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Dear <<First Name>>
Thank you to everyone who reached out after last month's call for ideas on our upcoming virtual meetup series. It seems like the idea struck a chord - we received more than 20 replies from interested members with a range of ideas for how to best focus these conversations. A few topics with notable interest included innovations in wildlife tracking, noninvasive monitoring techniques, and open tools for conservation (see all suggestions here).
Now that we have a better sense of what you all are excited about, we are moving forward with organizing the events. The tentative schedule includes one meetup each month for the remainder of 2018, with more to follow beginning early next year. Keep an eye out for more updates coming soon.
You can still share your ideas for the series by replying to this email or by joining the discussion on WILDLABS.
See you in the community,
The WILDLABS Team
(Header Image: Arribada Initiative, read more about their work here)
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Visit the My Groups tab of your dashboard to discover the latest discussions in your areas of interest. Groups with the most recent comments will float to the top of your list.
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- Mike Johnson introduces WildFind, a package to produce a georeferenced heatmap of VHF collared animals. The system is still a work in progress, so let him know if you have any suggestions. (Be the first to reply)
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Nigel Butcher shares that Microwave Telemetry offers five free tags annually to early career researchers. Would these be useful for your work? See his post to find out more and apply by October 31st. (Be the first to reply)
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Chris Beirne gives an update on tracking seed movement through an elephant’s digestive system - a good reminder that with fussy subjects, sometimes old-school methods still beat out the fancy new tech. (2 replies)
- Albin Popot's thread about solar balloons for tracking animals has kicked off quite a discussion, with Mike Johnson joining to share some videos and lessons learnt from his own experiments DIY balloons for VHF tracking (8 replies)
- Rob Appleby has added his collar housing designs and associated .stl files to Yvan Satgé's thread aimed at creating a repository for printable 3D models of tracking devices. Can you help grow this valuable resource with your own designs? (4 replies)
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- Felipe Spina introduces Residents of the Forest, an educational video series showing the diversity of Amazon dwellers via camera trap footage. The series is part of WWF-Brazil's current work in Resex Chico Mendes. (Be the first to reply)
- Sibusiso Bakana is looking for video footage or images of rhinos and elephants to help him develop a data mining detection tool to combat poaching in South Africa. (3 replies)
- Rob Appleby has offered Laura Z. advice about a camera that potentially fits her requirement list for monitoring seabird nests. This info might be helpful to others looking for small, remote camera systems, so check it out if you're working in this space. (4 replies)
- Catharina Karlsson and Paul Meek have offered Ollie Wearn advice about their approaches to transporting camera traps safely and securely, especially on commercial flights. (4 replies)
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- The conversation continues in the Drones for GIS - Best Practice thread. Collin Cook and Thomas Starnes discuss open source alternatives to the effective but pricey Drone Deploy software Megan Ossman wrote a user's guide for last month. The two they mention are DroneMapper and OpenDroneMap. Do you have other recommendations? (6 replies)
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Megan Ossmann answers questions from Rob Appleby regarding her recent work with Eric Becker testing out FLIR’s new Duo Pro R thermal camera as a detection tool for loggerhead sea turtle nests. (4 replies)
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Adrian Hughes is keen to hear about any experience you might have using multispectral cameras with drones. His team at RSPB is particularly interested in exploring improved ability to monitor vegetation through measures such as NDVI. Do you have experience to share? (Be the first to reply)
- Sol Milne is also after advice about processing images taken from the drones he's using to monitor orangutans, with aim of getting coordinates for each pixel in the image. It's a big hurdle in his study and he's very keen to use the collective knowledge of our community to help solve the problem. (Be the first to reply)
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- David Brown asks about what software folks are using to sort through Audiomoth files, particularly to pull out bat calls. So far he's been using BatClassify, which is free and can handle zero length files but is also very slow. (Be the first to reply)
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Thierry Cambier and David Brown both share a bit about how they are using Audiomoths in their respective studies. Thierry used his to capture the first-ever recording of Barbastella in the town of Wallonia, South Belgium! How are you using your audiomoth? (3 replies)
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- Nadiah Mat Junoh announces the Xtinct Forest Fire Innovation Challenge (XFire), which seeks scalable tech solutions to suppress large wildfires in Southeast Asia’s inland and peatland forest. Submissions will be accepted through December 31st. Find out more
- Lot Amorós shares that all 36 sessions of the Eye on Earth Symposium, many of which are relevant to our community, will be webcast globally. Find out more
- Jake Levenson is hosting a webinar on Thursday with colleagues at HeroX and NASA on their crowd-sourcing competition: Developing the Next Generation of Animal Telemetry Competition. Find out more
- Robin Poches has flagged an upcoming online course (paid) about Wildlife Tracking with Telemetry in Spanish. Find out more
- Thomas Starnes shares that the Conservation Biology Institute is hosting a series of Conservation Remote sensing webinars with the Society for Conservation GIS. Find out more
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Live Funding Opportunities
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The National Geographic Society (NGS) is seeking applications for their new Conservation Technologies RFP to create novel tools and technologies to monitor ecosystem health. In the same way that human health is monitored in real time (e.g., thermometer, MRI, blood pressure), environmental diagnostic monitoring techniques are needed to provide practical measurements correlated with ecosystem health.
Open Now
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NASA and The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) are seeking your ideas for how to use emerging SmallSat/CubeSat technology along with other Space, Stratosphere, Land, and/or Water systems to improve the spatial and temporal coverage, spatial accuracy and/or data packet size of animal telemetry data collection and tracking. A total prize pool of up to $30,000 is available. Up to 3 awards are planned with the minimum prize being no lower than $5,000.
Due: November 8th
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DISCOVERY Yacht Expeditions
This International SeaKeepers Society program provides marine scientists with a unique and cost-effective platform for at-sea research by placing researchers on privately owned vessels to conduct oceanographic research.
Proposals accepted on a rolling basis
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- The Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) seeks an experienced Scientific Computing Lead to manage its public and private cloud resources. Closes Oct 31
- The Citizen Science Group at the DLR-Institute of Data Science in Jena, Germany is looking for a Computer Scientist to join their team for a 3-year term starting as soon as possible. Closes Oct 31
- The Conservation Decisions Team (CSIRO) is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to work on developing AI specifically designed to deliver interpretable and explainable solutions to environmental decision problems. Closes Oct 31
- The University of Oregon Institute of Ecology and Evolution and the Department of Biology invite applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Biology and Data Science. Closes Nov 1
- The United States Geological Survey (USGS) and Colorado State University (CSU) are seeking Field Technicians to work on projects involving radio telemetry and behavioral observations of wild horses and burros in remote sites in the western United States. Closes Nov 9
- The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is seeking 3 field technicians to assist with research on the behavior and habitat use of wild turkeys in Illinois. Primary responsibilities will include trapping, radio-tagging, and tracking wild turkeys and remotely downloading data from their transmitters. Closes Nov 30
- The University of Saskatchewan is seeking a PhD or MSc student to join them In a collaborative project focusing on birds and other sentinel vertebrates as indicators of ecosystem health on working farms in the Prairie region. Closes Nov 30
- The University of California at Davis is recruiting for a tenure-track faculty position in wildlife habitat ecology. Closes Dec 1
- The University of Florida is seeking a dynamic scholar, educator, and communicator for a 9- month tenure-accruing appointment available in their Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation. Closes Dec 1
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Search and discover members with our enhanced Member Directory in the People tab of your Dashboard
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Computer scientist and mathematician working on a smarter wildlife trade intelligence platform.
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DPhil student at University of Oxford & Conservation Projects Officer at the Born Free Foundation
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Practitioner turned academic, I'm currently most interested in ecology and conservation in East African savannahs
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Dive Deep with our Case Studies
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Biology undergrad attempts automated species recognition using MacBook Air and Google
Machine learning is widely recognized as the solution to camera trap data processing, but a user-friendly and broadly-accessible system for putting this tech to use has not yet been developed. In this case study, WILDLABS Intern Talia Speaker takes us through her work as a biology undergrad attempting to bridge the accessibility gap in machine learning solutions for camera trap data.
Read more >>
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HWC Tech Challenge update: Comparing thermopile and microbolometer thermal sensors
Anne Dangerfield shares the results of Arribada Initiative's latest round of thermal sensor testing, including their decided favorites for using with polar bears in the Arctic and with elephants in India.
Read more >>
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In a World of “What-Ifs”, what if we shifted the way the world supports and interacts with conservation organizations in real-time? This case study provides an inside look into how frustrations in the field led Megan Cromp to develop the Key Conservation mobile app.
Read more >> |
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Sol Milne describes his work investigating how changing land-use is affecting orangutan distribution. He has combined drone imagery, citizen science, and line transects to get a thorough picture of the relationships between human land use, strangler fig distribution, and orangutan nesting sites.
Read more >>
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Rangerbot is an underwater drone that can accurately identify and fire an injection into crown-of-thorns starfish. After its concept won the 2016 Google Impact Challenge People’s Choice prize, it was developed by a team at the Queensland University of Technology and is now ready to be put to the test.
Read more >>
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#Tech4Wildlife can be tricky. Sometimes it takes a village to find the right tool for a task in conservation. With WILDLABS, we're working to grow that village. Download our annual report to learn more.
Download now >>
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