article / 4 March 2020

#Tech4Wildlife 2020 Photo Challenge In Review

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 this year's projects in the field, lab, classroom, community, and web, with more than 250 photos shared, 1500 retweets, and 4,870 likes Over five years, our #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge has reached more than 1.5 million people, raising awareness for all the vital conservation work happening within our community on every continent around the globe! 

For the past five years, the #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge has provided us with the unique opportunity to watch your conservation tech projects develop and evolve over time. You've innovated new platforms, you've discovered new sources of information by combining vastly different technologies, you've utilized the latest tools, and you've continually pushed the boundaries of what is possible in the conservation field. From studying local wildlife populations to tracking endangered species in the most remote corners of the world, you've done it all and shared it with us along the way. Whether you caught our 2020 countdown live on Twitter and want to relive the moments, or you're just discovering #Tech4Wildlife, you can look back at every entry on our photo wall.

tech4wildlife post feed

This year's Top 10 Challenge Winners and Honourable Mentions spanned the seas, grasslands, polar regions, rainforests, mountains, and national parks, using every type of technology you can imagine, from 3D printing to drones to open source software. Many projects shared reflect years of collaboration and development within the #Tech4Wildlife community, including those shared by this year's 1st Place Winner, Shah Selbe, founder of Conservify

In Dec 2019, we deployed @FieldKitOrg sensors and an open LoRaWAN network in Cameroon's Dja Faunal Reserve alongside @UCLAIoES to support the fieldwork being done at the Congo Basin Institute. We will return this spring to finish the network and deploy more sensors #Tech4Wildlife pic.twitter.com/50PU3RekC4

— Shah Selbe (@shahselbe) March 2, 2020

Shah's FieldKit has already been deployed in field projects around the world and is set to launch to the public this spring. And best of all, the projects Shah shared with us are still evolving alongside with FieldKit, meaning more incredible content and data is set to come from his continuing work collaborating with organizations like National Geographic, WCS, Adventure Scientists, and UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. 

This year, we kick off a partnership with @AdvScientists to use @FieldKitOrg to monitor over 11,000 miles of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers. More details available here: https://t.co/fwBpSUrZ7K #Tech4Wildlife

— Shah Selbe (@shahselbe) March 2, 2020

Shah's FieldKit is a revolutionary open source hardware and software sensor system that is  customizable, affordable, and easy to share with peers from anywhere in the world. Shah's FieldKit has already demonstrated incredible versatility in various environments and ecosystems measuring water quality and weather data. 

We spent some time at @AmericanPrairie for the deployment of an open LoRaWAN network that will bring back GPS tracking data of bison populations and @FieldKitOrg sensor data. The team is eager to get back there and deploy some more. #Tech4Wildlife pic.twitter.com/D4skooWgLY

— Shah Selbe (@shahselbe) March 2, 2020

Shah also deployed FieldKit technology in Montana's American Prairie reserve using an open LoRaWAN network that will also transmit GPS tracking data about the iconic American Bison. And up in Alaska's Banff National Park, where Shah has been conducting glacial seismic monitoring for the past three years, we look forward to seeing the FieldKit in action when it is deployed there this year.

Our work in Banff National Park continues for a third year of seismic monitoring of the Bow Glacier alongside @blprnt and @JLKavanaugh. We built a custom geophone setup and hope to upgrade to @FieldKitOrg compatibility this year. #Tech4Wildlife pic.twitter.com/IdIWN0Sois

— Shah Selbe (@shahselbe) March 2, 2020

Sometimes the best innovations come from finding new ways to use existing technology. No matter where #tech4wildlife is being used in the world, many of our favorite projects used incredible technology combinations to collect data in new ways. We've seen many incredible whale projects over the years featuring drones, hydrophones, sensors, and more, and our 7th Place honoree Emma Vogel showcased a unique tech combo used to study both Humbacks and Killer Whales in Norway. These biologging tags collected movement data as well as HD video footage. To capture video during the polar night, a region-specific challenge, Emma and her team also added lights to the equipment. 

We @UiTromso are using #Tech4Wildlife by tagging #KillerWhales in northern Norway with #biologging tags. These tags have various sensors for collecting movement data and record HD video (with lights for #polarnight!) pic.twitter.com/8ldqt433CA

— Emma Vogel (@efvogel) February 28, 2020

And in warmer waters off the coast of Baja California, we saw another exciting case of technologies teaming up to capture complimentary data from whales. Heloise Frouin-Mouy earned an honourable mention for sharing this footage from a dual-drone project, with one drone carrying the camera and the other deploying a hydrophone. 

For @WILDLABSNET & #tech4wildlife: a drone equipped with a hydrophone and another drone with a camera for studying the acoustic behavior of gray whales in Baja California Sur, Mexico.https://t.co/gICgTipaQV https://t.co/DQQRJcgSwq pic.twitter.com/HZtd4Ior0I

— Heloise Frouin-Mouy (@FrouinMouy) March 2, 2020

Collars featuring tracking tech are always quite prominent in our #tech4wildlife challenges, and this year Marcella J. Kelly earned 8th Place for putting a camera spin on collaring. This camera collar allowed Marcella to understand Black Bear foraging behavior by giving her access to the bear's perspective on the ground. Unlike Marcella's other camera trap footage (which was also spectacular in its own right!), this camera collar isn't contained to one site, but provides a glimpse into how bears are interacting with their wider environment as they move through it.

We @whapavt are using #Tech4Wildlife by putting camera collars on #blackbears to study foraging ecology in the Appalachian Mountains. We now are watching thousands of videos of cool behaviors like this rock flipping. It's awesome to get a bear's eye view! pic.twitter.com/YqVGTpI8IE

— Marcella J. Kelly (@marcellajkelly) February 27, 2020

Digital Naturalism also brought a massive level of creativity to the projects coming out of their lab this year, earning them 5th Place in our lineup. Since beginning our Photo Challenge five years ago, we've seen new technologies become more affordable and accessible, and 3D printing is a great example of a once-expensive tech option that is now taking off in a big way. Digital Naturalism incorporated open source 3D scanning and printing into their project monitoring the inside of stingless bee hives.

We have been using #opensource #3dscanning and #3Dprinting tools like Meshroom and @Prusa3D printers to scan an replicate intricate features of stingless bee hives that we can swap inside the best filled with monitoring sensors#tech4wildlife with @merejohnson21 pic.twitter.com/4oY9q70ySG

— Digital Naturalism (@HikingHack) March 2, 2020

All of Digital Naturalism's #tech4wildlife entries this year displayed an impressive level of ingenuity when it comes to combining different technololgies. This Bat Signal was an especially creative idea that allowed them to demonstrate science at the Bat Lab in a visual, eye-catching way. Ultrasonic sensor readings pick up nearby bat calls and convert those sensor readings into colored light projected from a custom LED light system. So many of our #tech4wildlife projects focus on collecting data for scientific research, and this Digital Naturalism project is a wonderful look at how technology can also be used to make conservation science fun, interesting, and accessible to the public!

And also for the bat lab we made a custom bat signal which take ultrasonic sensor readings into an @arduino , and changes the color on a big 3w rgb LED from @adafruit to visualize when bats are calling nearby from the jungle!

(Plus every batlab needs a bat signal)#tech4wildlife pic.twitter.com/q8VUrfI9jG

— Digital Naturalism (@HikingHack) March 2, 2020

Long-time followers of our #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge will know that this event is, at heart, about the spirit of collaboration and connecting all of you in the conservation tech community. Runner-up Dr. Meredith S. Palmer's project this year developed as the result of collaboration within our WILDLABS community and fully captured that spirit. Meredith used a #tech4wildlife classic, camera traps, one of our most commonly shared tech tools, in an experimental way by adding triggered audio cues to the cameras in an effort to understand predator/prey relationships within their ecosystems. In the future, we may even see this research method develop into a high-tech solution using audio cues as an answer to issues like human-wildlife conflict. 

We use camera traps that produce predator cues when triggered, allowing us to study anti-predator behaviors in nature! Using the data-generating power of CTs in a manipulative experiment helps us better understand how predators structure ecosystems #Tech4Wildlife @WILDLABSNET pic.twitter.com/TaVHAW9KAW

— Meredith S. Palmer, Ph.D. (@songofdodo) March 2, 2020

A shot of the circuit board used to sense and playback the sounds for this rig. Notice the shoutout to @songofdodo and @WILDLABSNET :) pic.twitter.com/KJmAXW8WTQ

— akiba (@freaklabs) March 16, 2020

Congratulations again to all of our photo challenge winners and participants! As always, we look forward to seeing what innovations you'll have to share by this time in 2021.

And although our photo challenge has concluded until next year, the WILDLABS #tech4wildlife community is always active and ready to see your latest projects on Twitter, discuss your big ideas in our groups, and help you connect to the right conservation and tech experts who can make your revolutionary ideas a reality! 


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