have a simple heuristic function for this that works pretty well.
Assuming you can manually define the relevant pixel ranges, which should just take a few minutes if it's less than a few dozen camera models, I would extract the first frame of each video to an image, then crop out the temperature/moon pixels.
Once you've cropped out the temperature/moon information, for the temperature, I would recommend using PyTesseract (an OCR library) to read the characters. For the moon information... I would either have a small library of images for all the possible moon phases for each model, and match new images against those, or maybe - depending on the exact style they use - you could just, e.g., count the total number of white/dark pixels in that cropped moon image, and have a table that maps "percentage of white pixels" to a moon phase. For all the cameras I've seen with a moon phase icon, this would work fine, and would be less work than a template matching approach.
FYI I recently wrote a function to do datetime extraction from camera trap images (it would work for video frames too), but there I was trying to handle the general case where I couldn't hard-code a pixel range. That task was both easier and harder than what you're doing here: harder because I was trying to make it work for future, unknown cameras, but easier because datetimes are relatively predictable strings, so you know when you find one, compared to, e.g., moon phase icons.
In fact maybe - as others have suggested - extracting the moon phase from pixels is unnecessary if you can extract datetimes (either from pixels or from metadata, if your metadata is reliable).
5 December 2023 10:09pm
camtrapR has a function that does what you want. i have not used it myself but it seems straightforward to use and it can run across directories of images:
https://jniedballa.github.io/camtrapR/reference/OCRdataFields.html
WILDLABS Awards 2024: Supporting accessible, affordable, and effective innovation for nature
1 December 2023 11:00am
ICOTEQ launch TAGRANGER® system of products
23 November 2023 1:25pm
AWMS Conference 2023
Catch up with The Variety Hour: November 2023
16 November 2023 12:59pm
Insight; a secure online platform designed for sharing experiences of conservation tool use.
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.
DeepFaune: a software for AI-based identification of mammals in camera-trap pictures and videos
14 July 2023 3:14pm
24 October 2023 8:46pm
Hello to all, new to this group. This is very exciting technology. can it work for ID of individual animals? we are interested in Ai for identifying individual jaguars (spots) and andean Bears (face characteristics). Any recommendation? contact? thanks!
German
25 October 2023 8:57am
That's a very interesting question and use case (I'm not from deepfaune). I'm playing with this at the moment and intend to integrate it into my other security software that can capture and send video alerts. I should have this working within a few weeks I think.
The structure of that software is that it is two stage, the first stage identifies that there is an animal and it's bounding box and then there's a classification stage. I intend to merge the two stages so that it behaves like a yolo model so that the output is bounding boxes as well as what type of animal it is.
However, my security software can cascade models. So if you were able to train a single stage classifier that identifies your particular bears, then you could cascade all of these models in my software to generate an alert with a video saying which bear it was.
4 November 2023 4:51am
Hi @GermanFore ,
I work with the BearID Project on individual identification of brown bears from faces. More recently we worked on face detection across all bear species and ran some tests with identifying Andean bears. You can find details in the paper I linked below. We plan to do more work with Andean bears in 2024.
I would love to connect with you. I'll send you a message with my email address.
Regards,
Ed

Multispecies facial detection for individual identification of wildlife: a case study across ursids
Mammalian Biology - To address biodiversity decline in the era of big data, replicable methods of data processing are needed. Automated methods of individual identification (ID) via computer vision...

Movebank tutorial on uploads of tag acceleration and magnetometer data
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5 Trailblazing Wildlife Monitoring Tech Solutions across East Africa. What Monitoring Technologies are you using?
25 October 2023 12:40pm
Lead Data Engineer - Climate Solutions, Open Earth
25 October 2023 11:07am
ZSL Research Fellow (x3 roles)

20 October 2023 3:34pm
Pre-register for the Basics of R for Ecologists
20 October 2023 1:54pm
Enrollment for Luke Negoita's Basics of R (for ecologists) course is opening in a few days, but this will be the LAST TIME (for a while) that he'll be admitting new students into the course. If you've needed to learn R for ecology, this course has everything you need (his words!)
Restoring the Mara Elephant Population Using Coexistence Tech Solutions with Mara Elephant Project's Wilson Sairowua

20 October 2023 1:31pm
PhD Opportunity - Exploring synergies between statistical ecology and statistical genomics

20 October 2023 12:56pm
PhD Opportunity - Distance sampling with milder assumptions

20 October 2023 12:53pm
PhD Opportunity - Causal inference and trial emulation for ecological observational data

20 October 2023 12:45pm
PhD Opportunity - Movement through space and time, realistic movement for species abundance methods

20 October 2023 12:33pm
Marine Flyways - Seabird Tracking Database
20 October 2023 12:23pm
To celebrate #WMBD, BirdLife is excited to share the newly identified Marine Flyways!! Seabird tracking data were shared by over 60 researchers from 48 long-distance migratory species and have revealed SIX MarineFlyways. They've created an awesome animation to go along with it!
Biodiversity Intactness dataset now available on the Earth Engine community catalog
16 October 2023 1:21pm
How 3D Technologies are Reshaping Forest Ecology and Conservation
6 October 2023 1:13pm
GEO BON Monitoring Biodiversity for Action
5 October 2023 3:10pm
🚀 New Grant: 'Satellites for Biodiversity Award' Round 2
2 October 2023 1:50pm
GIS & Data Science Specialist
28 September 2023 1:32pm
Statistical Data Management and Analysis using R
26 September 2023 10:40am
Mobile Data Collection using ODK Training
26 September 2023 10:26am
Geospatial Data Scientist, Varaha
25 September 2023 9:58am
Software for recording field data?
6 September 2023 3:01pm
22 September 2023 11:08am
Have a look at kobocollect, very easy to use and reliable, can collect data and then send them to the cloud when you have internet.
Other solution:
QField - Efficient field work built for QGIS
SMART Conservation Software - Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (smartconservationtools.org)
EarthRanger: Protecting Wildlife With Real-Time Data
Natural Resource Data Solutions - Land & Resource Management
Efficient tools for effective resource management. Natural Resource Data Solutions provides data collection and resource management tools for land owners and environment conservation agencies, public and private.

22 September 2023 4:05pm
I second Kobo/CyberTracker for tracks, but if you have money for an ArcGIS Online license, Survey123 is great (offline use - but can't record tracks)
22 September 2023 6:11pm
We use Kobo as well - it is amazing!!!
Digital Disruption for Conservation Toolkit
22 September 2023 12:18pm
Made available by the Digital Disruption and the Future of Conservation project team at Unearthodox, the toolkit provides conservation practitioners with a comprehensive introduction to Web 3.0 and AI concepts and their potential use for nature conservation.
1 December 2023 2:35pm
Hi Lucy
As others have mentioned, camera trap temperature readouts are inaccurate, and you have the additional problem that the camera's temperature can rise 10C if the sun shines on it.
I would also agree with the suggestion of getting the moon phase data off the internet.