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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The Esri Conservation Program is now accepting applications for grant assistance to access its ArcGIS Solutions for Protected Area Management Application. This system provides access to a suite of both mobile and web...
4 March 2020
The 2020 Tusk Awards are now accepting nominations of outstanding individuals who have made a significant impact on conservation in Africa. These nominations offer the rare and exciting opportunity to honor your peers...
3 March 2020
Article
In the past six months Instant Detect 2.0 has physically emerged, with the first prototype systems built and ready for testing at the start of April. The ZSL team is now well into their optimisation and hardening phase...
3 September 2019
The European Space Agency’s “Environmental Crimes” thematic call offers support and funding of up to €60,000 per activity to companies looking to develop services tackling illegal water, air and land polution using...
22 August 2019
The WILDLABS TECH HUB is supporting technology solutions tackling the illegal wildlife trade, in collaboration with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Digital Catapult, Satellite Applications Catapult, Amazon Web...
4 June 2019
To further their missions, LDF and Microsoft are collaborating on the AI for Earth innovation grant to support applicants in creating and deploying open source machine learning models, algorithms, and data sets that...
4 June 2019
Traditionally, illegal wildlife trade thrived in physical markets. But today it has also moved online. In China, more than half of the trade in elephant ivory items happens on e-commerce platforms. Enrico Di Minin and...
31 May 2019
It is common knowledge that the illegal trade in tiger bones and body parts poses a grave threat to the remaining populations of Asia’s most iconic big cat. But this grisly business also has a detrimental impact on...
31 May 2019
Ol Pejeta Conservancy partners with conservation and technology organisations to kick-start a research and innovation centre for wildlife conservation
31 May 2019
This webinar recording will provide a brief overview of current SMART functionality, highlight case studies of large scale and innovative SMART deployments, and detail how SMART is embracing and leveraging new...
21 May 2019
In February, we released an open call for the WILDLABS TECH HUB, offering 3 months of support for solutions using technolgy to tackle the illegal wildlife trade. We were overwhelmed by an incredible 37 submissions,...
13 May 2019
To realise the potential benefits of data for our societies and economies we need trustworthy data stewardship. We need to establish different approaches to deciding who should have access to data, for what purposes and...
15 April 2019
November 2023
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Hi Gautam, I think the best way is have them read the thread, and then get back to me with questions - I can then respond on a case-by-case basis. Our website is here:... |
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Wildlife Crime | 8 years 3 months ago | |
Hi All, Rachel has asked that I tell you a bit about who we are and what we do and how we think we can help this group. We are... |
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Wildlife Crime | 8 years 3 months ago | |
This post made me wander whether we could employ social media listening tools to identify illegal wildlife trade hotspots, levels, changes in ... |
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Wildlife Crime | 8 years 3 months ago | |
The Journal of Animal Ecology with the Journal of Applied Ecology and Methods in Ecology and Evolution have published a... |
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Wildlife Crime | 8 years 3 months ago | |
Watch streaming footage here of John Amos, President of Sky Truth, speaking on Cheap Space, DIY Imaging and Big... |
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Wildlife Crime | 8 years 6 months ago |
Tech Companies Block More than 11.6 Million Transactions for Endangered Wildlife Online
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Technical Difficulties: The Death of Giants
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Technical Difficulties: Expect the Unexpected
27 October 2021 12:00am
Technical Difficulties: Cleared for Takeoff
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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?
24 November 2020 12:00am
Webinar: Getting Started With SMART
11 November 2020 12:00am
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
15 October 2020 10:16am
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