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Marine Conservation / Feed

Bringing together many of our community's tech types like bioacoustics, biologging, drones, remote sensing, machine learning, and more, the Marine Conservation group is a meeting point to begin innovative collaborations and answer difficult questions.

discussion

Wishlist for kit in a field-based Research Station or tech testing space?

Stephanie O'Donnell

27 November 2023 10:41am

Hi wildlabbers!A colleague is looking to crowdsource some advice: what would be on your wishlist for kitting out a field based space for research and tech development?...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

28 November 2023 3:25am

Regine Weckauf over on linkedin: 

'Little to do with research and tech development, but given how hard it is to attract and retain experienced staff to field based positions, I know it makes a difference how nice the space is. Just because it's the "field", shouldn't mean staff living in basic conditions, regardless of how many times we've been told to see it as a badge of honor. If you have the money, put in nice bathrooms, kitchen, living spaces, and private accommodation. Maybe even a nursery? It creates more local employment opportunities and people genuinely want to visit.'

 

Carly Batist

28 November 2023 2:25pm

Love the idea for in-house gear/supplies! It can be SOO difficult to travel with batteries, electronics parts with airline regs, country policies, etc. and shipping recorders/trail cams/etc. gets VERY (prohibitively) pricey in some countries with customs and taxes. Would be great to have an in-country place to source that kind of equipment. 

Housing educational resources related to that tech (in the form of people, print materials, computer tutorials) in-house would be similarly awesome. Particularly/especially in local languages.   

Having in-country wet labs as well helps the eDNA/genetics folks, since sample import/export permitting can be (always seems to be?!) a nightmare, so if you can even just do PCR and/or extractions in-country that helps a ton. 

In terms of overall field-station-wishlist - honestly, just the promise of continued funding and staff. Every field station I've been to or worked at is in a constant search for enough money to get through the next month/year, because the funding comes in the establish a station but then not to maintain it long-term. It's not sexy for a wishlist per se, but boy is it over-looked and much-needed. 

@hikinghack from Dinalab would probably have lots of good insights on this! 

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discussion

Hydromoth for coastal & offshore surveying

Sol Milne

16 November 2023 7:36am

Hi all! I'm interested in deploying a Hydromoth on an Uncrewed Surface Vehicle (USV) to collect acoustic data for biodiversity analysis, for coastal and offshore marine surveys....

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Harold Tay

18 November 2023 1:47am

Hi Sol,

I think your concern is well placed.  The pros typically tow an array of hydrophones, in its simpler configuration it looks like a long fat rubber hose containing maybe a dozen transducers feeding their electrical signals to a recording unit back on the ship.  All this is done to reduce noise from the ship, from waves crashing, and flow noise.  The multiple transducers can also be electronically tuned to be directional so that it can be "pointed" away from a noise source (like the ship).

In your position, I would just try the simplest thing that could work, then fix the problems as they arise.  It could be you may need to be dead in the water while recording.  To address surface noise (slapping waves, wind), you could mount the hydromoth low down on a spar buoy, which you tow into position.

 

Best of luck, it sounds like an interesting project (c:

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article

Researching Seagrass Habitats Along the Kenyan Coast 

Susana Wachia Kihia

14 November 2023 6:47pm

Engaging in seagrass conservation research along the Kenyan coast with dynamic approaches that integrate the skills I gained from the WiCT Training as part of my Master’s (by thesis) in Zoology program at Stellenbosch...

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Link

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

Cleo Graf

7 November 2023 1:01pm

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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Welcome to Insight

Wildlife crime refers to any illegal activity that involves the taking, trading, or possession of wild animals and plants, or their parts and derivatives.

Insight
Link

Correspondence among multiple methods provides confidence when measuring marine protected area effects for species and assemblages

Stephanie O'Donnell

20 October 2023 12:28pm

When considering MPA groundfish monitoring methods: the more, the merrier! New paper out in Journal of Applied Ecology compared three MPA monitoring techniques commonly utilised to survey groundfish populations. They found that using multiple methods was the best approach.

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Link

Marine Flyways - Seabird Tracking Database

Stephanie O'Donnell

20 October 2023 12:23pm

To celebrate #WMBD, BirdLife is excited to share the newly identified Marine Flyways!! Seabird tracking data were shared by over 60 researchers from 48 long-distance migratory species and have revealed SIX MarineFlyways. They've created an awesome animation to go along with it!

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discussion

What Biologgers are you using?

Holly Cormack

30 August 2023 10:44am

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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Stephanie O'Donnell

7 September 2023 10:57am

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? 

Stephanie O'Donnell

7 September 2023 11:00am

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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careers

Senior Spatial Ecologist

The Charles Darwin Foundation

24 August 2023 11:22pm

The Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands (CDF) is recruiting a Senior Spatial Ecologist to join our shark research team and strengthen the ongoing long-term research on shark population ecology and...

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careers

Reviewing Now: Animal Telemetry Postdoctoral Fellowship

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

24 August 2023 11:09pm

The Smithsonian Institution seeks a field- and data-oriented biologist to support marine animal telemetry research and to assist with activities of the Atlantic Cooperative Telemetry (ACT) Network. 

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article

#Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Judges' Panel Honorees

WILDLABS Team

4 August 2023 10:00am

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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discussion

360 Camera for Marine Monitoring

Sol Milne

25 July 2023 8:54am

Hi all, I'm trying to set up a low-cost, 360 camera for underwater use. The main criteria are:1. It needs to run for 1 week, with 3* 2 hour intervals of recording per day,...

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Xavier Mouy

28 July 2023 7:43pm

Hi Sol,

For my research on fish, I had to put together a low-cost camera that could record video for several weeks. Here is the design I came up with

At the time of the paper, I was able to record video for ~12 hours a day at 10 fps and for up to 14 days. With new SD cards now, it is pushed to 21 days. It costs about 600 USD if you build it yourself. If you don't want to make it yourself, there is a company selling it now, but it is much more expensive. The FOV is 110 degrees, so not the 360 that you need, but I think there are ways to make it work (e.g. with the servo motor). 

Happy to chat if you decide to go this route and/or want to brainstorm ideas.

Cheers,

Xavier 

Sol Milne

3 August 2023 2:32am

Hi Xavier, this is fantastic! Thanks for sharing, the time frame is really impressive and really in line with what we're looking for. I'll send you a message.

Cheers,

Sol

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discussion

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

Stephanie O'Donnell

12 July 2023 3:40pm

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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Stephanie O'Donnell

12 July 2023 3:58pm

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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