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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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DAS: A Scaleable Solution For Protected Area Management

Camellia Williams

26 September 2017 12:00am

The Domain Awareness System (DAS) is a revolution in monitoring technology, creating real-time awareness of protected areas assets. This technology has the potential to completely change standard monitoring procedures...

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discussion

How to track and count Scarlet Macaws

Ana Torres

15 August 2017 6:36pm

Hi all, I would love to have some advise about a good option for tracking scarlet macaws in the wild with a decent accuracy but without carrying antennas and having lots of people...

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Jorge Valenzuela

27 August 2017 9:20pm

I recomended cybertracker. Is easy and flexible app for android and works without cellphone coverage.

 

 

Sam Rye

8 September 2017 6:21am

It might be worth looking at this NZ based participatory bird count - https://www.greatkererucount.nz/

I believe they based it on iNaturalist - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.inaturalist.android

Ana Torres

8 September 2017 6:23pm

Hi, thanks jval and smarye for your ideas, I will look into it.

 

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discussion

Anonymous SMS

William Njoroge

3 April 2017 7:38am

Hi All, I am looking for a two-way communication solution using SMS. Ol Pejeta Conservancy works to conserve wildlife, provide a sanctuary for great apes, and to generate...

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Sophie Maxwell

13 April 2017 2:42pm

Hi Will, 

We are collaborating with WCS, San Diago zoo and the Wildtrack team from last year's zoohackathon to build a similar solution to the one you describe. The solution uses Twilio and you get a full overview of the work already built here: https://devpost.com/software/wildtrack

It would be good to share requirements and see if there is a way the Wildtrack solution can work for your needs. We would love to work with you to understand your full set of requirements and see if these can be accommodated. 

If this is of interest please do drop me an email at [email protected]. I will also be out in Kenya from 25th April for two weeks, so if you'd like to meet we can hopefully do this face to face.

Sophie

 

Kate West

15 August 2017 4:50pm

Hi all

I'd be interested to hear if there were any updates on the discussion above. We @marianneteoh are looking at establishing informant networks for reporting illegal fishing and marine wildlife trade and a means of anonymous reporting would be incredibly useful.

Thanks in advance,

Kate

Rachael Kemp

29 August 2017 5:27pm

Hi Kate,

At ZSL, we're continuing to work with the WildTrack team on their solution - now named SmartSkout. We've just had an article published on the Guardian about the project https://www.theguardian.com/vulcan-partner-zone/2017/aug/22/new-app-enable-citizens-report-poaching-real-time 

We're currently focussed on producing the MVP for terrestrial SMART sites but we'd be very interested to hear more about your work establishing informant networks to see what potential there is for broader applications of the technology in the future. Feel free to connect with me at [email protected] 

Best

Rachael

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discussion

Operation Ferdinand - a Predator and Livestock Conflict Prevention Video Game!

Gabriela Fleury

23 June 2017 7:07pm

Hello there, WiILDLABS! My name is Gabriela Fleury, a conservation biologist and graduate of the University of Cape Town's ConBio programme. I work with Jaymie Krambeck, a...

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Jorge Valenzuela

11 August 2017 1:42am

Hi Gabriela, i`ll check the game. Very interesting!!

 

Gabriela Fleury

11 August 2017 9:04am

Thanks for all the interest everyone! My colleague Jaymie and I are so excited that people are checking out our game. Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!

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discussion

Bird identification app needed

Fleur Scheele

13 July 2017 5:52pm

FFI Georgia wish to develop an application for smartphones to identify raptors that are commonly traded or poached in Georgia, eastern Europe. The aim is to provide allow law...

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Ed Miller

19 July 2017 10:29pm

Have you already tried the Merlin Bird ID App (http://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/)? The photo ID works pretty well. You just need to take a picture of the the whole bird. For offline mode, you can download a regional "Bird Pack", such as "US: Southeast".

Regards, Ed

Fleur Scheele

20 July 2017 9:06am

Dear Ed,

 

Excellent suggestion, thank you. We indeed need something as user-friendly as this. Right now they do not have all the right species for us (Eastern Europe/Middle East) but we could talk to them to see what is possible. Thanks again!

Fleur

Ed Miller

20 July 2017 5:09pm

Hi Fleur,

I see now that the Merlin App bird packs are limited to North America. You could certainly contact the Cornell University Lab of Ornitology (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/) who develop the app. They may be interested in helping with such a problem.

Another option may be iNaturalist (http://www.inaturalist.org/). They have an app for logging nature observations. It is not limited to bird, but includes plants, animals, etc. They are currently adding a deep learning system to help automatically identify species from photos (currently around 10,000 species can be identified). I believe they give a top 10 possibilities. They use GPS location data from the proto or phone to provide localized suggestions. There's a demo web page here: 

https://www.inaturalist.org/computer_vision_demo

According to their blog (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/computer_vision_demo), they have integrated the computer vision module with their iPhone app. I don't think they have added it to their Android app yet. I have Android, so I have not tried the computer vision component from my app.

They may also have limited species for your area, however, the great thing about iNaturalist is that anyone can upload observations. I believe for the computer vision to be effective, they want to have at least 20 verified observations of a species by 20 different people before they add it to their model. The app is from the California Academy of Science. You may want to contact them to see if you can accelerate the process.

Best of luck!

Ed

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discussion

SMART 2016 Annual Report

Drew Cronin

5 July 2017 7:26pm

Hello Wildlabs Community, Just wanted to make you aware of the release of the 2016 Annual Report from the SMART (Spatial Monitoring And Reporting Tool) Partnership. If you'...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

18 July 2017 1:10pm

Thanks for sharing this, Drew! We have a number of SMART focused case studies and articles in our Resources area that might also be worth checking out if you're considering using SMART in your work: 

  • The Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) - Alexa Montefiore gave a nice introduction to SMART in this first overview article 
  • Video: Discover the SMART Approach - recorded in June 2016, this talk was presented by Barney Long (@Barney_Long ), Emma Stokes (@estokes ) , Jonathan Palmer (@jpalmer ) and Alexa Montefiore, this talk explains the origins of SMART, offers case studies of successful applications and outlines future development plans for the methodology. The session concludes with an interactive Q&A session, which offered the opportunity to delve deeper into the practicalities of implementing SMART. 
  • Getting SMART in Cambodia - In this talk, Kate West (@katewest ), Manager of our Marine Conservation Group, shares her key lessons learnt from implementing SMART in a marine context and dives deep into the limitations and considerations that need to be taken into account when implementing the SMART approach. This is a valuable talk for any team considering deploying SMART in a marine context. 
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discussion

Website developers; engaging research to those working on the ground

Kate Baker

1 June 2017 12:33pm

Hello everyone, I'm on the lookout for a web developer to assist in creating a website to help connect up urban water research from universities to those working...

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Ian Aitken

29 June 2017 7:58pm

Hi Kate try www.ushahidi.com based in Kenya.

 

I have no affiliation with them I have seen the work they do.

 

Ting Wai Chong

5 July 2017 2:48pm

Hello Baker,

What kind of website you are trying to create? Like do you just want to share research data to those organizations or is it just to share reports (as in complete report based on the data but the actual data are not shared) or is it something else? I think Vizzuality is a good option since they have background working with big data, I am not really sure about other firms that offered data science in their development works since not many firms offer that type of development.

Ting Wai

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Naturewatch: Lessons from the field of app development

John Cornell

21 June 2017 12:00am

When developing and deploying new technologies, something things do not go according to plan. The difficult road leading to success and the hard won lessons learnt along the way are seldom shared, and unfortunately more...

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article

Getting SMART in Cambodia

Kate West

8 May 2017 12:00am

In 2016, Cambodia reached a landmark for marine conservation when a 405 km2 Marine Fisheries Management Area was declared around the islands of Koh Rong and Koh Rong Sanloem, creating the country’s first large-scale...

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discussion

Modeling techniques

Priyanka Wagh

29 March 2017 1:20pm

Hi, May I know what are the different applications of modeling?

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John Probert

29 March 2017 1:38pm

Hi Priyanka,

 

From your post, I believe you mean applications for modeling data, right? There are many depending on the area or environmental topic you are working on, such as QGIS, Movebank, Google Fusion Tables, iPlover, etc. What does everyone else in the community have to say about this?

@sivakumar @Hangiw @dave  @wai.yee @StephODonnell - What are your thoughts?

Stephanie O'Donnell

29 March 2017 2:42pm

Hi Priyanka, 

I'll second what John's posted - it would be helpful to know a little more about what you're looking to do before we can answer your query. What is you project? What sort of data do you have? What are you looking to model? 

Steph 

Priyanka Wagh

29 March 2017 3:11pm

Hi Steph,

Actully, it's my presentation topic in class, Now I don't have a data but have to deliever an information in general. So can I produce depctive data to show how to represent any model. 

Priyanka 

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discussion

Big Ocean Button Challenge

philine

16 February 2017 3:42pm

Could imagine this might interest some of you: Big Ocean Button Challenge Mobile apps to turn ocean data into the products and services we need. https://herox.com/...

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discussion

Survey123 and Collector

Adrian Hughes

31 October 2016 3:24pm

I'm interestes in finding out about people's experience with the two ESRI mobile apps. They are very quick to setup and deploy but I guess are limited in terms of...

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Ben Dorsey

19 December 2016 1:24am

I am finding ArcGIS Collector very usefull. I can say, as an dedicated R coder, some things are worth paying money for and Collector is one of the. I have used it to implement several monitoring and data collection projects. I particularly like the assurance that data will not be lost on the device and the ability to cache base maps. 

Paulo Cardoso

2 February 2017 6:42pm

Dear BPdorsey, Collector will support custom basemaps ? It wasn't an option a few months ago.

Adrian Hughes

3 February 2017 1:59pm

Thanks for the comments so far everyone

We have used custom basemaps in Collector. You need to publish a tile layer to ArcGIS Online,( I'm not sure if an organisational account is needed for this.)add it to your map and then you can download that tile layer to your device

https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/share-maps/publish-tiles.htm

 

 

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discussion

Have you used Wildbook?

John Probert

6 January 2017 4:31pm

Hello. I'm looking at automated species image recognition software, specifically through Wildbook. I was wondering if anyone has used it before, and what their thoughts were...

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discussion

Accelerators For Wildlife Conservation Apps?

Megan Cromp

31 October 2016 5:35pm

Hello, Does anyone know if there are any accelerator programs that focus on assisting with the development of wildlife conservation apps? Particularly ones that are...

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Anne

16 November 2016 3:26pm

Hi Megan, 

 

It sounds very interesting the app you are developing. I am working for a smaller nature conservation Fund and am trying a partnership with a platform that is also in development and aimed at connecting people and organizations, facilitate update and knowledge sharing and increasing the visibility and donor pool of the organisations. As I said it's still in development but you can take a look if you like www.pifworld.com/eng. I am however also very curious to get to know other (potential) tools that work similar.

 

It would be great to chat one time to get better acquainted, maybe you can send me your contact details by PM if you'd like to follow up?

Best, Anne Alexandre

 

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discussion

September Meetup: Gaming for Conservation Impact, Thursday 29th Sept

Stephanie O'Donnell

27 September 2016 10:43am

Topic: Internet of Elephants - Gaming for massive conservation impact Date: Thursday, 29th September Time: 10-12 (talk and...

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corinna_IoE

10 October 2016 9:28am

Thanks Alasdair for signing up! Happy to welcome you as one of our test users. The link will follow in a bit, meanwhile feel free to join our Facebook Play Group to get weekly updates on our process and backstories of the amazing animals we're allowed to work with: https://www.facebook.com/groups/IoEPlay/

Corinna

Karina Assiter

16 November 2016 2:22pm

Im sorry I missed this event - I hope there will be others like it...

Stephanie O'Donnell

16 November 2016 2:32pm

Hi Karina, 

There most definitely will be more events like this one. We are thinking of holding another gaming for conservation meetup in early 2017, potentially in London. Would that be of interest? 

Hmm. having looked up where Wentworth institute of Technology is - looks like you're actually based in the USA Cambridge. Do you ever make it over to the UK? Otherwise, maybe we could look into organising something more local to you..

Steph 

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discussion

Kid-friendly wildlife apps

Katarzyna Nowak

4 November 2016 4:16pm

I am wondering if anyone could recommend a wildlife conservation / wildlife crime awareness app that is kid-friendly and resonates / would resonate with...

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Chloe Aust

9 November 2016 11:54am

Hi Katzyna, we have an app called Instant Wild where you can see camera trap images coming in and help identify what is in them - you can take a look/find out more at http://www.edgeofexistence.org/instantwild 

Chloe

Sophie-Cohen

15 November 2016 4:47pm

Hi Katzyna,

Not an app, but United for Wildlife are releasing a new free online course on the illegal wildlife trade on the 17th that has Vietnamese subtitles and transcripts available. The website with the course is here: http://learn.unitedforwildlife.org/ but the new course won't be live until the 17th. I am happy to send you some further information on this if you would like? 

Just let me know!

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