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Every day, mapping and spatial analysis are aiding conservation decisions, protected areas designation, habitat management on reserves and monitoring of wildlife populations, to name but a few examples. If you are excited by the ways in which GIS is used in conservation, this is the group for you!

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Leveraging Actuarial Skills for Conservation Impact

Hello Wildlabs Community,I'm an experienced actuary with a deep passion for wildlife and conservation. With over 15 years in the insurance industry, I've honed my skills in data...

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Hi Steph,

Thanks so much for welcoming me to WildLabs and for posing a question that really gets to the heart of what I believe I can offer to the community. 

Actuaries, by trade, are experts in risk management and financial forecasting, using data from the past to predict future trends and outcomes. But it's how this expertise can apply to conservation that's truly exciting to me.

For instance, consider coral reefs, vital ecosystems facing existential threats from climate change and human activities. An actuary could help by modelling the intricate dynamics between environmental factors and reef health, assessing the financial implications of their decline not just on local communities, but globally. This is similar to how we model financial risks and potential losses due to environmental changes in the insurance industry. It’s about understanding the value of conservation, not just in ecological terms, but also in clear financial language that can speak to both the public sector and private enterprises.

The innovative work within this community, from Sara Beery's advancements in computer vision to Ben Mirin's creative engagement with wildlife sounds, showcases the power of interdisciplinary approaches. I am in awe of these efforts and am keen to see where someone with my background in predictive analytics and financial impact assessment can fit in.

As a newcomer eager to contribute, I'm particularly interested in exploring projects where we can apply actuarial science to optimize conservation funding or model the economic benefits of preserving ecosystems like coral reefs. These models can help make a compelling case to stakeholders about the urgency of conservation efforts, bridging the gap between ecological necessity and financial strategy.

I’m here not just to bring my skills to the table, but to learn from all of you and find where I can best contribute to the incredible work being done here.

Looking forward to finding my place in this inspiring community.

Best regards, 

Ruhan

Hello again,

I’ve been reflecting further on our discussions and wanted to share another perspective that bridges our worlds. 

The insurance industry, particularly in property and casualty, which is a multi-trillion-dollar market globally, is facing unprecedented challenges due to environmental changes. Traditionally, insurers have relied on historical data to forecast future risks. However, the rapid pace of climate change is rendering centuries of data increasingly irrelevant, putting immense pressure on the industry to adapt quickly.

This situation presents an interesting parallel to conservation efforts. Just as insurers are now considering investments to mitigate environmental risks to protect their financial interests, there's a growing recognition that protecting natural habitats and biodiversity is not just an ethical imperative but also a financial necessity. The urgency that insurers feel to adapt and invest in mitigating climate risks mirrors the urgent need for action within conservation to prevent irreversible damage to ecosystems like coral reefs, forests, and more.

I wonder if there's an opportunity for a collaborative approach where conservation projects can align with the insurance industry's need to invest in environmental protection as a means of safeguarding their own future. Such projects could offer innovative, data-driven solutions to conservation challenges while also providing insurers with viable strategies to reduce their exposure to environmental risks.

I’m fascinated by the potential for our fields to collaborate, leveraging the financial muscle of the insurance industry to support conservation efforts on a scale that could make a significant difference. What are your thoughts on this? Could there be a space for actuaries in designing conservation strategies that also serve to mitigate future financial risks for insurers?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and exploring potential synergies.

Best, Ruhan

Hi Ruhan. 

Sent you a DM. It sounds interesting and possibly can intersect with our work in environmental and ecosystem monitoring. 

Thanks.

Akiba

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Jupyter Notebook: Aquatic Computer Vision

Dive Into Underwater Computer Vision Exploration OceanLabs Seychelles is excited to share a Jupyter notebook tailored for those intrigued by the...

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This is quite interesting. Would love to see if we could improve this code using custom models and alternative ways of processing the video stream. 

This definitely seems like the community to do it. I was looking at the thread about wolf detection and it seems like people here are no strangers to image classification. A little overwhelming to be quite honest 😂

While it would be incredible to have a powerful model that was capable of auto-classifying everything right away and storing all the detected creatures & correlated sensor data straight into a database - I wonder if in remote cases where power (and therefore cpu bandwidth), data storage, and network connectivity is at a premium if it would be more valuable to just be able to highlight moments of interest for lab analysis later? OR if you do you have cellular connection, you could download just those moments of interest and not hours and hours of footage? 

Am working on similar AI challenge at the moment. Hoping to translate my workflow to wolves in future if needed. 

We all are little overstretched but it there is no pressing deadlines, it should be possible to explore building efficient model for object detection and looking at suitable hardware for running these model on the edge. 

 

 

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Power managment/Recharging System and Communication System

As we know Power managment/Recharging System and Communication System are chalanges for forest, so any one please suggest the Device and Power source to monitor sound in forest...

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Power usage for microcontrollers with solar is  much more manageable. For Raspberry Pi's and higher it gets expensive and big.

I'm quite impressed by the specs from the Goal Zero Yeti devices. This can have high capacity and be charged with Solar. Not small though. And the price is not in proportion to the Pi's.

So this 200x model for example, would be close to 16 days running the audio recorder. Let's say 10. without solar. Add solar? Depends on the size of the panels I guess. Power usage for mobile networking? Depends on how much you transmit.

Probably some well documented experiments would be really nice for people here. Sounds like something nice for the next set of grants :)

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Need advice - image management and tagging 

Hello Wildlabs,Our botany team is using drones to survey vertical cliffs for rare and endangered plants. Its going well and we have been able to locate and map many new...

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I have no familiarity with Lightroom, but the problem you describe seems like a pretty typical data storage and look up issue.  This is the kind of problem that many software engineers deal with on a daily bases.  In almost every circumstance this class of problem is solved using a database.

In fact, a potentially useful analysis is that the Lightroom database is not providing the feature set you need.

It seems likely that you are not looking for a software development project, and setting up you own DB would certainly require some effort, but if this is a serious issue for your work, you hope to scale your work up, or bring many other participants into your project, it might make sense to have an information system that better fits your needs.

There are many different databases out there optimized for different sorts of things.  For this I might suggest taking a look at MongoDB with GridFS for a couple of reasons.

  1. It looks like you meta data is in JSON format.  Many DBs are JSON compatible, but Mongo is JSON native.  It is especially good at storing and retrieving JSON data.  Its JSON search capabilities are excellent and easy to use.  It looks like you could export your data directly from Lightroom into Mongo, so it might be pretty easy actually.
  2. Mongo with the GridFS package is an excellent repository for arbitrarily large image files.
  3. It is straightforward to make a Mongo database accessible via a website.
  4. They are open source (in a manner of speaking) and you can run it for free.

Disclaimer: I used to work for MongoDB.  I don't anymore and I have no vested interest at all, but they make a great product that would really crush this whole class of problem.

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Want to learn QGIS!

Hi Guys, I wanted some suggestions on GIS.As GIS applications are increasing day by day I wanted to learn this program, so how do I begin with as I am a beginner and have...

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Information to the young who are the future

All our efforts in conservation will be beneficial mostly to the the young. How are you making available your works to them? I try to provide information in simple and fun way to...

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Great work @CathyNj kindly check out the below opportunity. I reckon you may find it useful for your work. 

"Join Planet Ed and The Nature Conservancy for the Planet Media Call for Pitches to Shape the Future of Climate Education for Kids!" 

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What is your favorite package or software for visualizing animal tracking data?

Hi all,I manage a large research collaborative focused on conservation applications of animal tracking data (Smithsonian's Movement of Life Initiative).  I'm interested in...

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Seeking Host Organisations for Travel Scholarship Application

Hi all,I'm Eva, a final year undergraduate studying Joint Honours Biology and Geography at the University of St Andrews.  I've recently joined the WildLabs community in...

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Hi Eva, 

Me and my colleagues run a small NGO based on Yogyakarta in Indonesia, although our projects are spread around the country. One of our active project is working with the movement ecology of Sunda gharials in Berbak-Sembilang National Park. One of the other is for Malayan Giant Turtle conservation using one-plan approach, which we are planning to start in situ phase. We can't give you promise about anything, but are able to be the host organization and would love to talk the opportunity!

Cheers,

Dhanu

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Which market-available microphones, accelerometers and GIS sensors for dogs / pets ?

I have conducted an MSc thesis in data-science applied on bioacoustics data, and wish to carry on some experiments on my own now, using domestic environment as a lab.I am looking...

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good to know that GPS coordinates can be used to sync the time. 
Does GPS resolution allow to a desired time resolution (e.g. seconds) ? Does choice of time resolution significantly depends on the physiology of the animal (e.g. time of re-action to stimuli, hence less than a second) or for most animal communication and animal behaviour is it enough above a second? 
 

I am not an acoustics person but train and deploy canines in the field. Are you looking for something that records  sniff rate and patterns?  For GPS I just use a Garmin collar system Altha 100. There is a Conservation Canine group that might be worth asking your question in. 

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