Despite critical advancements in the tech solutions available to conservationists around the world, many existing tools are cost-prohibitive in the landscapes that need them most. Additionally, those who create low-cost and open-source alternatives to pricey market tech are often operating on tight budgets themselves, meaning they have limited resources for the promotion of their solutions to a wider market. We need increased communication around these solutions to highlight their availability, share lessons learned in their creation, and avoid duplication of efforts.
This group is a place to share low-cost, open-source devices for conservation; describe how they are being used, including what needs they are addressing and how they fit in to the wider conservation tech market; identify the obstacles in advancing the capacity of these technologies; and to discuss the future of these solutions - particularly their sustainability and how best to collaborate moving forward.
Header image: Shawn F. McCracken
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- @LucyD
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Software developer and wildlife ecologist
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- @Angele
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Working on IPLCs and applying data/geospatial tools for a conservation/carbon forestry project in the Philippines 🌿
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Freaklabs
I'm an engineer and product designer working on wildlife conservation technology.
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- @snapshot_serengeti
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Fauna & Flora
Conservation, Innovation, Education
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Woods Hole Group
Argos satellite system manager for North America
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- @shana
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I am a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. I am a researcher with the eDNA Collaborative and Co-Director of the Pacific Marine Energy Center.
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Wildlife Ecologist
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- @StephODonnell
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WILDLABS
I'm the Community Manager at WILDLABS
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Careers
Permanent and Full Time role at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
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November 2023
event
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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It's certainly possible that your camera(s) just aren't embedded structured metadata for this information. But I wouldn't give up too quickly on looking for it, because... |
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Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools, Open Source Solutions, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 hour 59 minutes ago | |
It will be great if there were different plug-in boards that would allow the researcher to connect any form of communication: ICARUS, Argos, Iridium, Globalstar, GSM, etc. I think... |
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Biologging, Open Source Solutions | 3 weeks 2 days ago | |
This was one of my all time favourite Variety Hour talks! @wschan gave us an awesome walk through the open-source low cost acceleratometer... |
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Biologging, Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 1 month 3 weeks ago | |
Hey everyone!I am brand new to conservation technology and I am trying to find my way. I currently work in a different field and want to... |
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AI for Conservation, Climate Change, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Drones, Early Career, Earth Observation 101 Community, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Remote Sensing & GIS, Sensors, Software and Mobile Apps | 2 months 2 weeks ago | |
ooh very cool Salman! Amazing how much tracking devices have come down in price over the years and LoRa/LoRawan is just such a perfect fit for GPS data. Thanks heaps for sharing.... |
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Build Your Own Data Logger Community, Open Source Solutions | 2 months 3 weeks ago | |
Hello Everyone! My name is Claire and I work as a Field Technician and Veterinarian for Arribada Initiative, check out our upcoming... |
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Marine Conservation, Open Source Solutions | 4 months 2 weeks ago | |
Hi all! I am a mechanical engineer working in the Aerospace Engineering department at a University, and I have the opportunity to take over... |
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Emerging Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Marine Conservation, Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 4 months 3 weeks ago | |
There is the Conservation Tech Directory! There's an 'open-source' tag you can search by too. |
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Open Source Solutions, Software and Mobile Apps | 4 months 3 weeks ago | |
Hi everyone! and thanks @StephODonnell for the invite :)I’m a software engineer working on MLOps, and currently studying for a part-time... |
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AI for Conservation, Open Source Solutions | 7 months 1 week ago | |
Yes, but for our needs that are not powerful enough |
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Acoustics, Build Your Own Data Logger Community, Camera Traps, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions | 8 months ago | |
Hi Andrea! Although I am a keen user and observer of the Moveapps initiative, my R or Python coding skills are next to non- existing. I am therefore not likely to be contributing... |
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Biologging, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Open Source Solutions, Software and Mobile Apps | 8 months 3 weeks ago | |
Hi Titus,If the usual syntactic foam sources aren't available, an option may be to add an empty dry housing or use a larger housing for the BRUV, just to provide the buoyancy.You... |
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Camera Traps, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions | 9 months 2 weeks ago |
Automatic extraction of temperature/moon phase from camera trap video
29 November 2023 1:15pm
29 November 2023 4:28pm
It's certainly possible that your camera(s) just aren't embedded structured metadata for this information. But I wouldn't give up too quickly on looking for it, because extracting it from actual video frames is more challenging, less efficient, and less reliable.
EXIF / IPTC metadata is effectively limited to a finite set of pre-defined attributes, mostly centred around camera settings & author information, respectively. You can check the latest specification to see precisely what is formally defined. Ambient temperature actually is in there (and has been for a while) but there's nothing for astronomical data (although, can you not infer the moon phase based on the location & time data?).
It is alas a long-running issue that camera makers often misunderstand the specification and store data incorrectly (or not at all).
Camera makers can embed proprietary data in MakerNote fields, but the format is unspecified and standard tools (like exiftool) likely won't understand them for all but the most popular cameras (think Nikon, Canon, Sony, etc). And possibly only for older models.
Many common image & video containers (e.g. JPEG and MP4) do support embeded XMP, an extensible format which allows model- and make-specific metadata. It's possible that's in use in your case. exiftool does not show embedded XMP data by default - at least not reliably. In a nutshell, I suggest running exiftool as:
exiftool -D -g -G -ee -scanForXMP -u -U <PATH>
That's more likely to show you embedded XMP data, as well as all EXIF / IPTC tags (even those unrecognised by exiftool - you can at least get their raw bytes and work from there). You can also add the `-v3` argument if you want to dig even harder, or see the raw data in more detail.
Another way some cameras store proprietary metadata is in proprietary tracks (e.g. GPMF for GoPros). You can see if your files contain any such tracks via:
ffmpeg -i <PATH>
Usually these are used for metadata which can change during a recording, as EXIF / IPTC / XMP have no real support for that. But some camera makers use them even for static metadata out of e.g. laziness or hubris.
Extracting such tracks is easy enough with tools like ffmpeg, but interpreting them can be challenging if their format is not documented like GoPro's GPMF.
Can you provide a sample file for us to examine?
Open-source kinetic energy harvesting collar - Kinefox
1 November 2023 5:31pm
3 November 2023 2:24pm
Hi Thomas !
Thanks for sharing! I know one of the Danish authors of the KInefox paper. It is very cool stuff and we hope to one day use something like this on muskoxen in Greenland.
Some of the limitations are obviously the relatively limited number of daily fixes. Also, we would probably need satellite based communication, but since the authors from Max Planck are also heavilly involved in the https://www.icarus.mpg.de/en project, I hope this kinetic energy harvesting gets incorporated in the satellite based ICARUS trackers one day.
The article you linked to refered to this paper with a dizzying list of recent energy harvesting studies:

Recent progress in energy harvesting systems for wearable technology
This paper provides a comprehensive review of the recent progress made in energy harvesting systems for wearable technology. An energy-harvesting syst…
It also seems well worth a look.
3 November 2023 3:11pm
This is very cool @ThomasGray_Argos !! I tried years ago to build a benchtop version of something similar, using a 'kinetic' torch assembly, but never got much further than some very crude designs. I even approached Seiko about their watch mechanisms, but in the they weren't interested...
It's really great to see this technology get applied and I hadn't heard of the Kinetron microgenerator the researchers used. They did a fantastic job designing their system and bonus points for releasing it all to open-source! The only thing I couldn't see were costs or a bill of materials (and I could've easily missed it), as I was keen to see how much the Kinetron microgenerator was. The hybrid capacitor they used was great value at AU$7.19.
My next project is to try harvesting radio waves using something like this:

AEM30940 Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting Power Management IC
RF energy harvesting IC AEM30940 is a new generation solution for harvesting radio frequency energy at ultra-low-power. We make your batteries last forever.

Urban environments might have enough ambient sources of radio waves that no additional transmission stations are needed, but for remote locations, purpose-built transmitters could work for critters that have defined, and relatively small home ranges.
Anyway Thomas, thanks heaps for sharing and very interesting and encouraging.
Rob
6 November 2023 3:47pm
It will be great if there were different plug-in boards that would allow the researcher to connect any form of communication: ICARUS, Argos, Iridium, Globalstar, GSM, etc. I think for an open-source product, it would be far more value to not self limit.
PiCAM: A Raspberry Pi-based open-source, low-power camera system for monitoring plant phenology in Arctic environments
1 November 2023 5:34pm
Lead Data Engineer - Climate Solutions, Open Earth
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20 October 2023 1:31pm
Unravelling freshwater turtle activity with an open source, low-cost accelerometer
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Looking for Opportunities to Shadow Field Technologists in Southeast Asia
13 September 2023 4:11am
Experience with SeeedStudio T1000 as tracker and data logger.
4 September 2023 1:42pm
8 September 2023 4:37pm
ooh very cool Salman! Amazing how much tracking devices have come down in price over the years and LoRa/LoRawan is just such a perfect fit for GPS data. Thanks heaps for sharing.
All the best,
Rob
CIEEM 2023 Autumn Conference: Modernising Ecology: Techniques and Approaches
5 September 2023 1:59pm
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AI for Eagles Challenge
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pneumatic artificial muscle applications in conservation tech?
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New Add-ons for Mbaza AI
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Catalog of open source conservation projects
30 June 2023 4:40pm
3 July 2023 2:53am
There is the Conservation Tech Directory! There's an 'open-source' tag you can search by too.
Making Waves: Open Hardware as a Solution to Scaling up Bycatch Mitigation
2 July 2023 11:24am
Sustained Effort: The Environmentalist’s Dilemma

21 June 2023 9:00am
PhD Position in Deep Learning for Biodiversity Monitoring: Custom Imaging Platform and Deep Learning to Classify and Phenotype Earthworms
21 June 2023 8:23am
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19 June 2023 10:54pm
The Wildlife Society Conference
19 June 2023 5:59am
Wildlife Monitoring Engineer
8 June 2023 4:54pm
Panthera: Monitoring Wildlife with Open-Source Data Management Tools

11 May 2023 5:52pm
Call for survey participants (AI/ML practitioners)
19 April 2023 3:17pm
Global shortage of Raspberry Pis - What are the alternatives
3 November 2022 10:27am
28 March 2023 9:37pm
Have you considered Arduinos?
29 March 2023 10:13am
UPDATE: The Banana Pi didnt work out for us as it was not possible to track back all the components and ensure that they were responsibly sourced. The Rock board did work for us and we were able to port our system onto this. We will be rolling out units using this over the summer. It also looks like Raspberry Pis are coming back on line and we were able to secure a bulk order for deliver mid-summer
29 March 2023 10:14am
Yes, but for our needs that are not powerful enough
$500 micro grants for open science events
10 March 2023 1:19pm
The gathering for open science hardware is giving up grants for people putting on events that promote open science hardware
A simple and free application!
https://forum.openhardware.science/t/usd-500-microgrants-available-for-…
Proposals wanted for Innovation in Practice

6 March 2023 10:34pm
29 November 2023 3:06pm
Hello Lyuboslava,
As you said, the first thing that came to mind was running a CV program to read the needed data. If the data does not change in the duration of the footage, then, in my humble opinion, it would be easiest to take a single frame from each clip and run an optical character recognition program to get the temperature.
The moon phase might pose a bit more of a challenge if the meta data truly is hidden. A different CNN program that is trained on the moon phases should suffice. But as you well know, not the simplest solution.