Sensors already equip a range of tools to enhance monitoring capacity for conservation. Some of the higher bandwidth technologies, like camera traps and acoustic monitoring systems, have been essential elements of the conservation toolkit for decades, and thus have enough users that we've created dedicated WILDLABS groups to address them. But a whole range of lower bandwidth sensors beyond these core technologies are being increasingly integrated into conservation monitoring systems, and offer rich new insights into the wildlife and ecosystems we're all working to protect. As with many technologies, cost and access have historically been challenges to the adoption of new sensors, but with low-cost and open-source solutions on the rise, we're excited to see what the future of this space holds.
Getting Started with Sensors:
- Watch Shah Selbe's Tech Tutors episode on scaling FieldKit, an open-source conservation sensor toolbox, from a project to a successful conservation tech product.
- Check out our Virtual Meetup about Low-Cost, Open-Source Solutions in conservation tech, including a talk by Alasdair Davies on the Arribada Initiative's work with thermal sensors in early warning systems.
- For a more in-depth introduction, watch the first video in our datalogger mini-series: Freaklabs: How do I get started with Arduino?
In this group, you'll meet others who are using and innovating diverse sensors in their work, discuss ways to make sensors more effective & accessible for conservationists, learn about what sensors are already helping us accomplish in the field, and have the opportunity to ask and answer questions. Join this group to get started!
Header image: Emma Vogel, University of Tromsø
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Frontier Labs
Creators of seriously good bioacoustic recorders. Celebrating 10 years of excellence in bioacoustic tech in 2021
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Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB), Technical University of Munich (TUM)
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The miniaturisation of technology is rapidly opening up new possibilities for conservationists and environmental scientists in need of less invasive, easy to deploy solutions. University of Washington researchers have...
13 October 2020
To celebrate the first Black Mammalogists Week (starting Sunday, September 13th), we talked to four of the amazing Black scientists behind this event! Find out what they had to say about their favorite (and most...
10 September 2020
Today, WWF conservation engineering intern Ashley Rosen shares insight into the process of redesigning a camera mount for FLIR thermal cameras used by rangers in the fight against poaching. Ashley's design will become a...
24 August 2020
Our first season of Tech Tutors may have wrapped, but the connections and collaborations from these episodes are still going strong! Today, we're sharing Tech Tutor presenter Laure Joanny's recap of the most important...
20 August 2020
Today, Sustainable Fishing Challenges group leader Daniel Steadman discusses how fishing gear itself could benefit from fresh technological innovations to prevent both environmental damage and damage to species and...
19 August 2020
Funding
Protecting elephants from conservation's most pressing issues like poaching and human-wildlife conflict requires big, bold, and innovative solutions. Hackster.io, Smart Parks, Edge Impulse, Microsoft, and several other...
11 August 2020
Since 2016, ZSL’s Instant Detect team have been working on improving metal detecting sensors for anti-poaching. The team believe that using metal detecting sensors will provide a highly targeted detection of potential...
10 August 2020
As we launch our new Sustainable Fishing Challenges group in the WILDLABS community, we are excited to welcome Daniel Steadman, the group manager, to give us an overview of three major areas in which #tech4wildlife...
4 August 2020
In this case study from herpetologist Emily Taylor, we learn about the best methods and gear used to track snakes, lizards, and other reptiles and amphibians via radio-telemetry, and how these techniques have changed...
31 July 2020
What is it like to track endangered species using drones? In this blog post from Wildlife Drones, Dr. Debbie Saunders travels to New Zealand to track the Kākāpō, an extemely rare and elusive bird of which approximately...
8 July 2020
In this three-part WILDLABS feature article series, we take a look at the various technologies used to fight the greatest threat to wild condors, lead poisoning, explore the innovations changing the ways we study and...
2 July 2020
In this three-part WILDLABS feature article, we're taking a look at the various technologies used to fight the greatest threat to wild condors, lead poisoning, explore the innovations that may change the way we study...
25 June 2020
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Hi Adam, My name is Nicole, I work at Frontier Labs - we also make bioacoustic recorders (BARs) and are based in Brisbane, Australia. Yay for Australian tech! We have been... |
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Sensors | 2 years 8 months ago | |
Would certainly be cool to see a tutorial on this! Looking forward to that! |
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Marine Conservation, Sensors | 2 years 8 months ago | |
Almost done with the trap alarms. I added an additional buzzer (with internal circuitry) to get more noise. The added benefit is that the slightly different tunes creates... |
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Sensors | 3 years ago | |
Hi Barry, I am tinkering with similar edge devices and aspirations! I recently acquired the Jetson Nano to start testing some aspects of the BearID Project software pipeline.... |
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Connectivity, Sensors | 3 years 2 months ago | |
Thanks for the paper Harold, this looks like a possibility. Especially if there's a way to make bespoke detectors |
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Sensors | 3 years 2 months ago | |
Hi everyone, I'm building some small audio attachments to pop onto Vectronics collars. Does anyone have dummy or... |
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Sensors | 3 years 3 months ago | |
Really interesting chat. I was looking at this "eTape" to measure inundation on marine turtle nests. https://www.adafruit.com/product/463 Will give you water presence... |
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Sensors | 3 years 6 months ago | |
Have you ever wanted to get a sample from the top of a tree, without having to climb it or shoot it out with a shotgun? Would it... |
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Sensors | 3 years 7 months ago | |
Hello Rob, I have seen the bracelet style used on large mammals with mixed success and failure. The main considerations are terrain the animal uses, and fitting the bracelet... |
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Sensors | 3 years 7 months ago | |
Amazing stuff Andrew! The dips in light idea made me think of exoplanet hunting straight away! Such a cool idea!! |
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Sensors | 3 years 7 months ago | |
Hi Akiba No worries, thanks for responding! I'd love to delve into more detail on this once the new series has started and I have an idea of the tools and kit required!... |
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Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 3 years 9 months ago | |
Hi Maxine, There are pros and cons to switching regulators and linear regulators. Linear regulators "throw away" the excess voltage in order to maintain a... |
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Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 3 years 9 months ago |
Zoohackathon: 'END LOOP - Coding to end wildlife trafficking'
22 September 2016 12:00am
Perspectives from the World Ranger Congress
10 August 2016 12:00am
Has technology provided a one-stop measure to halt albatross bycatch in fisheries?
5 August 2016 12:00am
How can technology help us monitor those small cold-blooded critters that live in caves?
25 July 2016 12:00am
Passive Acoustic Monitoring: Listening Out for New Conservation Opportunities
29 June 2016 12:00am
Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge Accelerator Bootcamp
24 June 2016 12:00am
Science Makers: sensor networks on 2 July
22 June 2016 8:09am
Portable DNA Sequencer
24 March 2016 4:51pm
26 April 2016 6:53pm
Thanks, Adam, for initating a discussion about the MinION. It certainly seems to have a lot of promise, however the scientists who are currently field testing it detect very high error rates. It's been on my radar as a possible field kit for extracting DNA out of wood as it gets processed into various forest products through the supply chain. The implication here is that the part of a tree that is made into forest products is made up of dead cells and thus it is very difficult to extract quality and quantity DNA out of wood. This, combined with the high error rates makes it 'still very much in development' for forest products - but perhaps it'd be suitable sooner for other applications in the conservation world. There's a professor at New Mexico State Univ. who has been working with the MinION for a while now on wood - Brook Milligan. He recently gave a talk at the 'London Calling' Oxford Nanopore (maker of the Minion) conference that is worth watching: https://londoncallingconf.co.uk/2015/videos/view/241
22 June 2016 10:43am
Hi John and Adam,
I've been hearing a lot about Oxford Nanopore Technologies and MinION over the last few months, and while it sounds fanastic, it's been difficult to get an understanding about the potential and limitations of this piece of tech, particularly as relates to conservaiton applications. So hearing your experiences, John, is really interesting.
For anyone interested in learning more about MinION and nanopore technology, I've just came across a thorough article in the Atlantic about the sequencer that was helpful for me as a total novice (though a very interested one!) in the world of nanotechnology and eDNA. It gives context to the MinION in terms of history, current applications and potential applications. It also features one of our community members, Jon Whetton, who is also a USAID Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge Winner, talking about the potential applications to conservation:
The etymology of VolTRAX may be farcical, but its purpose is not. This domino-sized add-on for the MinION is designed to prepare a biological sample—say bodily fluids, or swabs of soil—for sequencing. It moves liquid through a network of fine channels, bombards it with chemical reagents to extract DNA, and loads that DNA into the MinION. “We spend a lot more time in the lab preparing samples than we do sequencing,” says Loman. “If, and it’s a big if, you could drop the clinical sample onto the chip that does it all for you, it would be hugely advantageous.”
VolTRAX is set to go out to early users this summer. Jon Wetton, a geneticist and forensic scientist at the University of Leicester, wants to use it to fight illegal wildlife trafficking, by sequencing telltale genes that act as identity badges for different species. Conservationists have already used this technique, known as DNA barcoding, to track sources of elephant ivory or identify whale meat posing as sushi. But samples must be shipped for analysis, and “you’re looking at weeks or months to get the results back,” says Wetton. “That can’t be done on anything perishable, or if you’ve got a suspect in custody. But with an on-the-spot test, you could confiscate, arrest, or do something about it.”
With a nanopore sequencer, inspectors could tell the difference between a cut of beef or bushmeat from threatened apes and monkeys. They could analyze the blood on a suspected poacher’s tools to reveal the identity of the last animals it cut. They could work out if seized caviar belong to legitimate fish species or endangered sturgeon. “You could answer a whole slew of serious wildlife crime issues with the same test,” says Wetton.
That still leaves the significant problem of parsing the data, but Oxford Nanopore has a solution for that, too: an online hub called Metrichor, where people can connect to ready-made apps for analyzing DNA sequences. One such app, developed by Oxford Nanopore itself, is called “What’s In My Pot?” or WIMP. It takes sequences and identifies the organisms they belong to. The team have already field-tested it on microbes from a sewage-contaminated river behind their own building, and on unpasteurized milk from the back of a New York lorry.
Sensory: BBC Wildlife Director John Downer & the technology of ‘spy-cam’ filmmaking
13 May 2016 11:55am
Utilizing thermal imaging technology
27 April 2016 7:43pm
Text Messages from Teenage Gannets
25 April 2016 12:00am
Eggs Eggs and more Eggs
2 March 2016 1:05pm
24 March 2016 4:42pm
Latest news about this project was picked up by the BBC world service for a short interview
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03nwl8g
You can also read more here:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/build-an-electronic-vulture-egg
Underwater sensors
18 March 2016 12:39am
Could Big Data Have Saved Cecil the Lion?
4 January 2016 12:07pm
12 February 2016 7:16pm
It's very interesting what you say about the strength of a name. I do think that anthropomorphism can be a good thing in the case of conservation. By giving Cecil a name and a life story (incidentally a very cosy British name, which is interesting in itself), it brings the issue into emotional focus. We are attracted to characters and stories, not data. The plight of a named lion strikes a stronger chord than the numbing statistic of 600 "un-named" lions dying every year.
So do we care more about nature if we make anthropomorphise it? I think yes, as it creates a relatable personal connection with our own lives.
I'd like to get in touch with you next week as this is an area I am very interested in exploring and I hope I can be of help. Paul
14 March 2016 4:37pm
We're just starting to look a lot at Storytelling in Wildbook (http://www.wildbook.org).
This is what a data profile looks like in Wildbook:
http://www.whaleshark.org/individuals.jsp?number=A-001
While we allow for basic anthropomorphism via nicknaming, it's still a very data centric view of what a combined group of reserchers knows about the animal.
We have experimented with social media profiles which interestingly have an analogous data schema as mark-recapture:
http://fb.wildme.org/wildme/public/profile/WS-A-001
But we want to go ever further with storytelling mediums (e.g., story maps?) that can be automated from scientific data input, especially where cit sci data and reserch data can be reliably mixed.
So in addition to a name, we want to build a relationship through a portrayal of its life history and even potentially a view of the social network of the animal participates in (if such data can be shared safely.).
16 March 2016 7:22am
That's great Jason. I think your approach can be very successful. I'm a little bit familiar with Wild Book through my contacts at IBEIS, who I believe you work with quite closely. I'd love to see how the work we are doing at Internet of Elephants can incorporate whale shark data. I'll message you separately to discuss.
An Internet of pigeons?
14 March 2016 4:16pm
Ecotech Grants from the Captain Planet Foundation
18 February 2016 12:00am
Bringing Conservation Technology to Life
17 February 2016 12:00am
Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge: Winners Announced!
22 January 2016 12:00am
Deep Coral Reef Exploration and Discovery: Two-way Technological Flow
24 December 2015 12:00am
Cheap Space, DIY Imaging and Big Data
21 December 2015 12:00am
The Impact of the Internet of Things
10 December 2015 12:00am
The Social Lives of Conservation Technologies and Why They Matter
2 November 2015 12:00am
22 June 2016 4:04pm
Thanks for sharing this event, Jenny! Looks really interesting, hope to see you there.