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Human-Wildlife Conflict / Feed

Human-wildlife conflict is a significant challenge that only grows as habitats shrink and other issues like climate change alter the natural world. Technologies like biologging gear have become essential for proactively addressing human-wildlife conflict before it escalates, and tech projects that seek to understand population ranges and behaviour can help people learn to live with wildlife as part of our own environments. If you're interested in using technology to prevent human-wildlife conflict, this group is the place for you!

discussion

Instant Detect 2.0 and related cost

I am doing a research project on rhino poaching at Kruger National Park. I was impressed with the idea of Instant Detect 2.0. I do not know the cost involved with installing that...

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Hi Kaarthika, hi all,

ZSL's Instant Detect 2.0 is currently undergoing Beta testing with external partners and so is still pre-production. We therefore do not have final pricing for the system. 

Saying this, we have got a manufacturing partner fully set-up who has already completed two full build rounds of the system, one in 2020 and another in 2023. This means we actually have a very good idea of the system's build costs and what these are likely to be when we can manufacture the system in volume.

While I cannot release this pricing yet, I am confident that we will have an unparalleled proposition.

In particular, the satellite airtime package we can supply to conservationists due to the generosity of the Iridium Satellite Company means that each system can send 3,600 (25-50KB) images a month from anywhere in the world for a single fixed fee. This equates to around a 97% discount to the normal commercial rates. 

We are currently very busy fundraising so that we can make this final step to scale the system. 

If we can secure this funding, we hope to go into volume production by mid-2024.

Best wishes,

Sam

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Link

Insight; a secure online platform designed for sharing experiences of conservation tool use.

A secure platform designed for those working to monitor & protect natural resources. Insight facilitates sharing experience, knowledge & tools to increase efficiency & effectiveness in conservation. By sharing we reduce time & money spent to find, test, & implement solutions.

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How 400km solar-powered fence reduces human-wildlife conflict - The Standard

An electric, solar-powered fence erected by the Rhino Ark Charitable Trust partnering with the Kenya Wildlife Service completed in 2009 evolved into the longest conservation barrier that safeguards vital forests in the Aberdare Conservation Area fostering peaceful coexistence.

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discussion

Seismic detectors

Hello community, Is anyone familiar with, or using, seismic detection technology to prevent HWC? At WWF, we have been looking into the possibility of using devices with seismic...

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Hi Nilaksha,

Congratulations! That is great news! Please do keep us posted on how it goes and do let us know if you need varied field sites in which to test the tools. @Teun , how's your prototype coming along?

Best,

Nilanga

Dear all, any update on this subject?

 

All the best.

Hi Antoine, 
Sorry about the late reply. The field trials were abandoned mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We're planning to improve our prototype and conduct field trials in this December. I'll post an update here. 
regards

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careers

ZSL Research Fellow (x3 roles)

Zoological Society of London
The Institute of Zoology (IoZ), the research division of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), is seeking to fill three new permanent positions by recruiting outstanding early-career researchers as Research Fellows (...

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discussion

What Biologgers are you using?

Hello biologging community!My name is Holly Cormack and I’m the new Conservation Technology Intern in the WILDLABS team. We are researching what different...

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Interesting. interesting. I'm probably jumping the gun here but I'm curious - are you getting any trends on types of biologgers or specific manufacturers people are talking about? Or is everyone using different tags/manufacturers? 

Ah! It's great to find out about your tags - great video, thanks for sharing. We'd love to hear from some of your users about their experiences with your tags! Would you be able to share the poll with your user community? 

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discussion

Ai monitoring of wolves in the Netherlands

Hi,Is anyone involved in monitoring of wolves with AI object detection in the Netherlands or who would like to?The other day I went to visit someone in Meersen who was worried...

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That's cool, that looks to be a yolov8 based model with a python interface. This means that in theory it should be not so hard (Within a day) to make a websocket wrapper around it and then it can be easily integrated into my state management and alerting system.

I'll take a look at that this weekend

Hi @kimhendrikse, interesting stuff! I'm currently working on a detection system for desert lions in Namibia. Not exactly the same as it will analyse images afterwards on a local machine instead of in real time, but still. For this I use MegaDetector to detect the animals and a yolov8 classifier to further classify them into lion or non-lion (just like the deepfaune project). 

If you're looking for camera trap images of wolves, LILA BC has around 5500 images classified as wolf (Canis lupus, shots taken from North America). If you want to include domestic dog, they have more than 10k images available (Canis familiaris, shots taken from various places on earth). Usually, If I need training data I run MegaDetector over these LILA BC images with a high threshold (±0.7) and square crop them. That should give you quite some training data to train a wolf/dog classifier. MegaDetector is also really good in detecting people, so you would get that for free. 

Anyway, I live in Utrecht and would love to be involved in this project. Maybe get in touch and meet? [email protected] 

Ah really nice!

And thanks for reaching out. I'd be very much interested in catching up. With your background in yolov8 I'm sure that we could integrate deepfaune into the project within a day. And you can tell me about the image training you are involved with. I'll PM you.

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discussion

Thermal cameras for monitoring visitors in highly vulnerable conservation areas

Hi everybody, Im Alex González, a consultant and researcher in sustainable tourism and conservation. I'm currently consulting a conservation organisation for the development...

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Hi,

I have been involved in people detection tech for more than 10 years and have an open source project that uses CNN computer vision for object detection and alerting, including people (

I also have several thermal cameras here. note, the people detection can also work fine on thermal images. Mostly I've stopped using thermal cameras because normal cameras work so well with modern models that they no longer have an advantage perse. If you really need to detect people in pitch darkness though, using a thermal camera in combination with image detection would be better than just thermal movement detection.

Let me know if I can help in any way. I know this is quite an old post though.

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article

In case you missed it... (no. 1)

Five #tech4wildlife people, projects and updates that caught our attention this month. An AI supported bear early warning system, a project that's connecting indigenous communities with high speed internet, exploring...

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Hi Steph! Nice with this "sporadic series"! The bear alarm in China reminds me of the Bear Repeller by the Hack the Planet guys:/Lars
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Alibaba Cloud's Geo Fencing System in the Mara

Wilson Sairowua, Tracking Manager at Mara Elephant Project (MEP) narrates how tech4change, Alibaba Cloud's Geo Fencing System paired with collaring has helped to mitigate human-elephant conflict across Maasai Mara and has facilitated a 72% increase in elephants in the Mara region

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Born Free Uses Smart Maps to Save Lions, Solve Human-Wildlife Conflict

Location intelligence helps Born Free Kenya understand where communities and lions are in conflict. Outreach to fortify cattle corrals is guided by smart maps and spatial analysis.

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Human-Elephant Conflict Tech Solution in Tsavo: NdovuCare

Sandra Maryanne
Read our interview with Sandra Maryanne, a young conservation tech innovator raised in Taita, Ivarenyi with first-hand experience on the challenges of human-elephant conflict within her community. To address this, she...

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discussion

Interested in being part of the Enduata Emaa CBO's Green Planet Ambassadors Project in Amboseli? 

About the Enduata Emaa Community Based OrganizationEnduata Emaa Community-based Organization was founded in 2021 by its Chairman Samuel...

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@richardturere Hello :) and a warm welcome to WILDLABS! Here is the link to @Lekato Samuel Lekato - Founder and Chairman, Enduata Emaa CBO. Sam is interested in conservation technology focused on how to keep wild animals away from community homesteads in Amboseli and I reckon your Lion Lights could help. I'll let you two take on the conversation from here. Thanks! 

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discussion

Human/animal detection/alerting

Hi all, I've just discovered this site. I have an open source project that would be ideally suited for helping in human/wildlife conflict situations. The project is actually an...

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Hi Kim! 

Welcome to Wildlabs!

This looks like an amazing project! I see multiple uses for our ecosystem monitoring in Greenland - both for the research/monitoring part but also for safety - polar bears roaming around camp!

I will look into your github and may get back to you!

Cheers,

Lars 

Super, nice to hear. BTW, this project appears new, but it's been in operation b yseveral parties for more than 10 years, so it's mature.

No one is playing with it yet as I only just released it to open source last year. However, it was evolved since 2008 and the main state machine was almost the same as it is now in 2011. I added the the AI computer vision in 2019.

I believe it has a lot of features that make it practical to use, particularly as I'm using the best available object detectors for example, but also they way I make the state control very flexible. Just waiting for some people to try it :)

BTW, I've been adding support for the latest Orin Jetson series SBCs but still have to come back to finishing this release off. I've been somewhat distracted with my audio localization project which I want to finish to the point of releasing and and writing it up before finishing the Jetson Orin release of the security project.

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discussion

Automated Elephant-detection system

Hi everyone, I thought I would introduce my automated elephant-detection system, that I have been working on over the summer for the hackaday prize. It was a finalist in...

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Hi,

This is rakesh kalva from India. I have been working on human-elephant conflict in the state of Andhra Pradesh for the past 5 years. This is a cool idea. I have used camera traps to identify movement and individual elephants for demographic data. 

Some field based observations of using camera traps for elephants:

1. I usually place the camera traps on forest paths and many of the images we captured wernt of the complete elephant. Its just the legs and trunk. Wont that effect the detection by the software as to wether its an elephant or not?

2. In case of flash cameras , quite a lot of our cameras got damaged by elephants. So we were going for IR cameras. WIll it work for IR cameras as well?

3. Another issue is with the cameras being stolen by locals or poachers.

4. So we gave up all this and are using a simple trip technology with a switch attached to a door bell attached to a rope placed at a height of 7-8 feet. In this landscape no other animal is at this heigh so when the alarm is triggered we know its an elephant.

5. Elephants operate in a large territor, so will it be feasable to use this technology? 

But there are some interesting research questions that can be answered with this technology you are developing. Kindly let me know if i can be of any help on field.

 

Regards,

Rakesh Kalva

Wildlife Biologist

Hi Neil,

I am a project manager for Zoological Society of London's Thailand Programme. We work in the southern Western Forest Complex of Thailand, which is a large landscape of relatively contiguous forest surrounded by development and agriculture and thus rife with human-elephant conflict. We are currently looking to co-develop or pilot low-cost cameras or acoustic sensors for real-time detection of elephants at HEC hotspots within the landscape. Current issues we've been facing are high rates of non-target stimuli triggers which clog up the cloud (so the automated classification of elephants would be useful to limit notifications) and the high cost of conventional cellular camera systems. I am curious to know the current status of your Elephant AI system. The most recent update I've found on your hackaday is of the combination with a deterrence system, which is very promising. Feel free to email me at [email protected] or reply to this message.

Cheers,

Juliana

What's the definition of low cost really? Using various cnn models for objection detection the results can be very accurate. The costs would vary. The cheapest Jetson Nano (Old model) is about 150 euros but case, SSD and camera and it can run yolov4 full model, 416x416 image size.

However, if you go the next step, the jetson Nano orin, then you start about 500-700 euros for the board, but the model can run a full size yolov6 model which is extremely good. Elephants are so unique looking, you could likely eliminate all false positives.

You would need to attach cellular modems or something like that I expect but these sound like a different thing to a cellular camera system that you mention and thus likely a lot cheaper.

The Jetson SBC's do use quite a lot of power.

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