GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, play a crucial role in nature conservation. 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. Want to learn more about how remote sensing is used in conservation? Check out the first two episodes of this season of Tech Tutors, where our Tutors answer the questions How do I use open source remote sensing data to monitor fishing? and How do I access and visualise open source remote sensing data in Google Earth Engine?
You can also check out our Virtual Meetup Archive for a range of panels that overlap with Remote Sensing & GIS topics.
Computer engineer, Drone Pilot, Seed researcher
- 1 Resources
- 30 Discussions
- 9 Groups
Certified Associate Wildlife Biologist
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 7 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 7 Groups
Conservation Technologist, National Geographic Explorer, and Founder of Conservify and FieldKit
- 0 Resources
- 5 Discussions
- 18 Groups
I am a Geo-ecologist, who loves to use GIS, remote sensing, citizen science and knowledge transfer to shape for a better future for nature - We are part of nature, so let's act like it!
- 1 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 4 Groups
I am a GIS Analyst currently working at Center for Ecosystem Restoration Kenya, a non-profit whose vision is to restore resilient and thriving ecosystems. I have a Bachelor's degree in Geoinformation Technology and I am looking to explore applications of GIS in Conservation.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 8 Groups
I'm a marine biologist working at Local Ocean Conservation as a marine research and data manager. I love exploring the wonders of the underwater world and learning about the amazing creatures that live there. I'm passionate about protecting our oceans and raising awareness.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 11 Groups
I'm a GIS and Remote Sensing specialist with a focus on conservation, currently working as a Visual Data Scientist. I'm passionate about leveraging AI tools to enhance conservation and environmental management efforts.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 6 Groups
Cofounder and CEO, Earth Species Project
- 1 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 1 Groups
WWF-Tanzania GIS Specialist/Developer/Trainer
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 5 Groups
I am the WILDLABS Southeast Asia Conservation Technology Intern
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 4 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 7 Groups
Come work with us! WILDLABS and Fauna & Flora are seeking an intern to help develop the movement ecology content on the Inventory - our wiki-inspired database of conservation technology. Accepting applications until...
6 June 2023
The Future Forest Company (FFC) team are looking for an enthusiastic, early career data and GIS administrator to join them. The role will manage spatial and operational data, with a particular focus on carbon from...
31 May 2023
1
Careers
We are a team of ecologists and technologists who believe good business must be good for nature. We’re building an economy that puts nature and business in balance by incentivising the restoration of nature at scale.
16 May 2023
2
We are a team of ecologists and technologists who believe good business must be good for nature. We’re building an economy that puts nature and business in balance by incentivising the restoration of nature at scale.
2 May 2023
Global Fishing Watch are looking for a data scientist to join the Research and Innovation team. Help us tackle geospatial data fusion problems to produce the most complete picture of human activity at sea.
19 April 2023
How to use geospatial data for rapid analyses of forest carbon projects
5 April 2023
How environmental consultancy Eticwood use geospatial data for rapid forest carbon project assessments
24 March 2023
Article
This technical workshop was recorded at the Esri Developer Summit 2021. Presenters use packages to make GIS workflows reproducible through code, work with spatial data and make relevant maps using open source packages...
21 March 2023
The Innovation in Practice edition of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is still seeking proposals about conservation technology
6 March 2023
1
Scholarships available for training courses focussing on nature restoration in East Africa
21 February 2023
1
The Zoological Society of London, with the support of WILDLABS and the UK Space Agency, are proud to publish this new guide to satellite technologies for tracking wildlife.
17 February 2023
2
3
July 2023
event
event
1
May 2023
event
event
April 2023
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
---|---|---|---|---|
Carly, that would be great! Thanks! I work with soundscapes and love the work of Rainforest Connection! I'll send you an email (@CUNY) to coordinate! |
|
Acoustic Monitoring, AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Drones, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech, Remote Sensing & GIS | 6 days 5 hours ago | |
Do you have a wild animal tracking story that involves adventure or misadventure? Share it with us! From going around in circles for hours... |
|
Biologging, Citizen Science, Drones, Remote Sensing & GIS | 2 weeks 3 days ago | |
I'm looking for any recommendations for any entry level/internship remote roles/companies in the United States that are focused in... |
|
AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Early Career, Remote Sensing & GIS | 1 month 2 weeks ago | |
Hi Jeremy, With a quick search I've found the paper linked below. It looks like equipments such as Livox MID are sufficient for plot-level analyses, but not for individual... |
|
Drones, Earth Observation 101 Community, Emerging Tech, Remote Sensing & GIS, Sensors | 2 months ago | |
Indeed, I'll be there too! I like to meet new conservation friends with morning runs, so I will likely organize a couple of runs, maybe one right near the conference, and... |
|
Acoustic Monitoring, AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps, Remote Sensing & GIS | 2 months ago | |
Thank you so much for your reply! I'll look in to this now :) |
|
Acoustic Monitoring, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools, Drones, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 2 months 1 week ago | |
Our project in very short is, setting up a sensor network for monitoring airborne biomass, mainly insects, birds and bats in near realtime, and to develop a forecast model to be... |
|
Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Biologging, Remote Sensing & GIS, Sensors | 2 months 2 weeks ago | |
Dear @gcamara , thank you so much for your elaborate reply. I am afraid, I am still overlooking something. Do I understand correctly, that the relationship between EO and local... |
|
Remote Sensing & GIS | 2 months 3 weeks ago | |
I'm curious to understand how people are using satellite data. What problems does satellite imagery solve for you?... |
|
Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 3 months ago | |
Hi all,I've been quickly developing in-house drone services in the UK for Providence Ecological and have found some useful information for building a workflow with Rich... |
+8
|
Remote Sensing & GIS, Drones | 3 months 1 week ago | |
Oh good call! I'll add that to our events calendar as well :) |
|
Remote Sensing & GIS, Sensors | 3 months 3 weeks ago | |
Hi everyone, I seek your help for the choice of my thesis subject, I hold a Master's degree in Management of protected areas and I have... |
|
Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools, Protected Area Management Tools, Remote Sensing & GIS | 4 months 4 weeks ago |
2023 Esri User Conference
7 June 2023 3:37pm
WILDLABS Conservation Tech Intern (The Inventory)
6 June 2023 10:43am
ISO Speakers for Emerging Technologies class.
31 May 2023 4:29pm
2 June 2023 2:08pm
Carly, that would be great! Thanks! I work with soundscapes and love the work of Rainforest Connection! I'll send you an email (@CUNY) to coordinate!
Natural Capital GIS & Data Administrator
31 May 2023 3:55pm
Climasens: Using technology to understand and respond to climate change
30 May 2023 12:36pm
Climasens’ platform is now being used by Australian Councils to support disaster resilience efforts. It’s inaugural product, HeatSens, is being used to bridge the gap between emergency management and climate change preparedness to better inform efforts and investment towards climate change adaptation, especially in areas where vulnerable populations exist.
PostDoc in forest remote sensing
Animal tracking stories
22 May 2023 2:19am
Field Surveyor
16 May 2023 4:06pm
How do I create an aerial survey flight plan for wildlife monitoring?
9 May 2023 9:24am
Machine Learning Researcher - Computer Vision (Remote)
2 May 2023 8:49pm
Satellites offer new ways to study ecosystems—and maybe even save them | Science | AAAS
24 April 2023 10:48am
Article from 2021 but it popped up on my feed today, might be of interest to our remote sensing group!
Looking for entry level remote role in GIS/environmental analysis in the United States
22 April 2023 12:05am
Rapid due diligence for forest carbon projects
21 April 2023 10:51am
Data Scientist (Geospatial), Global Fishing Watch

19 April 2023 10:34am
Introduction to Mapping using QGIS Training
17 April 2023 10:51am
The 59th Annual Meeting of Illinois Chapter of The Wildlife Society
12 April 2023 5:24am
Advice on afforable LiDAR scanners for Amazon forest surveys
5 April 2023 3:47pm
6 April 2023 6:21pm
Hi Jeremy,
With a quick search I've found the paper linked below. It looks like equipments such as Livox MID are sufficient for plot-level analyses, but not for individual trees. Also, it has performed worse in dense canopies and broadleaf forest, thus I believe we won't have a technology capable of doing what you aim for this amount of money (< $1000) in a few years from now.
I hope someone give us an alternative, though. :D
Best,

Development and Performance Evaluation of a Very Low-Cost UAV-Lidar System for Forestry Applications
Accurate and repeated forest inventory data are critical to understand forest ecosystem processes and manage forest resources. In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-borne light detection and ranging (lidar) systems have demonstrated effectiveness at deriving forest inventory attributes. However, their high cost has largely prevented them from being used in large-scale forest applications. Here, we developed a very low-cost UAV lidar system that integrates a recently emerged DJI Livox MID40 laser scanner (~$600 USD) and evaluated its capability in estimating both individual tree-level (i.e., tree height) and plot-level forest inventory attributes (i.e., canopy cover, gap fraction, and leaf area index (LAI)). Moreover, a comprehensive comparison was conducted between the developed DJI Livox system and four other UAV lidar systems equipped with high-end laser scanners (i.e., RIEGL VUX-1 UAV, RIEGL miniVUX-1 UAV, HESAI Pandar40, and Velodyne Puck LITE). Using these instruments, we surveyed a coniferous forest site and a broadleaved forest site, with tree densities ranging from 500 trees/ha to 3000 trees/ha, with 52 UAV flights at different flying height and speed combinations. The developed DJI Livox MID40 system effectively captured the upper canopy structure and terrain surface information at both forest sites. The estimated individual tree height was highly correlated with field measurements (coniferous site: R2 = 0.96, root mean squared error/RMSE = 0.59 m; broadleaved site: R2 = 0.70, RMSE = 1.63 m). The plot-level estimates of canopy cover, gap fraction, and LAI corresponded well with those derived from the high-end RIEGL VUX-1 UAV system but tended to have systematic biases in areas with medium to high canopy densities. Overall, the DJI Livox MID40 system performed comparably to the RIEGL miniVUX-1 UAV, HESAI Pandar40, and Velodyne Puck LITE systems in the coniferous site and to the Velodyne Puck LITE system in the broadleaved forest. Despite its apparent weaknesses of limited sensitivity to low-intensity returns and narrow field of view, we believe that the very low-cost system developed by this study can largely broaden the potential use of UAV lidar in forest inventory applications. This study also provides guidance for the selection of the appropriate UAV lidar system and flight specifications for forest research and management.

Who's going to ESA in Portland this year?
31 March 2023 9:27am
4 April 2023 9:58am
That sounds great. I think you should encourage people to bring a bit of tech with them, can be a good conversation starter/ice-breaker
4 April 2023 4:04pm
Good idea! I've got a ransom assortment of different acoustic recorders I can bring along
5 April 2023 11:58pm
Indeed, I'll be there too! I like to meet new conservation friends with morning runs, so I will likely organize a couple of runs, maybe one right near the conference, and one somewhere in a nearby park where we can look for wildlife. The latter would probably be at an obscenely early hour, so we can drive somewhere, ideally see elk (there are elk within 25 minutes of Portland!), and still get back in time for the morning sessions.
Due diligence for Nature Based Solutions
5 April 2023 3:38pm
How do I extract spatial data from EarthRanger to create maps on QGIS & ArcGIS Pro?
3 April 2023 12:35pm
Remote Sensing Technology for Improved Forest Carbon Inventorying
27 March 2023 11:58am
Exploring storage options for mass data collection
22 March 2023 3:20am
22 March 2023 7:36pm
Hi Adam!
I mostly live within the ecoacoustics space so I'll just speak on the hydrophone part of your request; Arbimon is a free web/cloud-based platform with unlimited storage for audio files. We've got an uploader app as well for mass-uploading lots of files. There's also a bunch of spectrogram visualization/annotation tools and analysis workflows available. It's AWS running under the hood.
I have some experience working directly with AWS & Microsoft Azure, and I've found personally that AWS was more user-friendly and intuitive for the (fairly simplistic) kinds of tasks I've done.
27 March 2023 5:23am
Meeting customer deadlines, without having to hire more staff
24 March 2023 4:02pm
Python for Geographers (video)
21 March 2023 4:56pm
ARSET - Fundamentals of Machine Learning for Earth Science
21 March 2023 4:49pm
Monitoring airborne biomass
14 March 2023 10:30am
14 March 2023 1:34pm
Looks like you want to have a read of this thread:

Project introductions and updates | WILDLABS
Tell us about your project!If you are just starting out with autonomous camera traps for insects, or if you are a seasoned expert, this is the place to share your projects with the rest of the community. Tell us what your project is aiming to achieveWhere is it based and who is involved?If you are looking for advise or feedback be sure to make it clear what you would like to knowPlease come back once you have some results to share your successes and challenges!
20 March 2023 2:44pm
Our project in very short is, setting up a sensor network for monitoring airborne biomass, mainly insects, birds and bats in near realtime, and to develop a forecast model to be used for mitigation with respect various types of human-wildlife conflicts (e.g. wind power, pesticide application, aviation). Our expertise is mainly in radar monitoring, but we aim on add insect camera information to be merged with the quantitative biomass measeurments by radar.
Google Earth Engine vs Microsoft's Planetary Computer: Which do I use?
3 March 2023 11:38am
12 March 2023 3:21pm
Dear @Frank_van_der_Most and @StephODonnell , thanks for the comments. Regarding the importance of local knowledge in EO data classification, some thoughts follow:
1. Consider two AI applications: large language models (LLM) and object recognition in images. LLMs such as ChatGPT use words to predict the next word. Since language is its own meta-language, LLMs rely on the fact that our understanding of written text is direct. There are no intermediaries between humans and the printed page.
2. Object recognition in images (e.g., face recognition) is another kind of AI application where there is an implicit assumption: there are objects (faces, cars, etc) in the image and the role of the algorithm is to distinguish them from the background (considered as unwanted noise).
3. Classification and interpretation of Earth observation data, by contrast, uses a different paradigm. In principle, all of the data is informative. Unlike face recognition, there is no background. Every pixel counts. Pixel values are not words, but measures of reflections, emissions or echoes of the Earth's surface.
4. We use words to describe the reality external to us. The variety of nature is such that we have to use simplifications and taxonomies to describe our landscapes. Take the word "forest". As Chazdon et al. question in their 2016 paper, "when is a forest a forest?" The answer is: it depends on who is asking the question.
5. There have been many attempts to join pixel values with landscape descriptions. e.g, "pixels with NDVI > 0.75 are forests". Do they? What about dry forests that only have high NDVI values in the wet season? So far, all attempts to use direct links between pixel values and landscapes have failed the test of rigour.
6. Another example is the algorithm used by Global Forest Watch to measure tree cover gain and loss. As explained in the link below, "Not all tree cover is a forest". As GFW acknowledges, their algorithm has problems distinguishing forest from oil-palm plantation and to identify trees in dry forests (see more at https://research.wri.org/gfr/data-methods?utm_campaign=treecoverloss2021&Limitations#limitations).
7. Some of you may know the attempt made by FAO to standardize land use and land cover classification using the LCCS ontology. LCCS describes land properties based only on land cover types, disregarding land use. For example, LCCS does not distinguish ‘pasture’ from ‘natural grasslands’; it labels both as herbaceous land cover types. Classification in LCCS has no temporal reference. For a more detailed criticism, see Camara (2020).
8. There is no shortage of global land cover and land use maps. While these maps provide a general sense of the global picture, very few (if any) have local significance. As those in the WILDLABS community know, local context matters. My favourite example is the Brazilian Cerrado, an endangered biodiversity hotspot. In the last decades, many areas of natural vegetation in the Cerrado have been converted to pasture for cattle raising. However, global maps inevitably label both pastures and natural Cerrado vegetation as "grasslands". Clearly, such data is hardly usable for supporting studies and public policies in the Cerrado.
9. What is the alternative for mapping areas such as the Cerrado? The only way I see is gathering experts who understand the uniqueness of each ecosystem and try to relate each landscape to signals measured by EO satellites. This is hard and painstaking work, which many iterations.
10. The recent availability of open big EO data is a blessing and a curse. Using time series, experts can use the temporal evolution of the pixel values to improve the discriminatory power of EO data. Take the distinction between herbaceous pasture and natural Cerrado vegetation. All savannas of the planet (including the Cerrado) have evolved to be resilient to the dry season and to fire. Therefore, while in the wet season it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between herbaceous pasture and natural Cerrado, such distinction increases in the dry season. This is a case of where time series and big data improve the classification results.
11. Big EO data is also a curse, since it requires experts to rethink how to use EO data for land classification. Selecting training samples by looking at a single image is too simplistic when we are classifying time series. Linking the values of a time series to the temporal evolution of the landscapes requires relearning what EO data is.
Long story short: using Earth observation for conservation studies and public policy making is hard. It requires the combination of big EO data, good algorithms, and lots of expertise to understand the information inherent in the data. A nice challenge to all!
References cited:
Chazdon et al., "When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration". Ambio, 45, p 538–550 (2016).
Camara, "On the semantics of big Earth observation data for land classification". Journal of Spatial Information Science, 20 (2020).
17 March 2023 9:33am
18 March 2023 12:48am
Dear @gcamara , thank you so much for your elaborate reply. I am afraid, I am still overlooking something. Do I understand correctly, that the relationship between EO and local expertise is that one needs the local expertise to inform the interpretation of the EO data? But then every area that is different from its neighbors ( easier said than established ) needs a representative. That means that one needs a huge number of representatives to cover the entire earth. If that is organized, then the knowledge is collected through these people. How are the images then still useful? For the precision and the quantification?
GIS for a Sustainable World
16 March 2023 4:28pm
Proposals wanted for Innovation in Practice

6 March 2023 10:34pm
How do I get started with Landsat for Land use and Land cover mapping?
6 March 2023 10:15am
31 May 2023 10:21pm
Definitely interested! I'm in the ecoacoustics/acoustic monitoring space, working at Rainforest Connection and Arbimon.