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Drones / Feed

Used to pick up signals from tracking gear on the ground, collect images of wildlife and habitats from the air, gather acoustic data with specialized hydrophones, or even collect snot samples from whales' blowholes, drones are capable of collecting high-resolution data quickly, noninvasively, and at relatively low cost.

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Selecting a thermal imaging drone for wildlife monitoring

Hi All,I'm in a small volunteer conservation group in the inner western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. We care for a small patch of remnant wetlands, and work closely with the...

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Hi Doug,

 

I've got a Mavic 3T. Happy to chat about this and other fox related issues in Melb.

Mike.

 

Hi Doug,

we are a young startup that uses AI as a tool in nature and wildlife conservation. At the moment we develop a drone with on-board AI (for object detection) and thermal and "normal" camera. If you want to know more about the project, you can contact me [email protected]. I would be happy to help you.

 

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Sustained Effort: Carbon Footprints and Capacity

Sol Milne
In this article, Sol Milne discusses his experiences with sustainability, both in terms of environmental impact and project longevity, and considers how uncoupling conservation work from colonial ideas can help us build...

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#Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Judges' Panel Honorees

WILDLABS Team
Please join us in celebrating this year’s top #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge Honorees as chosen by our panel of leading conservation organization judges, and enjoy the story contained within these entries about how our...

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Mapping seagrass with drones and AI

GeoNadir shared how drones and AI can help assess seagrass habitats at the Great Barrier Reef, as well as how satellite imagery can monitor seagrass on a wider scale.

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Project Spotlight: Monitoring tropical freshwater fish in Kakadu National Park with drones, underwater cameras and AI

This was such a fantastic presentation in our June Variety Hour show. Andrew and his team are exploring applications of a whole range of technologies, anda are looking to share...

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During Andrew's talk, @dmorris put out a call in the chat that might be relevant to folks catching up on the video, so I'll drop it here too: 

Re: Andrew's fish work... part of the reason I got in touch with Andrew a few weeks ago is that I'm trying to keep track of public datasets and public models for marine video that have basically this gestalt (video where fish look fishy-ish). I think we're getting close to enough public data to train a general-purpose model that will work well across ecosystems. My running list of datasets is here:

https://lila.science/otherdatasets#images-marine-fish

Let me know if folks know of others!

There are also a grand total of two public models that I'm aware of that sort of fall into this category... one is Andrew's:

https://github.com/ajansenn/KakaduFishAI

The other is:

https://github.com/warplab/megafishdetector

If folks know of other publicly-available models, let me know about those too!

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Osa Conservation: A Multi-Tech Toolbox of Solutions

Osa Conservation
In this Conservation Tech Showcase case study from Osa Conservation, you’ll learn about how technology is aiding their long-term efforts to prevent wildlife crime, protect critical species, and build a climate-adaptive...

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UAV-assisted counts of group size facilitate accurate population surveys of the Critically Endangered cao vit gibbon Nomascus nasutus

This paper explores the use of UAVs equipped with thermal and standard cameras to accurately count the group sizes of the Critically Endangered cao vit gibbon, highlighting how this technology can overcome the limitations of traditional ground-based methods and contribute to more robust population surveys and conservation efforts.

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ISO Speakers for Emerging Technologies class.

Hi Everyone, Apologies for posting across multiple groups.  I'm teaching a new course @ Clark University next semester on emerging technologies for conservation. The course...

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Definitely interested! I'm in the ecoacoustics/acoustic monitoring space, working at Rainforest Connection and Arbimon.

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Animal tracking stories

Do you have a wild animal tracking story that involves adventure or misadventure? Share it with us! From going around in circles for hours to discovering predators instead of your...

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Using computer vision to understand bee vision

Here's an innovative project from the Harvey Mudd College Bee Lab that could help us understand how bees view their environments, and thus better protect bee habitat. This project uses computer vision and drone imagery to replicate "bee vision" of flowers and how it differs from a human's view of the same habitat.

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Researchers use taxidermy bird drones to monitor wildlife

Interesting project - “Our main goal for this is to develop a nature-friendly drone concept for wildlife monitoring,” Hassanalian said. “Traditional drones are often disruptive to ecosystems due to issues such as sound and unfamiliarity, so developing quieter, natural-looking alternatives could help wildlife monitoring and research.”

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AI for Pelicans Challenge

In this Challenge, we will use AI to detect and classify pelicans in Romania's Danube Delta to evaluate the breeding population based on aerial photographs.

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Drones for IUU (illegal fishing activities & vessel monitoring)

Hi, new to Wildlabs and happy to have found itI am currently working on drone design (fixed wing), for the purpose of monitoring illegal fishing vessels. This will be done via...

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Hi Frank! Thanks so much for your reply. Yes I have been looking into the same sort of workflow as with camera traps etc and seem to be getting somewhere (although am yet to have my own data set with which to check!). 

Yes, with the transponder issue, actually NONE of the boats here have them! There has been a push to get boats to install them further down the coast, but it was marred by the usual corruption and forceless enforcement. So everything will be visual, rather than working on any signal given out by the boats themselves. I am looking into ai programs that can analyse footage and as you say, it can be done with species so I see no reason it cannot be done with vessels given the parameters to look for

 

Seeing the pictures that @lmccaskill uploaded got my brain storming, so to say. Are you working with similar small boats? I was assuming bigger fishing ships that are registered somewhere. If the boats are not registered and there are no existing photos of them, and you want to identify the individual boats, you'll need to build your own catalogue to train an AI.

However / in addition, if the boats have written text on them with a name or a code or number, like in the pictures, then it should be ridiculously easy to identify boats. No AI needed. I discovered recently that my laptop has started showing find results based on text in photos. If different boats are of the same model, again like in the pictures, then there is nothing else left than what is written on them ... well, perhaps the color scheme.

... or perhaps face recognition if the image quality allows it. But then you'll be at square 1 again with training an AI.

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ML-ready datasets for aerial/drone wildlife surveys

I got inspired to collect a list of annotated, appear-to-be-ML-ready datasets related to drone/aerial wildlife surveys:https://github.com/agentmorris/agentmorrispublic/blob/main/...

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Following up here... a few of us huddled virtually and assembled standardized metadata, standardized sample code, and sample annotated images for all the datasets on that list.  I don't know whether this exercise was useful, but it was fun!  

The URL hasn't changed, but I consider the list open for business now, let us know what we're missing:

https://github.com/agentmorris/agentmorrispublic/blob/main/drone-datasets.md

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Advice on afforable LiDAR scanners for Amazon forest surveys

Dear allFirstly, what a fantastic group! I love following the discussions on this site and am a true believer in the power of the crowd so am hoping someone might have the...

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Hi Jeremy, 



With a quick search I've found the paper linked below. It looks like equipments such as Livox MID are sufficient for plot-level analyses, but not for individual trees. Also, it has performed worse in dense canopies and broadleaf forest, thus I believe we won't have a technology capable of doing what you aim for this amount of money (< $1000) in a few years from now.



I hope someone give us an alternative, though. :D



Best,

 

 

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Exploring storage options for mass data collection

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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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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