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!
I'm a conservationist working in the Vulture conservation space in South Africa with a huge passion for technology.
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Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)
Wildlife Biologist and Marine Conservationist
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WILDLABS
I'm the Community Manager at WILDLABS
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PhD student at the University of Mississippi; research interests include predator/prey dynamics, particularly the landscape of fear in relation to species conservation. Rookie at using arduino
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Wildlife Drones
Wildlife Drones has developed the world’s most innovative radio animal-tracking system using drones so you can track your radio-tagged animals like never before.
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Software Developer (movebank.org, firetail.de)
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I'm a PhD researcher at Royal Holloway University of London (Centre for GeoHumanities) researching modalities of sound-sensing technologies across climate and conservation sciences. Interested in ethics and histories of acoustic monitoring as well as new visualization methods.
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Natural Resources Engineer. Birdwatcher and citizen science lover, data science enthusiast.
Wanting to learn more ways to use technology for conservation.
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Duke University
Master of Environmental Management student at Duke University studying how technology can facilitate conservation efforts in a multitude of ecosystems.
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Consultancy opportunity at ZSL for an experienced monitoring specialist to support species monitoring in rewilding landscapes across Europe
31 January 2023
1
Careers
Senior Software Engineer
Alex Killion
Yale University - Center for Biodiversity and Global Change
17 January 2023
Careers
Software Engineer
Anne Dangerfield
Join the Arribada Initiative! We have a unique opportunity for a software developer to create mobile / desktop applications and intuitive user interfaces that assist researchers and fieldworkers to conserve wildlife.
16 January 2023
WILDLABS and Fauna & Flora International are seeking an early career Vietnamese conservationist for 12-month paid internship position to grow and support the Southeast Asia regional community in our global...
11 January 2023
Seeking Software Engineer for Marine Science Lab a UC Santa Barbara
19 December 2022
Using satellite imagery to detect and classify the severity of cyanobacteria blooms in small, inland water bodies.
15 December 2022
Careers
Conservify is seeking a hands-on Senior Software Engineer with front end and back end experience developing rich web and mobile applications, and a strong desire to build a best-in-class product that stands out in both...
9 December 2022
Article
New: Satellites for Biodiversity Award
EmmaOldham
Conservation partnership launches new award to advance biodiversity conservation from space
5 December 2022
Careers
This position (at California State University, Long Beach) provides data management & analysis support to Shark Lab research operations including shark tagging, active tracking, receiver data, AUV & UAV data...
24 October 2022
The candidate will partner with our global team members that are focused on designing and implementing island restorations using the most effective, science-based, cost-efficient, and collaborative methods available.
14 October 2022
1
Rainforest Alliance are seeking a Enterprise Data and Information Architect, based in UK, the Netherlands, or Kenya.
11 October 2022
Careers
Rainforest Alliance are seeking a Data Engineer based in Kenya. Applications accepted on a rolling basis.
11 October 2022
February 2023
event
February 2023
event
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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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... |
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Acoustic Monitoring, AI for Conservation, Connectivity, Data management and processing tools , Protected Area Management Tools, Sensors | 4 days 1 hour ago | |
My original background is in ecology and conservation, and am now in the elected leadership of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware which convenes researchers developing open... |
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AI for Conservation, Biologging, Camera Traps, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools , Drones, Emerging Tech, Sensors | 3 weeks ago | |
Hi everyone, I seek your help for the choice of my thesis subject, I hold a Master's degree in Management of protected areas and I have... |
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Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools , Protected Area Management Tools, Remote Sensing & GIS | 4 weeks ago | |
intrested. |
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Community Base, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools , Early Career, Emerging Tech | 1 month ago | |
No, I was never able to figure out how to send these to anyone on here. I was hoping to learn how to clear these videos up if possible! |
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Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools , Open Source Solutions, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 month 1 week ago | |
I'll just ask the question without further explanation : How could your work on data management be made easier?I am really interested. |
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Data management and processing tools | 1 month 3 weeks ago | |
Hi Steph. Would be interested also. |
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Biologging, Community Base, Connectivity, Data management and processing tools , Emerging Tech, Remote Sensing & GIS | 1 month 3 weeks ago | |
Hi Gregory, I agree with Akiba - it can be tricky to get ethics approvals for this sort of thing. I've been working on a wildlife warning road signage project for a few years and... |
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Data management and processing tools | 3 months ago | |
Hi Alex,I'd go much further along the lines that David @dtsavage sets out. Before jumping to implementations, better think through why you want to keep all that data, and for who... |
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Acoustic Monitoring, Data management and processing tools | 3 months 1 week ago | |
Hi,If this is still relevant, you can try reaching out to the Belmaker lab, they do BRUV surveys in the eastern Mediterranean and have hours of video, some of it I believe is... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools , Marine Conservation | 3 months 2 weeks ago | |
The open-source program Audacity can show the spectrograms and histograms and has quite a lot of other useful features, e.g. playing ultrasound calls slower, so it can be heard by... |
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Acoustic Monitoring, Citizen Science, Data management and processing tools , Open Source Solutions, Software and Mobile Apps | 3 months 2 weeks ago | |
Have a look at @tessa_rhinehart 's TechTutors on scaling up acoustic surveys. This is addressed at 11 min: The "hexadecapus" is the hardware, but transfer is automated by... |
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Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools | 3 months 4 weeks ago |
Commercially available connected audio sensors
2 February 2023 3:08pm
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.
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!
How to conduct rapid eligibility assessments for forest carbon projects using geospatial data
3 February 2023 3:32pm
Consultancy opportunity: Wildlife monitoring specialist
31 January 2023 11:26am
Advanced Field School in Computational Ecology
25 January 2023 2:54pm
Western Section of The Wildlife Society 2023
25 January 2023 2:09am
Senior Software Engineer
Interview for Technologies in Conservation
24 November 2022 10:07am
16 January 2023 2:42pm
I'd be happy to chat with you if you wanted! My expertise is within passive acoustic monitoring particularly. The Conservation Tech Directory might be useful for you in identifying relevant actors within the space.
16 January 2023 5:16pm
Happy to contribute [email protected]
17 January 2023 5:12pm
My original background is in ecology and conservation, and am now in the elected leadership of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware which convenes researchers developing open source tech for science. I am not working on a specific piece of technology right now, but am happy to contribute some higher-level views for your interview if that helps.
Software Engineer
16 January 2023 12:26pm
New paper - An evaluation of platforms for processing camera-trap data using artificial intelligence
13 January 2023 12:14am
We review key characteristics of four AI platforms—Conservation AI, MegaDetector, MLWIC2: Machine Learning for Wildlife Image Classification and Wildlife Insights—and two auxiliary platforms—Camelot and Timelapse—that incorporate AI output for processing camera-trap data. We compare their software and programming requirements, AI features, data management tools and output format. We also provide R code and data from our own work to demonstrate how users can evaluate model performance.
Conservation Technology Intern (Vietnam)
11 January 2023 5:00pm
Help : Topics in Remote Sensing and Management of Protected Areas
10 January 2023 11:04am
Conservation Design Project Recruitment
19 December 2022 5:52pm
4 January 2023 10:48am
intrested.
Otter video help!
5 September 2022 6:57pm
7 September 2022 6:12pm
Thank you for the response! I'm not sure how to find that out. It says MP4. Is that what you're looking for?
21 December 2022 7:46pm
Did you get any further with this Britnee?
26 December 2022 6:54pm
No, I was never able to figure out how to send these to anyone on here. I was hoping to learn how to clear these videos up if possible!
Job: Software Engineer at Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory
19 December 2022 7:59pm
Upcoming PAM & R Ocean Science Courses
16 December 2022 3:27pm
Join NASA’s harmful algal bloom ML challenge and win prizes!
15 December 2022 7:56pm
ONLINE TRAINING: Project Planning for Wildlife Conservation
15 December 2022 7:11pm
How could your work on data management be made easier?
14 December 2022 12:10am
Workshop Invite: Building Partnerships between Conservation Tech and the UK Space Sector
22 September 2022 3:50pm
5 December 2022 3:10pm
Hi Steph,
If it's not too late, I'm very interested in this workshop.
Best,
V
6 December 2022 5:52pm
Hey Vance! We hosted the workshop a few weeks ago, but we're doing follow up calls and future meetings. I'll loop you into the next call!
Steph
12 December 2022 12:03am
Hi Steph. Would be interested also.
Senior Software Engineer
9 December 2022 5:01pm
New: Satellites for Biodiversity Award
5 December 2022 2:08pm
Using Average speed trapping to mitigate Wildlife Vehicle Collisions
28 October 2022 11:40am
28 October 2022 2:59pm
Hi Gregory.
I don't know if it's ethical to record license plate pictures for speed detection. It also sounds like it's a bit of a difficult approach to speed detection. Have you considered using a doppler radar based speed detector? You would likely need to DIY it or collaborate with someone that could assist with designing one but I think you'd get more reliable data in an automated way.
Just my $0.02.
Akiba
5 November 2022 5:25am
Hi Gregory, I agree with Akiba - it can be tricky to get ethics approvals for this sort of thing. I've been working on a wildlife warning road signage project for a few years and the project uses radar-enabled signs to take a speed before and after the sign. Problem is, the signs are expensive. However, we are interested in adding some 'control' or nil-treatment roads to the mix, so we'd be interested in finding a radar speed logging system that we could deploy to mimic the sign radars, along the lines of what @Freaklabs mentioned. A variation on this project perhaps?
Could be worth investigating? This model seems to have reasonable range:
The other thing that comes to mind is the so-called licence plate camera from Reconyx:
They are limited to vehicles travelling 80km/hr or slower and I think they only take stills, but you possibly use them in multiple places to record plate data.
How are you measuring speed with cameras by the way? Be very interested to hear more and keen to collaborate on a low(ish) cost radar solution if that's of interest.
Cheers,
Rob
Webinar: Cloud Computing for Biodiversity and Nature-Based Solutions
2 November 2022 8:09pm
Data mgmt for Passive Acoustic Monitoring best practices?
14 September 2022 8:35pm
15 September 2022 4:20pm
Hi Alex--
The first thing I'd suggest you think through is how much data you have vs how much data you are currently working on. Because if you have data from previous years that you want to ensure you're storing securely and reliably but don't need immediate access to in order to run analysis on, that opens up some options. You can compress data using lossless algorithms like FLAC, where the compression ratio varies but 50% is a pretty good margin, and then convert back to WAV if necessary for reanalysis. Compressing using MP3, OGG, AIFF, or other compression algorithms is an option that saves even more storage space but you will lose information in ways you wouldn't with FLAC--it depends on your specific needs.
I'd also recommend setting up a RAID array (RAID = "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks"). This offers some additional security in event of a drive failure. A lot of folks who do video editing, probably the most similar use case to people working with acoustic data who also lack the institutional support of a large company or university IT department use a local NAS enclosure like https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/ts-433 that are designed for just this purpose. Some higher initial startup costs than just buying individual USB hard drives but that does come with some perks including additional reliability and can be faster to read data depending on the exact drive specs and your local networking setup.
There are also low-cost cloud storage services like Amazon's Glacier. However, getting these set up can be a little bit tricky and they are not particularly responsive (for example, if you upload data to Glacier, it will be very safe, but getting it back if you need to use it again can take a few days depending on the dataset size).
19 September 2022 1:58am
Hello Alex,
My information might not be that helpful to you, still, our organisation have an Enterprise license of AWS cloud and we store all our media files (video, pictures, audio etc.) there. We are also using a media management solution, Piction, thru which we upload the files into the S3 bucket and in the process it also captures the file metadata (some of the metadata values needs to be entered manually). This is useful to search the files if someone wants to view or process the file later. We are soon deciding on the file storage configuration so that old files will move to cheap storage like AWS Glacier, which will take a maximum of a week time to retrieve it.
Jitendra
28 October 2022 4:19pm
Hi Alex,
I'd go much further along the lines that David @dtsavage sets out. Before jumping to implementations, better think through why you want to keep all that data, and for who? From your question, it appears you have at least three purposes:
1- for yourself to do your research
2- for others to re-use.
3- for yourself to have a back-up
For 1) you should do what works best for you.
For 3) use your organization's back-up system or whatever comes close to that
For 2 and 3) As you are indicating yourself : deposit your data at your nation's repository or zenodo.org if your nation doe not have one. It may be some documentation work ( which is what you should do anyways, right? ), but then you can stop worrying about holding on to it. Someone else is doing that for you and they do a much better job - because it is their job. Moreover, you increase the chance that other will actually become aware of all that data that you are sitting on by putting it into a repository. Who is otherwise going to find out and how that you have those disks on your desk? Lastly, depositing your data can also serve as a back-up. If you don't want to share it before you've published about it, there is likely the option of depositing under time-embargo or of depositing while requiring your consent for any re-use.
You ask how many people actually do this? You can find the answers at the repository, but I suggest that what matters most is whether you want to for your own reasons, and whether your funders, or organization's funders require it.
Shark Lab Data Analyst
24 October 2022 7:12pm
Underwater Fish Datasets from the Mediterranean
15 August 2022 11:45pm
26 September 2022 1:43pm
Hi Sebastian,
How about using webcams, like this one in the Adriatic (if high enough detail):
If not, it might be worth contacting https://reefish.umontpellier.fr/ who are based in Montpellier. They do marine research, (I think including some fish ID machine learning stuff too), so may have done work locally?
Cheers
26 September 2022 9:32pm
Not sure if audio data would be of any use to you, but if so FishSounds has some - I just tried their search function and there is a location tag for 'Mediterranean & Black Sea'.
You might try reaching out to the folks at Name that Fish, Innovasea, or perhaps an entity on the Fisheries Tech list would have Mediterranean stuff?
21 October 2022 7:52am
Hi,
If this is still relevant, you can try reaching out to the Belmaker lab, they do BRUV surveys in the eastern Mediterranean and have hours of video, some of it I believe is annotated. Particularly, Shahar might be helpful, he's the PhD student running point on the project.
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,