Software and mobile applications are equally as important to conservation technology as the hardware used in the field. Increasingly developed specifically for #tech4wildlife needs, there are mobile apps and software options designed to help with protected area management, wildlife crime reporting, and anti-poaching patrol planning, data analysis, community science, data visualization and GIS mapping, outreach and engagement, and even conservation storytelling.
Likewise, mobile games have opened up new avenues for engaging the public in conservation efforts, allowing for immersive storytelling and interactive experiences. By combining cutting-edge technology and important conservation information with a media form already familiar to the public, conservationists are finding exciting ways to make audiences feel personally invested in critical species and habitats.
Whether you're looking for software and mobile app developers to help you with your own conservation tech needs, you have questions about development, you're looking for resources, or you'd like to share your own app, software, or gaming tools, this is the group for you!
Header photo: Trevor Hebert
- @carlybatist
- | she/her
Science Outreach Lead-Rainforest Connection (RFCx) & Arbimon; Ecoacoustics, biodiversity monitoring, primates, lemurs
- 69 Resources
- 285 Discussions
- 18 Groups
- @StephODonnell
- | She / Her
WILDLABS & Fauna & Flora
I'm the Executive Manager at WILDLABS.
- 152 Resources
- 668 Discussions
- 30 Groups
WILDLABS & Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)
I hold a PhD in Biological Sciences and specialize in bioacoustics and passive acoustic monitoring of cetaceans in the Argentine Sea and Antarctica. Recently, I've also embraced computing to leverage technology in enhancing our conservation efforts.
- 7 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 14 Groups
- @Brickles
- | He/Him
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 7 Groups
American Museum of Natural History
- 1 Resources
- 8 Discussions
- 10 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 3 Groups
- @TaliaSpeaker
- | She/her
WILDLABS & World Wide Fund for Nature/ World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
I'm the WILDLABS Research Specialist at WWF-US
- 13 Resources
- 56 Discussions
- 24 Groups
Sustainability Manager for CERES Tag LTD. An animal health company; animal monitoring, conservation, & anti-poaching/ rural crime. Wildlife, livestock, equine & companion. #CeresTrace #CeresWild #CeresRanch
- 2 Resources
- 19 Discussions
- 24 Groups
Wildlife Drones
Wildlife Drones has developed the world’s most innovative radio animal-tracking system using drones so you can track your radio-tagged animals like never before.
- 11 Resources
- 8 Discussions
- 32 Groups
- @jcaris
- | hi/him
Smith College & Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University
Senior Drone Data Scientist, Tufts University; Former Director of the Spatial Analysis Lab at Smith College. Teaching, learning, and collaborating with brilliant students & faculty
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 9 Groups
2023 Bachelor Degree Graduate from the College of African Wildlife Management, Mweka.
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 14 Groups
- @crazybirdguy
- | Him
Field Biologist at Yayasan Cikananga Konservasi Terpadu, Indonesia, with experience and interest mainly in ornithology, citizen science and bioaccoustic
- 0 Resources
- 6 Discussions
- 12 Groups
Careers
Yale University - Center for Biodiversity and Global Change
17 January 2023
Careers
Join the Arribada Initiative! We have a unique opportunity for a software developer to create mobile / desktop applications and intuitive user interfaces that assist researchers and fieldworkers to conserve wildlife.
16 January 2023
Careers
We are looking for someone who enjoys the craft of making to come and help run our London based lab.
5 January 2023
Seeking Software Engineer for Marine Science Lab a UC Santa Barbara
19 December 2022
Rainforest Foundation UK is looking for a developer who wants to put their skills to use in the fight against climate change and social injustice.
19 December 2022
Careers
Conservify is seeking a hands-on Senior Software Engineer with front end and back end experience developing rich web and mobile applications, and a strong desire to build a best-in-class product that stands out in both...
9 December 2022
Conservify is seeking a hands-on Senior Product and Production Manager with strong interpersonal and organizational skills to remotely lead a small seasoned team of thinkers, designers and engineers who are shaping the...
9 December 2022
Rainforest Foundation UK is looking for a FullStack developer with an interest in environmental justice and the development of rainforest monitoring systems
6 December 2022
Applications open for a Research Software Engineer in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology to work on the design and development of an integrated, real-time platform to forecast and manage infectious...
1 December 2022
Nature is in crisis. Together we can save it. Come and join one of the largest technology functions in Europe, whose sole purpose is to save nature.
23 September 2022
Careers
The Senior Conservation Technology Specialist will be responsible for providing technical advice and capacity development to GWP project teams on conservation technology, distilling challenges and lessons from project...
22 September 2022
Boost cons tech capacity at an international NGO! Fauna & Flora International is offering a paid three-month internship to consolidate and share best practices for the application of emerging hardware and software...
26 August 2022
June 2024
July 2024
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41 Products
Recently updated products
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Thanks Carly! I had reviewed some of the help files, but clearly not the right ones!My email is [email protected] |
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Acoustics, Software and Mobile Apps | 2 weeks 1 day ago | |
Congratulations! My first hydromoth was just arrived yesterday and so excited! Looking forward for the update from your project!!! |
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Acoustics, Biologging, Climate Change, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Protected Area Management Tools, Sensors, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 month ago | |
Thanks, and that's a match! All these pictures are from a lab experiment and formated with AmphIdent. We took weekly belly pictures of several larvae. The aim of this google... |
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Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 month 2 weeks ago | |
Hi, this is pretty interesting to me. I plan to fly a drone over wild areas and look for invasive species incursions. So feral hogs are especially bad, but in the Everglades there... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Open Source Solutions, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 month 2 weeks ago | |
EcoAssist is an application designed to streamline the work of ecologists dealing with camera trap images. It’s an AI platform that... |
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Software and Mobile Apps, AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 2 months ago | |
Thank you Carly, I will definitely take a look. |
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Acoustics, Biologging, Climate Change, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 2 months 2 weeks ago | |
Hello Friends,Its amazing to see the growing number of organisations working in biodiversity conservation.Biodiversity stories can have a... |
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Data management and processing tools, Software and Mobile Apps | 2 months 3 weeks ago | |
We will be conducting in-person demos of our cutting-edge drone technology in the US this year! 🇺🇸 If you're interested in experiencing... |
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Biologging, Drones, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 3 months 3 weeks ago | |
Hi Danilo. you seem very passionate about this initiative which is a good start.It is an interesting coincidence that I am starting another project for the coral reefs in the... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Biologging, Camera Traps, Citizen Science, Climate Change, Community Base, Connectivity, Drones, Emerging Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Open Source Solutions, Sensors, Software and Mobile Apps, Wildlife Crime | 4 months ago | |
Hi!I would take a look at Although developed for camera trap imagery, it is by no means restricted to such.Cheers,Lars |
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Camera Traps, Community Base, Data management and processing tools, Drones, Emerging Tech, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 4 months 1 week ago | |
I'm also here for this. This is my first comment... I've been lurking for a while.I have 20 years of professional knowledge in design, with the bulk of that being software design... |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools, Software and Mobile Apps | 4 months 3 weeks ago | |
Trying to make sense of this brick product, the link provided is a bit vague. The front page talks about SIP trunking, so that implies it's all about telephone connectivity. And... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 4 months 3 weeks ago |
Southern African Wildlife Management Association Conference 2024
6 February 2024 12:20pm
Passionate engineer offering funding and tech solutions pro-bono.
23 January 2024 12:06pm
2 February 2024 1:22pm
Hi Danilo. you seem very passionate about this initiative which is a good start.
It is an interesting coincidence that I am starting another project for the coral reefs in the Philipines which also requires water analytics so I can probably work on both projects at the same time.
Let's that have a call and discuss, will send you a pm with my contact details
There is a tech glitch and I don't get email notifications from here.
Need advice - image management and tagging
12 January 2024 7:55pm
15 January 2024 8:47pm
Interesting, Iʻll give it a shot. Looks like this could save me some time.
Thanks for the explanation @wade!
24 January 2024 5:16pm
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.
- 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.
- Mongo with the GridFS package is an excellent repository for arbitrarily large image files.
- It is straightforward to make a Mongo database accessible via a website.
- 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.
25 January 2024 8:32am
Hi!
I would take a look at
Although developed for camera trap imagery, it is by no means restricted to such.
Cheers,
Lars
Ignite Labs: Space for Nature & Biodiversity Series
21 January 2024 2:46pm
Two year postdoc - Machine Learning & Bioacoustics
16 January 2024 7:49am
Wildlife Conservation for "Dummies"
9 January 2024 10:02pm
10 January 2024 11:24pm
Maybe this is obvious, but maybe it's so obvious that you could easily forget to include this in your list of recommendations: encourage them to hang out here on WILDLABS! I say that in all seriousness: if you get some great responses here and compile them into a list, it would be easy to forget the fact that you came to WILDLABS to get those responses.
I get questions like this frequently, and my recommended entry points are always (1) attend the WILDLABS Variety Hour series, (2) lurk on WILDLABS.net, and (3) if they express a specific interest in AI, lurk on the AI for Conservation Slack.
I usually also recommend that folks visit the Work on Climate Slack and - if they live in a major city - to attend one of the in-person Work on Climate events. You'll see relatively little conservation talk there, but conservation tech is just a small subset of sustainability tech, and for a new person in the field, if they're interested in environmental sustainability, even if they're a bit more interested in conservation than in other aspects of sustainability, the sheer number of opportunities in non-conservation-related climate tech may help them get their hands dirty more quickly than in conservation specifically, especially if they're looking to make a full-time career transition. But of course, I'd rather have everyone working on conservation!
13 January 2024 3:14am
Some good overview papers I'd recommend include:
- Besson, M., Alison, J., Bjerge, K., Gorochowski, T. E., Høye, T. T., Jucker, T., ... & Clements, C. F. (2022). Towards the fully automated monitoring of ecological communities. Ecology Letters, 25(12), 2753-2775.
- Speaker, T., O'Donnell, S., Wittemyer, G., Bruyere, B., Loucks, C., Dancer, A., ... & Solomon, J. (2022). A global community‐sourced assessment of the state of conservation technology. Conservation Biology, 36(3), e13871.
- WILDLABS-led research! Led by @TaliaSpeaker and @StephODonnell
- Lahoz-Monfort, J. J., & Magrath, M. J. (2021). A comprehensive overview of technologies for species and habitat monitoring and conservation. BioScience, 71(10), 1038-1062.
- Tuia, D., Kellenberger, B., Beery, S., Costelloe, B. R., Zuffi, S., Risse, B., ... & Berger-Wolf, T. (2022). Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation. Nature communications, 13(1), 792.
- Stowell, D. (2022). Computational bioacoustics with deep learning: a review and roadmap. PeerJ, 10, e13152.
- I'm biased towards bioacoustics because that's what I focus on, but this regardless this is an excellent horizon scan of AI/ML for conservation and acoustics!
- Borowiec, M. L., Dikow, R. B., Frandsen, P. B., McKeeken, A., Valentini, G., & White, A. E. (2022). Deep learning as a tool for ecology and evolution. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 13(8), 1640-1660.
I'd also encourage you to follow the #tech4wildlife hashtags on social media!
15 January 2024 4:27pm
I'm also here for this. This is my first comment... I've been lurking for a while.
I have 20 years of professional knowledge in design, with the bulk of that being software design. I also have a keen interest in wildlife. I've never really combined the two; and I'm starting to feel like that is a waste. I have a lot to contribute. The loss of biodiversity is terrifying me. So I’m making a plan that in 2024 I’m going to combine both.
However, if I’m honest with you – I struggle with where to start. There are such vast amounts of information out there I find myself jumping all over the place. A lot of it is highly scientific, which is great – but I do not have a science background.
As suggested by the post title.. a “Wildlife Conservation for Dummies” would be exactly what I am looking for. Because in this case I’m happy to admit I am a complete dummy.
How do you access the internet remotely?
24 July 2017 5:29pm
19 December 2023 7:45am
Wow! Those Yeti things are just what are needed for the wild passage project:
12 January 2024 1:32pm
My solution is usually wayyyy more traditional and involves climbing the tallest tree or hiking the highest hill.
That being said, I cant find a clear explanation about how BRCK works and I assumed it used signal repeater, which is illegal in many countries. It is also very prone of lightning strike, which is the reason I did not use it as I live in a very lightning-prone area.
12 January 2024 2:08pm
Trying to make sense of this brick product, the link provided is a bit vague. The front page talks about SIP trunking, so that implies it's all about telephone connectivity. And hence not related to the internet itself. Surely that means you have to already have an Internet connection? If that is the case, would not whatsapp voice calls be just as useful and a lot easier ? I've re-read it a few times and it does not seem to be any product relating to providing remote Internet connectivity??? Seems more like a way to extend your telephone network to a remote one for a business.
Presentation opportunity: Text analysis for conservation (NACCB 2024)
8 January 2024 4:05pm
Assessing the biodiversity impact of palm oil facilities around the world
4 January 2024 12:07pm
Update on SEE Shell App to identify illegal tortoiseshell products
14 December 2023 10:00pm
Data Viz Inspo for the Holidays
11 December 2023 8:42pm
Automatic extraction of temperature/moon phase from camera trap video
29 November 2023 1:15pm
1 December 2023 2:35pm
Hi Lucy
As others have mentioned, camera trap temperature readouts are inaccurate, and you have the additional problem that the camera's temperature can rise 10C if the sun shines on it.
I would also agree with the suggestion of getting the moon phase data off the internet.
1 December 2023 2:38pm
Do you need to do this for just one project? And do you use the same camera make/model for every deployment? Or at least a finite number of camera makes/models? If the number of camera makes/models you need to worry about is finite, even if it's large, I wouldn't try to solve this for the general case, I would just hard-code the pixel ranges where the temperature/moon information appears in each camera model, so you can crop out the relevant pixels without any fancy processing. From there it won't be trivial, exactly, but you won't need AI.
You may need separate pixel ranges for night/day images for each camera; I've seen cameras that capture video with different aspect ratios at night/day (or, more specifically, different aspect ratios for with-flash and no-flash images). If you need to determine whether an image is grayscale/color (i.e., flash/no-flash), I have a simple heuristic function for this that works pretty well.
Assuming you can manually define the relevant pixel ranges, which should just take a few minutes if it's less than a few dozen camera models, I would extract the first frame of each video to an image, then crop out the temperature/moon pixels.
Once you've cropped out the temperature/moon information, for the temperature, I would recommend using PyTesseract (an OCR library) to read the characters. For the moon information... I would either have a small library of images for all the possible moon phases for each model, and match new images against those, or maybe - depending on the exact style they use - you could just, e.g., count the total number of white/dark pixels in that cropped moon image, and have a table that maps "percentage of white pixels" to a moon phase. For all the cameras I've seen with a moon phase icon, this would work fine, and would be less work than a template matching approach.
FYI I recently wrote a function to do datetime extraction from camera trap images (it would work for video frames too), but there I was trying to handle the general case where I couldn't hard-code a pixel range. That task was both easier and harder than what you're doing here: harder because I was trying to make it work for future, unknown cameras, but easier because datetimes are relatively predictable strings, so you know when you find one, compared to, e.g., moon phase icons.
In fact maybe - as others have suggested - extracting the moon phase from pixels is unnecessary if you can extract datetimes (either from pixels or from metadata, if your metadata is reliable).
5 December 2023 10:09pm
camtrapR has a function that does what you want. i have not used it myself but it seems straightforward to use and it can run across directories of images:
https://jniedballa.github.io/camtrapR/reference/OCRdataFields.html
Data integration platforms
28 March 2019 9:27am
20 November 2023 8:19pm
Hey Chris - you haven't missed Variety Hour! It's this week!
1 December 2023 8:56pm
Argos has an API
Iridium data either arrives via email/server IP
Globalstar (unknown)
If you'd like the web services document for Argos, shoot me an email (tgray at woodsholegroup - dotcom).
1 December 2023 8:56pm
(duplicate)
ICOTEQ launch TAGRANGER® system of products
23 November 2023 1:25pm
Firetail - Black Friday
Software Engineer at Rainforest Connection & Arbimon
14 November 2023 12:30am
Insight; a secure online platform designed for sharing experiences of conservation tool use.
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.
TWS2023 - get in touch
5 November 2023 8:13pm
5 November 2023 9:04pm
I'm registered with the TWS2023 app, so feel free to nudge me there as well
Payment for ecosystem services - mobile money case study?
27 October 2023 2:59pm
30 October 2023 10:23am
Huge thank you Carly!
3 November 2023 12:36pm
The folks at AB Entheos in Nairobi are also looking at wild life damage insurance https://ab-entheos.co.ke/
5 November 2023 4:09pm
Thanks Arky!
DeepFaune: a software for AI-based identification of mammals in camera-trap pictures and videos
14 July 2023 3:14pm
24 October 2023 8:46pm
Hello to all, new to this group. This is very exciting technology. can it work for ID of individual animals? we are interested in Ai for identifying individual jaguars (spots) and andean Bears (face characteristics). Any recommendation? contact? thanks!
German
25 October 2023 8:57am
That's a very interesting question and use case (I'm not from deepfaune). I'm playing with this at the moment and intend to integrate it into my other security software that can capture and send video alerts. I should have this working within a few weeks I think.
The structure of that software is that it is two stage, the first stage identifies that there is an animal and it's bounding box and then there's a classification stage. I intend to merge the two stages so that it behaves like a yolo model so that the output is bounding boxes as well as what type of animal it is.
However, my security software can cascade models. So if you were able to train a single stage classifier that identifies your particular bears, then you could cascade all of these models in my software to generate an alert with a video saying which bear it was.
4 November 2023 4:51am
Hi @GermanFore ,
I work with the BearID Project on individual identification of brown bears from faces. More recently we worked on face detection across all bear species and ran some tests with identifying Andean bears. You can find details in the paper I linked below. We plan to do more work with Andean bears in 2024.
I would love to connect with you. I'll send you a message with my email address.
Regards,
Ed
Restoring the Mara Elephant Population Using Coexistence Tech Solutions with Mara Elephant Project's Wilson Sairowua
20 October 2023 1:31pm
27 May 2024 3:54pm
28 May 2024 8:12am
Biodiversity Intactness dataset now available on the Earth Engine community catalog
16 October 2023 1:21pm
Mozilla Foundation, funding for nature conservation
4 October 2023 6:30pm
Co-Founder & CTO (Chief Technology Officer)
4 October 2023 4:00pm
Software for recording field data?
6 September 2023 3:01pm
22 September 2023 11:08am
Have a look at kobocollect, very easy to use and reliable, can collect data and then send them to the cloud when you have internet.
Other solution:
QField - Efficient field work built for QGIS
SMART Conservation Software - Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (smartconservationtools.org)
EarthRanger: Protecting Wildlife With Real-Time Data
Natural Resource Data Solutions - Land & Resource Management
Efficient tools for effective resource management. Natural Resource Data Solutions provides data collection and resource management tools for land owners and environment conservation agencies, public and private.
NRDS22 September 2023 4:05pm
I second Kobo/CyberTracker for tracks, but if you have money for an ArcGIS Online license, Survey123 is great (offline use - but can't record tracks)
22 September 2023 6:11pm
We use Kobo as well - it is amazing!!!
Gundi: The Universal Adaptor for Conservation Technologies
13 September 2023 4:28pm
CIEEM 2023 Autumn Conference: Modernising Ecology: Techniques and Approaches
5 September 2023 1:59pm
26 January 2024 3:18pm
Hi Krasi! Greetings from Brazil!
That's a cool journey you've started! Congratulations. And I felt like theSearchLife resonates with the work I'm involved round here. In a nutshell, I live at the heart of the largest remaining of Atlantic forest in the planet - one of the most biodiverse biomes that exist. The subregion where I live is named after and bathed by the "Rio Sagrado" (Sacred River), a magnificent water body with a very rich cultural significance to the region (it has served as a safe zone for fleeing slaves). Well, the river and the entire bioregion is currently under the threat of a truly devastating railroad project which, to say the least is planned to cut through over 100 water springs!
In face of that the local community (myself included) has been mobilizing to raise awareness of the issue and hopefully stop this madness (fueled by strong international forces). One of the ways we've been fighting this is through the seeking of the recognition of the sacred river as an entity of legal rights, who can manifest itself in court, against such threats. And to illustrate what this would look like, I've been developing this AI (LLM) powered avatar for the river, which could maybe serve as its human-relatable voice. An existing prototype of such avatar is available here. It has been fine-tuned with over 20 scientific papers on the Sacred River watershed.
And right now myself and other are mobilizing to manifest the conditions/resources to develop a next version of the avatar, which would include remote sensing capacities so the avatar is directly connected to the river and can possibly write full scientific reports on its physical properties (i.e. water quality) and the surrounding biodiversity. In fact, myself and 3 other members of the WildLabs community have just applied to the WildLabs Grant program in order to accomplish that. Hopefully the results are positive.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that our mobilization around providing an expression medium for the river has been multimodal, including the creation of a shortfilm based on theatrical mobilizations we did during a fest dedicated to the river and its surrounding more-than-human communities. You can check that out here:
Let's chat if any of that catches your interest!
Cheers!