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Data management and processing tools / Feed

Conservation tech work doesn't stop after data is collected in the field. Equally as important to success is navigating data management and processing tools. For the many community members who deal with enormous datasets, this group will be an invaluable resource to trade advice, discuss workflows and tools, and share what works for you.

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Top five(ish) sources of ecological data | R (for ecology)

Stephanie O'Donnell

15 June 2023 12:45pm

A few places where you can download ecological data for coding practice and research. In this tutorial, Selina Cheng discusses the following datasets:
1) Data sets that come with R, 2) The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity 3) The Environmental Data Initiative 4) The National Ecological Observatory Network 5)The Global Biodiversity Information Facility

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Celebrating World Oceans Day: Revitalizing the marine ecosystem with technology-driven engineered reefs to accelerate CO2 capture

Esther Githinji

9 June 2023 10:14am

As we celebrate World Oceans Day this month, we are reminded that addressing climate change will take more than any one organization. It will require companies, governments, NGOs and communities, all working together, with the aid of technology, to improve the efficiencies of our activities and operations and to reduce costs, waste and emissions. Such an example is IBM and The Reef Company recently joining forces signing a joint initiative agreement aimed at bolstering their ocean conservation endeavors.

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Natural Capital GIS & Data Administrator

Esther Githinji

31 May 2023 3:55pm

The Future Forest Company (FFC) team are looking for an enthusiastic, early career data and GIS administrator to join them. The role will manage spatial and operational data, with a particular focus on carbon from...

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discussion

Using Average speed trapping to mitigate Wildlife Vehicle Collisions

Gregory Rasmussen

28 October 2022 11:40am

Help needed to manage average speed trapping data with a view to  mitigating Wildlife Vehicle CollisionsWith a view to mitigating WildlifeVehicle collisions...

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Gregory Rasmussen

7 May 2023 11:50am

We are at a PROOF OF CONCEPT with raspberry pi and python and are hoping this can be taken forward.  See link below.

Wade

19 May 2023 1:36pm

Can you elaborate as to the ethical concerns with using license plate information?  License plate information doesn't need to be stored for long durations with Gregory's proposed system - only for as long as it takes the vehicle to reach the second camera.

Akiba

20 May 2023 11:20am

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, particularly their right to protection of their personal data. Capturing personal, identifying information online without consent would be a violation of GDPR. I think the right to protect personal data extends to the physical world as well, which is where capturing identifying information like license plates without consent would fall. 

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Field Surveyor

Cameron Frayling

16 May 2023 4:06pm

We are a team of ecologists and technologists who believe good business must be good for nature. We’re building an economy that puts nature and business in balance by incentivising the restoration of nature at scale.  

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discussion

Camera Trap Data Management Survey

Dan Morris

3 May 2023 10:28pm

The Wildlife Insights team is running a survey to learn more about camera trap data management practices, and in particular to understand potential barriers to data sharing, as...

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Feathered forecast: Tech tools comb weather data for bird migrations

Stephanie O'Donnell

26 April 2023 2:50pm

Since its launch in 1999, the BirdCast project has used weather radar data to track and forecast bird migrations across the U.S. In recent years, technology such as cloud computing and machine learning have helped make the work of researchers in the project easier and more automated. The BirdCast project is now working on integrating radar data with human observations and bioacoustics to help identify the bird species traversing the skies.

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Anti-poaching tech vulnerable to cyber attacks, study finds | ITWeb

Stephanie O'Donnell

26 April 2023 2:48pm

While tech deployment has often been hailed for playing a critical role in the fight against poaching, these technologies bring with them the risk of cyber attacks. This is based on a study conducted by Orange Cyberdefense Academy’s Christelle Steyn, as part of her thesis titled: “Towards a Critical Review of Cybersecurity Risks in Anti-Poaching Systems in South Africa”.

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Data Scientist (Geospatial), Global Fishing Watch

Global Fishing Watch

19 April 2023 10:34am

Global Fishing Watch are looking for a data scientist to join the Research and Innovation team. Help us tackle geospatial data fusion problems to produce the most complete picture of human activity at sea.

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discussion

Accessible acoustic analysis tech for blind scientist - ideas?

Kate Stafford

31 March 2023 10:52pm

Hi all - I'm mentoring a student who is blind on a bioacoustics project to classify killer whale calls. Anyone out there have any experience with or ideas about making...

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Liz Ferguson

6 April 2023 10:49pm

Hey Kate I don't have any explicit ideas at the moment but will think on it - such a cool concept! I wonder if there's some form of tactile spectrogram that you could develop, or a way that you could have them try to draw a representation (so assign some shape) of what they are hearing as a means of classification a call and then clustering those shapes? There's a way of creating an image using foam and paper I believe so they could have a tactile record of those shapes. Guess it depends what you want to the quantitative results to be. Super cool that you are looking for greater accessibility in acoustics!!!

Anne Simonis

7 April 2023 1:40am

Hi Kate, 

We've developed a screen-reader workflow for a classification problem on our "Ocean Voices" Zooniverse project, which simply asks folks to label sounds based on what they hear and omits the spectrogram altogether. There are lots of screen-reader users who are active in the Zooniverse Talk forums, so they may have valuable input for you as well. 

Once a person has labeled data, I wonder if they could run automated detectors over the data in Pamguard, calculate features (using something like the R package PAMpal), and then use the BrailleR package to explore the statistics in R. This article has a pretty interesting summary about statistical software for visually impaired folks - might not be news to your student, but I thought it was pretty cool. 

I'm very curious what our friends who are visually impaired might notice in the acoustic data. Best of luck to you and your student! 

Cheers, 

Anne 

 

Megan McKenna

7 April 2023 5:11pm

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 MaryKay to get the latest on their project.  

Megan

 

 

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discussion

Exploring storage options for mass data collection

Adam Roberts

22 March 2023 3:20am

Hi all. I'm currently exploring options for data storage en masse. With our project we will be collecting 24hr hydrophone data, drone video 6hr per day, photography &...

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Carly Batist

22 March 2023 7:36pm

Hi Adam!

I mostly live within the ecoacoustics space so I'll just speak on the hydrophone part of your request; Arbimon is a free web/cloud-based platform with unlimited storage for audio files. We've got an uploader app as well for mass-uploading lots of files. There's also a bunch of spectrogram visualization/annotation tools and analysis workflows available. It's AWS running under the hood.

I have some experience working directly with AWS & Microsoft Azure, and I've found personally that AWS was more user-friendly and intuitive for the (fairly simplistic) kinds of tasks I've done.  

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discussion

Moveapps: EMAC23 Coding Challenge

Andrea Koelzsch

3 March 2023 7:58am

Motivated by having been named a Conservation Tech Award grantee in 2022, we are launching the EMAC23 coding challenge to Equip MoveApps for Conservation.Pick one of five use...

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Lars Holst Hansen

3 March 2023 3:12pm

Super initiative! I hope you get a lot of entries to this coding challenge!

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The WILDLABS Variety Hour: February 2023 - YouTube

Stephanie O'Donnell

3 March 2023 11:24am

Last week's Variety Hour is now up on youtube. It was a great session - we covered Moveapps, an awesome community project building marine biologgers, chatgpt and google earth engine vs microsoft's planetary computer. Thanks everyone who came along!

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