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WILDLABS logoWildlabs.net : The conservation technology network

Group

Geospatial / Feed

Geospatial data and analysis are critical for conservation, from planning to implementation and measuring success. The Geospatial group focuses on all aspects of this field, from field surveys to remote sensing and data development/analysis to GIS systems. The ability to visualize and analyze spatial data underpins many areas of conservation, this group may serve as a landing point and gateway for those new to conservation technology. 

Group curators

discussion

Getting behavioral data out of datasets that weren't built for it

Maggie Bliss

16 June 2026 3:49pm

Burning question:There's so much monitoring data already- camera trap archives, acoustic recordings, GPS tracks - but almost all of it was collected to answer presence/absence or...

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Peter Apps

10 July 2026 12:55pm

I have tens of thousands of camera trap bycatch African mammal videos that are available for analysis to anyone who can turn them into published papers, data that is actually useful for conservation, or publicity for wildlife and conservation.

They are already manually sorted into carnivores / herbivores and the carnivores are sorted and/or tagged to species. I do not have the resources to do anything further with them. 

 

 

Maggie Bliss

14 July 2026 1:18am

Peter, this is a generous offer - thank you. A dataset that's already sorted carnivore/herbivore with carnivores tagged to species is a real head start, and the fact that it's bycatch from another purpose is exactly the kind of "data built for one question, useful for another" material I've been thinking about.

A few questions to figure out fit: what capture mode are the videos - continuous clips, triggered bursts, fixed intervals? And roughly how long are the clips? I'm interested in whether there's enough temporal continuity to read behavior (time budgets, activity sequences), not just presence/absence. Also curious which species are best represented, and what any reuse would look like on your end in terms of credit and terms.

I'd genuinely like to explore turning some of this into something publishable and conservation-useful. Would you be open to a direct conversation off-thread?

Warmly,
Maggie

Maggie Bliss

14 July 2026 1:27am

Kim, this is great - thank you for sharing it. And to answer directly: yes, footage like this is genuinely useful for behavioral work, precisely because a continuous clip establishes a whole ecological scene rather than a single detection.

What's nice here is the range of behavior visible at once. The mother is engaged in what looks like foraging, while the juveniles are showing enrichment behaviors - exploratory, playful, curious, moving freely and not staying tethered to her. Posture and pose carry a lot of the signal too: tail position, body orientation, how attention is directed. That's the kind of thing you can only read when you have temporal continuity and enough frame to see the whole animal.

One question it raises - and this is exactly the interpretive challenge I find interesting - is whether the mother is actually foraging or "reading" the landscape through scent, which looks similar on camera but means something quite different behaviorally. Disambiguating those is where the real work is.

I'd love to hear more about your setup and how much footage like this you're generating. Continuous thermal at this quality, running for months, is a valuable stream.

Maggie

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discussion

Looking To Connect: Game Developer to Conservation Tech (Built Animal Movement App)

Kristof Klipfel

3 December 2025 1:10am

Hi everyone! My name is Kristof.I'm a game technology developer transitioning into conservation tech, and I'm so excited to have discovered this community - I honestly had no idea...

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Don F. Becker

20 April 2026 4:05am

I am glad to see more programmers coming into the conservation field.  The first big project I did that really got me involved with conservation work, was taking the path finding algorithms I used from learning game programming, and using them to detect and measure the distance of routes that turtles traveled up and down streams in a river drainage.  

Kim Hendrikse

20 April 2026 7:39am

Wolves, cool!

Will this then need collared wolves ?

Ferruge

1 July 2026 11:25pm

Hi Kristof!

It's been quite some time since you made this post, and I hope you're doing well.

I'm an environmental scientist currently working on a project to teach children living near a national park the basics of game development through conservation science focused on the biodiversity of the atlantic forest. I came across your post and thought it would be wonderful to chat with you, if you're still available and interested.

Let me know—I’d love to hear from you!

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discussion

London Climate Action Week 2026 Conservation Technology Related Events?

Elsa

15 June 2026 2:23pm

Hello, I am trying to put together a list of conservation technology (particularly Remote Sensing & GIS related) events happening during London Climate Action Week....

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Keenan Johnson

16 June 2026 11:20pm

Yes I've just moved to London actually and would love to attend as many events as I can. 

Elsa

21 June 2026 1:10pm

I'd reccomend EO Summit, although this is sort of a stand-alone conference: https://londonclimateactionweek.org/event/eo-summit-2026/ and these two look super interesting too:

If you end up going would be great to have a summary! :)

 

Akiba

22 June 2026 6:22am

I’ll be at LCAW but unfortunately can’t make this event. Posting it here in case others might be interested. 

Lcaw

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Link

Combining remote sensing and local perspectives uncovers divergent ecosystem service change in the Lower Omo, Ethiopia

Elsa

21 June 2026 10:45am

These findings demonstrate that bridging participatory perspectives and remote sensing improves ES assessments by revealing distributional impacts often obscured by top-down analyses. The approach offers a replicable framework for producing socially differentiated, landscape-...

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2665972726001741?via%3Dihub
discussion

ADD SOME QGIS ZHUSH

Vance Russell

18 June 2026 11:39am

For the longest time, I just thought adding cool border effects to a vector file was the domain of ArcGis Pro or that it was easiest to do there. I was wrong. Here are a couple of...

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Link

Global drivers of forest loss at 1 km resolution - Version 1.3

Elsa

13 June 2026 11:42am

Global map of the dominant driver of tree cover loss at 0.01° resolution (~1km) for the period 2001-2025. This is the latest update for this dataset.

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careers

GIS Assistant (African Parks Network)

Elsa

12 June 2026 6:32pm

The GIS team is the focal point for all mapping and spatial data management activities within the landscape and plays a critical role in supporting land-use planning and decision-making. The GIS Assistant will work...

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discussion

WOOHOO ITS WORKING!! Tech finds undetected decades old Alien Invasive Parent Plants in indigenous forest!

Sean Hill

24 July 2025 12:21pm

Great news everyone!! In November 2024 GeoWing Academy scanned 239 hectares of forested valleys using an off-the-shelf DJI Phantom 4 drone. The resulting...

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Julia

5 May 2026 11:02pm

This is a very promising result. The use of drones for detecting invasive species demonstrates strong potential for improving monitoring efficiency and accuracy. In a country like Brazil, where ecosystems are significantly affected by invasive species such as Hovenia dulcis (Japanese raisin tree) and Pinus spp., this technology could become a valuable tool for early detection and management.

Sean Hill

29 May 2026 10:15am

It certainly is! The great thing about it too is that the aerial detections often lead to more ground detections when teams are locating the trees from the map data and by using the ground app, they are able to mark the locations and photograph the newly discovered aliens and sync it to the existing maps as well. This allows for truly comprehensive removal and monitoring data capture.

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discussion

Nature Tech Unconference - Anyone attending?

Elsa

8 March 2025 12:11pm

Hi all, anyone planning to attend the Nature Tech Unconference on 28th March at the London School of Economics Campus in London, UK? (the event is free to attend but...

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Elsa

13 May 2026 12:05pm

Myself and the Fauna & Flora Conservation Technology team will be there (@Chelsea_Smith  and @ugyenpenjor ) and also the WILDLABS team @HRees ! See you!

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careers

Ecological Data Scientist

Lacey Hughey

21 April 2026 9:22pm

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, with 21 museums and the National Zoo. This position is located in the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology...

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discussion

Data storage and Esri integration with Microsoft Azure

Leanne Tough

8 January 2025 10:30am

Hello! I'm wondering whether there's anyone on here who would be able to offer me some guidance on storing spatial data in Microsoft Azure, and how to integrate Esri products with...

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Mike Palko

13 March 2026 3:19pm

I'm interested in chatting about this if you are still looking.

Theresa Stratmann

24 March 2026 7:58am

Hi Leanne. 

As you mentioned, ArcGIS Pro is not meant to work with cloud storage solutions (

). Although you now can connect to raster and parquet files (

).  That is why we use ArcGIS Online to share geospatial data within our organization. You can get discounts for NGOs. Check in with your local ESRI organization (ESRI UK?), they also sometimes host events to help NGOs. While we also have access to Azure and Fabric, this does not seem the best place to store and access spatial data. Rather we push data to Fabric from ArcGIS Online as needed to incorporate into other datasets. 

 

Theresa

Mike Palko

8 April 2026 12:36pm

Interesting.  If you need help with any of this and can utilize my skillset, let me know.

Thanks, Mike

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discussion

Reproducible Builds in Software Development

Manish Gadhvi

8 September 2025 8:47pm

Hi Wildlabs — quick question for the community: how important is reproducibility in your day-to-day conservation tech work?A few prompts to help:How important is...

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Manish Gadhvi

3 April 2026 2:46pm

Hi Stephen,

My experience of Nix is limited unfortunately but I think it offers a lot of the same benefits. I'm an Emacs/Lisp fan so it's perfect for me :)

There is Cuirass, which is a Guix specific CI and build automation service and a pack command to create containers. It's nice to have everything linked with Guix rather than different systems/frameworks

I built a small POC to explain the benefits. 

Stephen Leard

3 April 2026 6:39pm

Makes sense, I thought there might be a Lisp preference factoring in there 🙂

Cuirass looks cool, I'm going to check it out, and the eco-pulse-monitor project looks great too, well done!

Related to AI sustainability, have you checked out any of the CodeCarbon tools by chance? I've been working on incorporating their library into our daily code tasks at work, seems like a worthwhile project - 

EcoLogits just joined CodeCarbon too I think, also neat - 

Thanks!

Manish Gadhvi

5 April 2026 10:10pm

Thank you. That looks great! I was trying to build something similar but, as usual, there's a Python library already :) I was leaning towards trying SLMs like llama.cpp

 

My end goal is to find ways to use this approach in animal conservation specifically. I'm looking at data sets from the IUCN to see what's possible. I'd love to hear more about your work

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Link

Closing the Information Gap: Earth Observation puts evidence in the hands of Kenya’s conservancy managers

Elsa

4 April 2026 5:34pm

In Kenya’s arid and semi-arid north, where livelihoods depend on healthy rangelands and reliable water, conservation managers need reliable data. The Isiolo County Conservancies Association (ICCA) is putting Earth observation analytics to work to close the information gap and...

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Link

Coastal carbon and fishery assessment in Madagascar and Comoros Satellites supporting coastal resilience in Madagascar

Elsa

4 April 2026 5:17pm

Ecosystems are under pressure from environmental change and human activity, while data to support decision-making remains limited. An initiative supported by the Global Development Assistance demonstrated how satellite Earth observation provides insights for coastal management.

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