Wildlife crime is one of the greatest challenges facing conservation, and one of the conservation tech world's biggest areas of innovation. With new ideas and solutions constantly being put forth to track and protect species targeted by poachers, manage protected areas and support rangers, and combat the growing online market for illegal wildlife products, the engineers and conservationists working to solve wildlife crime's many challenges rely on tools like machine learning, biologging, camera traps, acoustic monitoring, drones, mobile apps, and more.
This wide variety of overlapping technology makes our Wildlife Crime group a potential melting pot for many of our other communities, and makes it an especially exciting place to find collaborators working in different tech spheres to meet a common goal. Whether you're a camera trap expert looking for information on thermal vision to spot potential poachers, a machine learning expert with the skills to analyze acoustic data for gunshots, or a protected area manager seeking the latest integrated mobile tools, this group can connect you with the right members of our community!
Below, you'll find WILDLABS resources and conversations to help you understand how different technologies are being put to work in the fight against wildlife crime, and what conservation tech practitioners need for these tools to be effective.
Three Tutorials and Videos for Beginners:
- How do I use AI to fight wildlife crime? | Lily Xu, Tech Tutors
- WWF Wildlife Crime Technology Project | Eric Becker, Virtual Meetups
- SmartParks | Laurens de Groot, Virtual Meetups
Three Forum Threads for Beginners:
- Snare detection technologies | Rachel Kramer
- Tools for conservation management | Chris Muashekele
- Looking for Intelligence Database Software | Dexter Oelrichs
Three Articles for Beginners:
- Using AIS data to investigate the world's fishing ports, Max Schofield
- How do Wildlife Crime Experts view Remote Sensing Technologies used to Combat Illegal Wildlife Crime?, Isla Duporge
- Metal Detecting Sensors for Anti-Poaching, Sam Seccombe
Join this group now to get to know our community and start discussing solutions and ideas together!
Header photo: © Frank af Petersens/Save the Elephants
Studying Biodiversity, Wildlife, and Ecosystem Health @ UEdi. Professionally software engineer, program manager, developer educator
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I've been working in IT for the past four years and Cybersecurity for the past year and a half. I'm looking to leverage my technical skills towards conservation purposes. I'm new on this journey and excited to jump of volunteer activities where I'm able!
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- @Mumonkan
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Wild Me
Software Engineer for Wildlife Conservation
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Dzanga-Ndoki national park biodiversity monitoring
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WILDLABS
This account is managed by the WILDLABS Team. Tag us or DM whenever you need help from our community team.
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World Wide Fund for Nature/ World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
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Technologist, birder, photographer and mountain guide.
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- @vandita_shukla
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PhD candidate studying drone flight planning for enabling tracking and identification of individual characteristics of wildlife; member of the WildDrone, an MSCA Doctoral Network funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research
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Movement Ecologist studying the where, why, and how animals move throughout our world. Current work is investigating the movement and energetics of large neotropical bats in a changing environment with ephemeral resources.
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Program Officer, Conservation Technology Program, WCS
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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.
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Do you have photos and videos of your conservation tech work? We want to include them in a conservation technology showcase video
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Read in detail about how to use The Inventory, our new living directory of conservation technology tools, organisations, and R&D projects.
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The Inventory is your one-stop shop for conservation technology tools, organisations, and R&D projects. Start contributing to it now!
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Technology to End the Sixth Mass Extinction. Salary: $132 - $160k; Location: Seattle WA; 7+ years of experience in hardware product development and manufacturing; View post for full job description
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Catch up on the conservation tech discussions and events that happened during World Wildlife Day 2024!
7 March 2024
Careers
The SMART Partnership is hiring a Program Director to oversee all aspects of the partnership's operations
21 February 2024
Join the mission to help tackle IUU fishing with cutting-edge tech! The Allan Institute for AI is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to accelerate efforts to make sure those working to restore our ocean have the tools...
21 February 2024
A set of highly discriminating STR DNA markers developed in a collaboration between the SASA wildlife forensics lab and University of Leicester researchers is being used to detect laundering of wild peregrine falcons...
13 February 2024
A portable nanopore DNA sequencer has been used to determine the species of origin of bushmeat intercepted at Brussels Airport during a day of baggage searches.
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23 November 2023
My project seeks to create awareness on bushmeat activities, through physical barazas as well use of technology (SMS – in Swahili) to disseminate messages on the offences and penalties under the Wildlife Conservation...
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Thanks, @Drue+Freeman . You raise excellent points, here. In my experience with projects that use protected area monitoring and management software such as the... |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 1 month ago | |
Hello - I wrote up a lessons learned from the Hack for Wildlife that we ran in Chicago. https://medium.com/@mygshah/i-just-ran-my-first-hackathon-you-can-too-... |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 3 months ago | |
Hi Isla, The 3 threats are all situational and location dependent. For example, in South Africa there is a very well established muti industry and huge muti markets in KwaZulu... |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 3 months ago | |
Wildlife Crime group, A set of Training Guidelines for Anti Poaching Field Rangers were launched... |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 3 months ago | |
Hi everyone, Isla has shared the results of this survey in a new article in our Resources area. You can read her full analysis of the survey results here: https... |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 6 months ago | |
That paper is available on Sci Hub. |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 9 months ago | |
Hi Rachel, the intended audience is individuals and organizations working on tech/innovative solutions to protect wildlife, although the principles of partnership building in... |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 9 months ago | |
I just saw this article about embedding GPS trackers in fake turtle eggs. It reminded me of the Nat Geo story from last year where they did... |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 9 months ago | |
It sounds like @David+Baisch at Conservation X Labs just ordered a SCiO spec and developer's kit to test its sensitivity. They're interested in ... |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 9 months ago | |
Hello all, A new rhino poaching report is out by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. ... |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 10 months ago | |
For those who are interested in following changes in rhino poaching numbers in South Africa, I highly reccommend this website. They post... |
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Wildlife Crime | 7 years 11 months ago | |
Here's a few apps relevant to combatting wildlife crime. 1. ENV- Report Wildlife Crime - This app specifically focuses on... |
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Wildlife Crime | 8 years 1 month ago |
Tech Companies Block More than 11.6 Million Transactions for Endangered Wildlife Online
6 December 2021 12:00am
Technical Difficulties: The Death of Giants
3 November 2021 12:00am
Technical Difficulties: Expect the Unexpected
27 October 2021 12:00am
Technical Difficulties: Cleared for Takeoff
20 October 2021 12:00am
Technical Difficulties: Understanding the Realities
13 October 2021 12:00am
NParks opens Singapore’s first Centre for Wildlife Forensics
20 September 2021 12:00am
Tech Tutors: How do I use AI to fight wildlife crime?
1 September 2021 10:59pm
Looking for - Intelligence Database Software
14 June 2021 11:01am
8 July 2021 8:31am
Hi Dexter
We have a bunch of tools for you guys at Natual-solutions.eu ...
Ave a look at https://geonature.fr/ its alll open source, we can translate it all for you if needed ...
Please fell free to email us at
9 July 2021 12:56am
Thank you very much! I'll email you now.
It Takes a #Tech4Wildlife Community
17 May 2021 12:00am
Announcing the 2021 CLP Team Award Winners
17 May 2021 12:00am
Getting Started with Conservation Dogs: An Interview with Paul Bunker
7 May 2021 12:00am
Ecognize: A platform for environmental and conservation issue reporting
8 April 2021 11:47pm
16 April 2021 10:52pm
Update (April 16): I just open-sourced the code at https://github.com/ecognize-hub/ecognize. I released it under the Apache 2.0 license so it can be used for pretty much anything, including commercial use.
Webinar: 'Advances in use of SMART approach, tools and technology'
12 March 2021 12:00am
How do I strategically allocate drones for conservation?
8 February 2021 12:00am
Protecting Wildlife with Machine Learning
29 January 2021 12:00am
New Paper: Empowering Rangers Through Technology and Innovation
27 January 2021 12:00am
Survey for Wildlife Conservation: Do We Need Hand of Technology?
27 December 2020 3:35pm
How do I use open access remote sensing data to monitor fishing?
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Webinar: Getting Started With SMART
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Hackathon Opportunity: Vaquita Hacks
10 November 2020 12:00am
[Webinar series] Wildlife Crime is Financial Crime: A collaborative approach in the fight against wildlife crime
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Designing a Camera Mount with FLIR and WWF
24 August 2020 12:00am
WWF US Conservation Leadership Award
13 August 2020 12:00am
Challenge: ElephantEdge
11 August 2020 12:00am
Metal Detecting Sensors for Anti-Poaching
10 August 2020 12:00am
Recognising illegally-traded animal body parts
18 June 2020 7:32pm
31 July 2020 2:30pm
Hi Sara and Debbie,
Just wanted to chime in here since I actually worked on this exact project several years ago when I was an intern at WWF.
We used scans from a near infrared spectrometer to classify ivory. The model was able to distinguish between fake and real ivory, including even distinguishing between elephant ivory and mammoth ivory. My manager for the internship, Rachel Kramer, had done all the hard work of collecting hundreds of scans of ivory samples from various museum collections and ivory that had been seized.
I am happy to share more details about the project if you are interested. Unfortunately I did not get to see it through because I was only working there for one summer three years ago, but I now work as a data scientist and so I have a lot more experience with this type of modeling.
31 July 2020 3:04pm
Very cool! It makes total sense to use a more informative sensor like a spectrometer for this. I'm not surprised to hear that WWF was interested! Do you know if the model you trained is being used anywhere?
31 July 2020 5:28pm
I am really curious! I will ask my old manager and get back to you.
FIT Identification - Possibilities for use as an anti-poaching tool?
13 July 2020 10:43pm
Tech4Wildlife News: SMART Mobile
23 June 2020 12:00am
We want to provide tracking and surveillance tech FOC to catch poachers.
14 October 2019 3:22pm
14 October 2019 11:57pm
I RUN THE GLOBAL WILDLIFE WARRIORS NETWORK COMPRISED OF 30 ONLINE LOCATIONS IN 30 COUNTRIES WITH A LARGE TEAM OF ADMINISTRATORS. WE ALSO HAVE ADMINS THAT ARE ANTI-POACHING RANGERS IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF AFRICA. LAST YEAR GWW REACHED OVER 5,000,000 PEOPLE. THAT IS ALWAYS GWW'S MAIN GOAL, OUTREACH! AS WE BELIEVE THAT THIS WAR TO PROTECT WILDLIFE WILL BE WON ONCE THE CREED OF CONSERVATION REACHES CRITICAL MASS GLOBALLY
21 April 2020 11:11am
Hello MH, can we get into contact what edge devices (camera traps, CCTV or other sensing) you might have? we are working on the frontline of technology as a force mutliplier for ant-poaching units mostly in southern africa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOWW0LwKc0g
thank you and regards
Wolf
17 June 2020 3:55pm
Hi Richard, I've been working with Kerinci Seblat National Park in Sumatra for the better part of 20 years focusing primarily to countering tiger and other wildlife poaching and IWT in/around one of the largest national parks in Asia, might be good to talk, at very least you would have a better idea of some of the issues our ranger teams face.
Innovator Interview: Hack the Poacher
4 June 2020 12:00am
22 June 2021 1:48am
Hi Phil,
Thank you very much! I had not considered them but they are a viable option for sure! The biggest concern would be the security of storing sensitive information online via AWS (or alternative) but lets see if there is a solution.
I'll dig around and come back to you on it! Have a great day