Group

Software and Mobile Apps / Feed

The software and apps used and built by the conservation tech community are as varied as the species and habitats we work to protect. From fighting wildlife crime to collecting and analyzing data to engaging the general public with unique storytelling, apps, software, and mobile games are playing an increasingly large role in our work. Whether you're already well-versed in the world of software, or you're a hardware expert looking for guidance from the other side of the conservation tech field, this group will have interesting discussions, resources, and ideas to offer.

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Enter the Zooniverse: Try Citizen Science for Yourself!

Ellie Warren
Trapped inside during the COVID-19 quarantine and looking to engage with conservation science without leaving your desk? Citizen science projects like those on Zooniverse offer a great opportunity to impact scientific...

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#Tech4Wildlife 2020 Photo Challenge In Review

WILDLABS Team
2020 marked our fifth year holding our annual #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge, and our community made it a milestone to remember. Conservationists took to Twitter last week to share their best high-tech snapshots from...

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Competition: Plastic Data Challenge

The Incubation Network
Are you ready for the Plastic Data Challenge? This global contest wants your innovative ideas for improving the plastic waste management and recycling chain in South and Southeast Asia. Participants can consider...

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Hawai'i Conservation Conference

Hawaiʻi Conservation Alliance
The Hawai'i Conservation Conference is accepting abstracts in several categories, including emerging technological advances in the conservation field. This is an exciting opportunity to present your latest research to...

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Competition: The Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge

Conservation X Labs
Conservation X Labs welcomes you to enter the Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge, a competition aimed at finding new and innovative solutions to the environmental problems caused by mining operations. This competition...

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Fence-Based Elephant Early Warning System

Appiko
Technology is rapidly changing the way communities monitor wildlife movement and prevent or mitigate human-wildlife conflict. This case study from Appiko delves into field testing of the open source sensor warning...

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Animove Summer School 2020

AniMove
Animal Movement Analysis summer school is offered as a two-week professional training course, that targets students, researchers and conservation practitioners that are interested to work or even have already collected...

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WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Recording: Acoustic Monitoring

WILDLABS Team
The fourth and final event in Season 3 of the WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Series is now available to watch, along with notes that highlight key takeaways from the talks and discussion. In the meetup, speakers David Watson, ...

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OpenSource Drag and Drop Windows 10 software builder

Hi all, I recently published research showing photographs + gps tracks from tourists on safari can be used to give density estimates comparable to other commonly used...

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Hi Ricardo, 

Thanks for taking the time to respond.  I'll look into the electronjs.org option and see if I can get VS through the uni. 

If you come across any other drag-and-drop style platforms (preferably free) that you can use to build windows 10 software, it would be great if you can pop me a message on this.  Something like what you get when building a website through Wordpress or Wix would be perfect.

Cheers again!

Hi Kas

LiveCode is open source (www.livecode.org) and can build for multiple platforms - Windows, MacOS, Linux + mobiles. Might be worth having a look at - it has an english-like scripting language and drag + drop GUI builder. You can develop on multiple platforms too so not limited to Windows.

You're probably already finished, but maybe someone else will find it useful.

Hi Alan, 

Thanks for the suggestion.

I ended up using Visual Studio but will take a look at LiveCode for future work - sounds very cool.

Thanks, 

Kas

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Software Camera Traps

Hi  I found information about this software  A new software for camera trap analysis https://www.zsl.org/zsl-camera-trap-data-management-and-analysis-package...

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Very easy to use online form to collect sea turtle data

I am trying to develop an online data collection system for sea turtle sighting data in Cambodia. This includes picture upload, name, date, location, species, information on tags...

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Hi @kierancamb 

A colleague of mine let me know about this thread as it's very similar to lots of things we've built (Angel Shark sightings map, Thames Marine Mammal sightings map for example). Thinking about it more this could be a simple online free and open source tool.

It could use a JSON schema compiled form made through an interface much like: https://jsonform.github.io/jsonform/playground/index.html?example=schema-morecomplex

And take a parameter for an email address to send the results to.

You could then save the form schema and the email address in a bookmarkable URL and it could just let people fill the form out and send the results on. Annoyingly URLS have a 2000 character limit but we could take a parameter of a configuration file stored elsewhere (Office Online, Google Docs, PasteBin, GitHub) that way the form would be editable by who created it too.

If anyone has any ideas on this or could also use something like it I'd happily start an open source GitHub project and build the basics.

Have been thinking about doing this for a while.

Hi Kieran and all,

I jump into the topic as I am doing research on data collection through mobile application in conservation. (I currently have a test in Cambodia in the education sector with a mobile app and the possibility for the ngo to push questions through notifications on the user's smartphone).

Kieran could you tell me what are the main problem of downloading an app for your users ? it seems it is a general concern, any idea why ?

i really believe in a system where people providing data should be incentivised for it so the data becomes of higher value and of higher quality.

Fabien

 

I'm part of a citizen science  biodiversity project and we ask our citizen scientists to use Kobo Toolbox's webforms to collect field data using a smart phone.  Kobo was started by Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and gets funding from various organizations including branches of the United Nations.  https://www.kobotoolbox.org

KoBoToolbox is a suite of tools for field data collection for use in challenging environments. Our software is free and open source. Most of our users are people working in humanitarian crises, as well as aid professionals and researchers working in developing countries.

Project leaders design a webform and send people a link to the form. People load the  form in a browser when they have internet connection, then go into the field and fill out the form. The forms work both online and offline. If the users fill out the form when there is no internet  connection, the next time the users open the form when there is internet connection, the data is synced to the Kobo servers. 

Kobo has an admin interface where project leaders can view, edit, and download the data. Project leaders can use condtional logic when designing the questions on the  webform (if user answers yes, show question A; if users answers no, show question B).

 

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Tablet Recommendations for Field Research

Hi,  One of the teams at ZSL is going out into the field to collect data and want to use tablets. The tablets need to be robust and don't need to have too many bells...

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Hi. I'm picking up on an older post but i'd love to know if a ruggedised tablet with a long battery life at a price NGOs can afford is still an  issue? Are there limitations to what you can find on the market still? What features do you need that you can't find currently? I ask as I work for Arm Ltd (supporters of Wildlabs.net) and I'm prototyping a tablet for the WHO to use for healthcare in rural communities in developing countries as they can't purchase anything suitable. If this sort of tablet would be useful in other sectors i'd be very interested to know. I'm not trying to sell anything (I promise!) I'm gathering evidence that there is market interest for such a device. I'm championing the need for tech to be designed for use cases that it currently isn't designed for eg off the shelf tablets don't help if you can't charge a device for 4 days and you face challenging physical conditions where you use it but you can't afford, nor do you need, military grade tablets. Thanks, Fiona

I haven't done research on the options recently. But last time I did, from a value perspective, I've been recommending a solid consumer tablet which you can then “ruggedize” with a case, screen protector, or even an underwater case. That plus one or more power banks will be cheaper than a rugged desiged version. Use the extra $ you save to get a backup tablet and swap out the case/protective gear if it fails.

Best way to get a decent deal on tablets (or anything really) is use Amazon Warehouse Deals or Blinq to buy open box returns. And get an Amazon Prime credit card for an additional 5% cash back on your purchases.

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How do you weigh a live whale?

Fredrik Christiansen
How do we actually know a whale weighs 40 tonnes? After all, we can’t exactly capture an animal the size of a bus and simply put it on a scale. Fredrik Christiansen explains their new, non-invasive way of weighing...

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Download the SMART 2018 Annual Report

​​​On behalf of the SMART Partnership, I'm excited to share with you our 2018 Annual Report, which details the incredible progress we’ve made in 2018 and previews...

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Great work Drew thanks for sharing, hopefully, for the 2019 report, we will have a greater presence of Latin American countries adopting SMART as we have ongoing training activities going on 03 "new smart countries" Brazil, Argentina & Paraguay.

Here is a post about Paraguay first SMART training, hold in the beginning of the month:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/paraguay-takes-first-step-towards-adopting-spatial-tool-spina-avino/

Regards!

 

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data collection on mobile app

Havuta is developing a mobile application tool for community data collection. We would like to understand the needs of the conservation sector (as our current field of application...

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Hi Fabian, 

In the interest of helping you get some useful feedback - did you have some more specific questions you wanted answered? 

You might also want to have a look at this thread - Mobile App Comparison Table - as it might have some useful info about what people are looking for, particularly what they've listed under the pros/cons comparision of different mobile apps. 

Steph

Hi Stephanie,

Thanks for the link I hadn't seen it. It's very usefull.

i realise I have listed a list of points without specific questions, here are a few:

Do people face difficulties in onboarding users ? What are the reasons for people doing observations in the field for not installing an app ?

We face in the education sector a problem of computer/smartphone literacy that requires the application interface to be very simple. Is this also the case in conservation projects ? Any suggestions to solve this ? Examples ?

Does incentivizing data collectors (users) make a difference in the onboarding process ? Quality of data ? Number of users ?

that's a few to start :)

Thanks 

 

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What lessons have you learnt along the way when developing apps or software for conservation?

We just published a fantastic, in-depth case study from @John+Cornell , in which he shares the story of the development of a mobile app, Naturewatch, that ultimately did...

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I agree re: Venture Studio model. I feel like the ideal situation is where the studio team has at least one or two products already underway and out in the market, rather than starting with the consulting work to bootstrap the products. I'm in the latter situation at the moment, and turning down work is really hard.

I think there's the possibility for a situation where an anchor client who is aligned with a product vision is able to provide a core early chunk of seed funding in exchange for lifetime use (or guaranteed 5 years for example) of a product. That's a model I'm really excited about to get the $10-20k that you'd need to get to a proof of concept.

Great lessons around stakeholder engagement and project management in this article. Users and developers alike are key to your project. User requirements gathering can provide a lot of insight if done well but it can be hard to prioritise the magic that some users want versus what can be practically achieved by a developer with your time and budget constraints. Find advice from a good project manager or business analyst if you can to help with technical language and project design barriers. Definitely agree with the above comments on getting your developers engaged with your users where possible. 

Field based users often want to spend as little time as possible with technology. You need to use their time wisely to capture their requirements. Make sure they feel listened to. You can never please them all but hopefully you can focus in on critical users and key priorities and they will bring the others along.

 

Lots of good ideas and advice from everyone.

Time/money/quality/speed/etc tradeoffs, as always. Start with your minimum viable product, get it out there (at least to your initial target users - early adopters/enthusiasts), and iteratively improve, if poss. Don't go for the Big Bang approach where everything is "perfect", because it won't be. Users expect a lot from apps - there are incredibly well-resourced companies putting out incredible apps for free - and users almost always expect more. So... if there's an existing app (like iNaturalist/eBird/...) that can do the job for you, use it, or work with them to adapt.

Additionally, mobile phone hardware/software upgrades can often result in app issues/upgrades being necessary, so plan on maintenance costs as well as enhancements along the way, as others have said. Particularly when targetting both major platforms (use a cross-platform dev tool!).

If you're lucky enough to have a volunteer development team, treat/reward them as well as possible, to keep the system going. Whether that's with money or publication co-authorship or beer, find a way.

Could probably comment more but should probably write a paper...!

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