Ten years ago, we couldn't have imagined how tools like machine learning, eDNA, and satellites would advance and transform conservation work. Now technology is advancing faster than ever, and as tools become smaller, lighter, and more affordable, it's vital to have a space where community members can discuss the next big thing, share ideas, compare tool options, and tell the story of their experiences - positive, negative, and anything in between - while using new technologies.
In 2021, the WILDLABS State of Conservation Tech report detailed what tools show the most promise according to community members, as well as what tools are currently seen as the most effective. And as new tools enter the field, we're excited to see how this data will change over time, and how this group grows over time as well.
Our State of Conservation Tech research also discusses something called the "Hype Cycle" - the pattern that occurs when a new technology bursts onto the scene, promises to be an exciting solution, encounters challenges as new users adopt the tool and put it into practice beyond just theory, and eventually settles into its most effective state as users acquire the right skills to use it to its actual potential. Machine learning, one of the most promising technologies, is currently in the middle of its own hype cycle, and we see community members working through their own hurdles to incorporate ML into their work effectively. Despite what you may think, this Hype Cycle can also be positive for tech development, as it means that users have big ideas for new tools, and with the right resources and skills, they can work toward bringing those ideas to life. And as our community members experiences the Hype Cycle for various tools at their own paces, we hope this group will also serve as a place to discuss that process and overcome hurdles together.
Ready to discover new possibilities? Join our Emerging Tech group now and get to know your forward-thinking conservation tech peers!
Header photo: Internet of Elephants
- @ChloeSutcliffe
- | She/her
Working with drones and LiDAR to build datasets on above ground biomass
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- @RHugtenburg
- | He/They
Student at Aberystwyth University. Bug Fanatic🪲. Worked at Octophin Digital for my industrial year placement 🐙.
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- 20 Groups
- @CynthiaGw
- | Her/she
Hi, Cynthia Gichimu here. I'm a conservationist, and a champion for youths. I believe in environmental sustainability for posterity. I volunteer as a Project Officer with the Friends of Kinangop Plateau, a community-based local action group committed to biodiversity conservation.
- 1 Resources
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- 6 Groups
- @mbkowalski11
- | he/him
University of California Santa Cruz
PhD Student (UCSC, Wilmers Lab) interested in large carnivores, behavioral ecology, human-wildlife coexistence, and biologging
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- 1 Discussions
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- @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.
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Cinematographer, Conservationist & Animal ID Explorer
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Interested in automated insect monitoring.
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- 15 Discussions
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- @kadambarid
- | she, her, hers
Dr. Kadambari Devarajan is an engineer-turned-ecologist working on biodiversity monitoring. (Website - http://kadambarid.in/)
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- 14 Groups
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La Trobe University
Zoologist & Conservation biologist
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- 2 Groups
Technology to End the Sixth Mass Extinction. Salary: $104k-144K; Location: Washington DC or Seattle WA, potential hybrid; 5+ years of Full stack development experience; Deadline March 15th - view post for full job...
10 February 2023
Frontiers in Conservation Science is calling for submissions for a Research Topic that aims at examining the paradoxical relationship that has been established in recent years between the flagships of new technology...
10 February 2023
Do you have any new methods or examples of practical applications of emerging new technologies that can help solve ecological problems? Submit a proposal to the new OA Special Feature of Ecological Solutions and...
7 February 2023
Are you excited by the potential for new technologies to help monitor the natural world? Do you enjoy communicating your passion for technology and nature with diverse audiences? We are seeking an enthusiastic...
2 February 2023
The role of no-code geospatial software in the fight against climate change
24 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
This position focuses on the ecology aspect of the project, while a second PhD in Ilmenau will be dealing with programming/AI development. Because of the high temporal resolution of our data, we can investigate how land...
9 January 2023
Careers
We are looking for someone who enjoys the craft of making to come and help run our London based lab.
5 January 2023
Rainforest Foundation UK is looking for a developer who wants to put their skills to use in the fight against climate change and social injustice.
19 December 2022
a technology-led solution to understanding the honeybees of the wasp world
8 December 2022
Rainforest Foundation UK is looking for a FullStack developer with an interest in environmental justice and the development of rainforest monitoring systems
6 December 2022
Conservation partnership launches new award to advance biodiversity conservation from space
5 December 2022
November 2023
event
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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In my experience, ChatGPT-4 performs significantly better than version 3.5, especially in terms of contextual understanding. However, like any AI model, inaccuracies cannot be... |
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AI for Conservation, Emerging Tech | 3 minutes 8 seconds ago | |
Congratulations! My first hydromoth was just arrived yesterday and so excited! Looking forward for the update from your project!!! |
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Acoustics, Biologging, Climate Change, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Protected Area Management Tools, Sensors, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 day 3 hours ago | |
SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR WILL ALSO DETECT AND LOCATE CHAINSAWS, MOTORBIKES, BICYLCLES, FIREARMS, MACHETES in fact anything metal. I have been concentrating on trying to get... |
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AI for Conservation, Drones, Emerging Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Wildlife Crime | 1 week 1 day ago | |
Hey Sol, No problem at all. Depending on your configuration, the Audiomoth software would have to work on a PCB with an ESP32 chip which is the unit on the audiomoth/... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 week 3 days ago | |
Gotcha, well I look forward to seeing future iterations and following along with your progress!! |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, AI for Conservation, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions | 1 week 6 days ago | |
'Most importantly, we have to make it play a MIDI version of the DoctorWho theme song when you arm the device. That has to be the #1 feature if you ask me!' Seconded! |
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Acoustics, Biologging, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 2 weeks 2 days ago | |
Hi @Alasdair Great to hear from you! Thanks for the comment and for those very useful links (very interesting). And for letting @Rob_Appleby know. I can't wait to hear... |
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Emerging Tech, Camera Traps, Conservation Tech Training and Education | 1 month ago | |
Hello everyone, I'm interested in gathering insights on how the behavior of different species impacts the development and efficacy of... |
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Biologging, Acoustics, Camera Traps, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech, Marine Conservation | 1 month 1 week ago | |
Hi @timbirdweather I've now got them up and running and winding how I can provide feedback on species ID to improve the accuracy over time. It would be really powerful to have a... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Citizen Science, Emerging Tech | 1 month 2 weeks ago | |
Thank you for the help! |
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Biologging, Emerging Tech | 2 months 2 weeks ago | |
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... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Biologging, Camera Traps, Citizen Science, Climate Change, Community Base, Connectivity, Drones, Emerging Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Open Source Solutions, Sensors, Software and Mobile Apps, Wildlife Crime | 3 months ago | |
Hi!I would take a look at Although developed for camera trap imagery, it is by no means restricted to such.Cheers,Lars |
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Camera Traps, Community Base, Data management and processing tools, Drones, Emerging Tech, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 3 months 1 week ago |
Video: Delivering edge computing on Robinson Crusoe Island (Chile) to preserve biodiversity
13 June 2022 2:08pm
Virtual Meetup Discussion: Future Questions & Tools in Movement Ecology
7 June 2022 9:38pm
12 June 2022 1:08am
Using NFC makes a lot of sense too. I'm just on an older lower-end device that doesn't support it, which is why it didn't pop immediately to mind. Would be interesting to see what the adoption rate for NFC-capable phones is across countries though I'd imagine some phone manufacturer or something already has that data.
12 June 2022 2:29am
A bit opposite of what you're looking for but according to this, the share of non-NFC enabled phones was 10% in 2020. They don't state their source unless you pay, but I suspect that's in terms of total phone models, not total phones in use. So it's highly likely that phones with no NFC in use is much higher than that.
UKAN+ Monitoring UK Biodiversity Symposium 15-16th June
31 May 2022 2:58pm
New paper: A practical approach with drones, smartphones, and tracking tags for potential real-time animal tracking
29 May 2022 1:15pm
New wildlife forensics lab - Singapore
29 May 2022 12:34pm
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Future Questions & Tools in Movement Ecology
24 May 2022 10:10pm
Job Opening - VR / Unity Game Developer for Wildlife
28 January 2022 2:23pm
Technical Difficulties: The Path to Success
14 October 2021 12:00am
Internet of Elephants is seeking test users for our early prototypes
3 October 2016 6:13pm
25 October 2016 9:43am
Thanks Stephanie for giving it a go. It is most certainly very basic right now - hardly a game yet - but purposely left that way so as to leave a lot of space for feedback and ideas. We'll put out another version in a few weeks - what is promising is that a lot of the things we were thinking to do next align with a lot of the feedback that is coming in.
25 October 2016 9:44am
Hi John - thanks for giving it a try - It is so basic that I'm surprised at all the positive response we get - nice to see people are open minded about this being version 0.000001 :)
Yes - definitely - the idea is to do this for maybe 10-15 different species around the world. We want the user to eventually come in and 'spin' the globe, see what is happening with real wild animals in different parts of the world, and have a fun way of engaging with them.
We don't yet even know which animal we would go live with first - that is still discovery to see what data is the most interesting from a game perspective combined with what captures the attention of people the most. Elephants certainly do the latter, so we're testing out with some elephant data we have. But we're seeing that wildebeest data and migratory bird data could be far more fun.
8 July 2021 8:40am
Introduction
29 June 2020 9:19pm
6 July 2020 11:16pm
Guess not!
27 July 2020 6:50pm
I only know Internet of Elephants! Have you heard about them?
I think their new competitor is Google, have you seen? https://9to5google.com/2020/07/10/google-3d-animals-list/
Internet of Elephants last launch was Wildeverse - https://www.wildeversegame.com/
Explorer Classroom: Gautam Shah
19 May 2020 12:00am
Creating the Wildeverse
13 May 2020 12:00am
Introductions
15 February 2016 8:13am
26 June 2018 10:58am
Hi - my name is Rogue Marechal, founder of HAL-13, a game board publisher specifically interesting in connecting the gaming community to the world and challenges of wildlife conservation.
Our first game, Serengeti: A Race For Life is an attempt to raise players/consumers awareness to the importance of biodiversity, by emphasizing the need to study and protect a wide range of species, as a means to help the enrire ecosystem.
By joining this community, I’m hoping to gain useful insight into wildlife protection, to enrich my knowledge of this field, and feed it back into my game designs.
Applications of AR/MR for Wildlife Conservation
22 December 2017 6:10am
Pokemon Go concepts for wildlife conservation
14 July 2016 10:10am
14 July 2016 10:47am
Hi Gautam,
Really interesting idea, thanks for sharing the post. Although this isn't quite the expansive action plan identified in the piece, it reminded me of the #pokeblitz hashtag that's sprung up in parallel with the Pokemon Go frenzy. If you find an actual creature while playing #PokemonGO, you can tweet pic with #PokeBlitz & experts will help you identify it! It seems to me to be a nice first step for 'making pokemon go real'.
Cheers,
Steph
4 August 2016 5:26pm
'Pokémon-Go players could capture 400 years of wildlife sightings in 6 days' - what an incredible figure! Like you, @mygshah , and Jordan, Dr Tom August has also been thinking about how Pokemon go could be applied to conservation:
http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/blogs/pok%C3%A9mon-go-players-could-capture-400-years-wildlife-sightings-6-days
6 August 2016 2:25am
Yes - good points in there about why traditional attempts at these attempts have hit a ceiling - we have some great approaches to that - will have some prototypes to share very soon, but happy to tell people about these ideas if interested.
Gaming with real data
4 January 2016 11:55am
11 June 2022 4:42pm
We've actually been looking into NFC to automatically provision field devices to set/read/store metadata. We're staring down the barrel of a large deployment and metadata is one of the issues that we think really needs automation. We're thinking of having a dedicated device to write and read the tags that would go on the devices as stickers and automagically sync the metadata with the database. An added bonus would be that most recently modern phones support NFC protocols like NTAG or MiFare Classic. That would mean that they could also be both read and written with the GPS coordinates, timestamp, etc as they're deployed in the field. It's still under discussion with the many other things that need to be implemented, though. I do think it's interesting that what we're seeing in a lot of conservation technology applications is not just a need for new technology but also the less exciting but more practical need for things that improve productivity like automating metadata management.