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Dear <<First Name>>,
Welcome to your March WILDLABS Community Digest! Before we get into some of the recent highlights from our community, a few announcements.
We are planning a virtual workshop to share how we facilitate our Virtual Meetups. We're fielding a lot of questions and requests for advice from people who've come along to our meetups and had a really positive experience (if you've never attended one, this is the sort of feedback we consistently receive from speakers and attendees). So organising a proper space to systematically share our knowledge, answer questions and run a troubleshooting/brainstorming session seems like the most helpful thing we can offer right now. We'll keep WILDLABS and twitter updated as we progress in planning, and will send out an email with an invitation in the coming days.
Secondly, if you are hosting a meeting or workshop that is now virtual and covers topics that might be of interest to our community, please use our Meetups and Events group to share your virtual events and place calls for expert speakers. Ben Weinstein is one member already doing this, he posted his Deep Learning for Airborne Tree Detection webinar that is happening later this week. As more events move online, it's also an opportunity to open out participation to more parts of the community - we're keen to help facilitate this.
Finally, we're delighted to introduce a new member of our team, Ellie Warren. Ellie is the person to speak to if you're interested in publishing your own case studies, commentaries, video series, project logs, and other original content to WILDLABS. If you have an exciting field project, developing technology, or innovative idea to share, we'd like to hear about it. Please read through our newly updated editorial guidelines on writing and submitting content to be featured on WILDLABS, and then get in touch with Ellie at ellie.warren@wildlabs.net. We look forward to sharing more of the incredible work you're doing around the globe!
See you in the community,
The WILDLABS Team
(Header Image: 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. 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. Learn more)
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A taste of what our community is discussing now. To see all live conversations in the community, visit the Explore tab of your dashboard.
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- Announcing the iWildCam 2020 Camera Trap Kaggle Competition! Sara Beery invited us to participate in iWildCam2020, a competition held as part of the Seventh Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC7). This year's challenge focuses on multimodal data fusion and providing matched multispectral remote sensing data for camera trap locations. (Be the first to reply)
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Technology Showroom of Artificial Intelligence (AI) aided Elephant Early Warning Systems Tim Vedanayagam shared details of his upcoming showcase of elephant warning systems utilizing artificial intelligence. These working models can be used to address crucial human-wildlife conflict issues in local communities within elephant habitat. (Be the first to reply)
- Curious about radio-tracking with drones? Laura from Wildlife Drones shared how this Australian startup is improving radio-tracking technology by combining it with the potential of drones. Laura provided a video demonstrating how this system can be used to monitor pangolins in Vietnam, and also discussed the immediate benefits of incorporating drones into tracking fieldwork; namely, that drones maximise the line of sight in any terrain by creating a high point with minimal effort. (6 replies)
- Margo Luminous Beta Launch: New Tracking Collar Jared Marley from wildlife tech company Margo updated us on the beta version of their new Luminous tracking collar, which is now deployed for field testing. As of this posting, the Margo Luminous features data transmission via iridium satellite with two way communication, with LoRa and LTE versions in early development. This collar is equipped with GPS, temperature sensors, an accelerometer, and a beta step counter. Jared would like to discuss other desired features for future Margo Luminous tests. (Be the first to reply)
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- Turtle Monitoring Data Base? Ted Schmitt from Vulcan is searching for leads on turtle monitoring solutions for use in Africa. If you have information about an existing database that would be helpful, or if you can recommend a data model in SMART, drop Ted a comment to share your expertise. (Be the first to reply)
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Guidelines for reducing drone distrubance on wildlife? Isla Duporge asks if anyone knows of any existing guidelines for reducing disturbance to wildlife when using drones- please share! (Be the first to reply)
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Has anyone developed protocols for IDing big batches of camera trap data? Michelle Moeller is trying to get a batch of camera trap images ID-ed and has a small team of interns working through the camera trap IDs. Has anyone developed protocols for this part of the process of camera trapping and how to minimise biases? Things she was hoping to include is how many hours reccomended per IDing session, what to do when you are not sure of a species, no. of verifications required. (Be the first to reply)
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Do you need a low cost, ruggedised tablet with long battery life? Fiona Riggle has picked up a dormant discussion to ask if a ruggedised tablet with a long battery life at a price NGOs can afford is still an issue? Are there limitations to what you can find on the market still? What features do you need that you can't find currently? As part of her work with Arm, she is prototyping a tablet for the WHO to use for healthcare in rural communities in developing countries as they can't purchase anything suitable. If this sort of tablet would be useful in other sectors she'd be very interested to know. (8 replies)
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How to add a salt water switch? Ned Horning from the American Museum of Natural History is looking for advice on tracking Diamondback Terrapins with GPS / LoRa trackers. Ned would like to discuss how to limit GPS power consumption by adding a salt water switch to the bundle. (Be the first to reply)
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Looking for Case Studies: Orgs Engaging Local Residents via Mobile Tech Projects? Alexandra Wall is looking for case studies from conservation projects that have engaged local communities on the ground through mobile technologies like phones. If you're involved in field projects that engage with local communities, and Alexandra would like to hear from you. (Be the first to reply)
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- X-Prize for Rainforests - community entry? Ben Tregenna invited the WILDLABS community to collaborate on an entry for the The $10M Rainforest XPRIZE, and had an enthusastic response. The XPRIZE is a competition "to survey the most biodiversity in at least three stories of a rainforest (emergent, canopy, understory, and forest floor) in 8 hours and use that data to produce the greatest number of new insights after 48 hours that will reveal the true potential of the standing forest." This month, we began to mobilise on arranging a group call to brainstorm entry ideas. (15 replies)
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Looking for a long-term real-time tracking technology for monitoring big game in South Africa Sneages and Robin Poches kicked off an in-depth conversation on possible methods for tracking large quantities of animals throughout wildlife reserves. Several of you have offered insights into the benefits of incorporating GPS-IRIDIUM-BLUETOOTH+VHF units into field monitoring, using drones to track up to 100 VHF-tagged animals, the development of a combined tag that uses LoRaWAN radios with Horizon biologging tags, and more. Sophie Maxwell also shares her positive experiences and pitfalls with tracking rhinos with the input of WILDLABS members. (8 replies)
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A community response to help support the Australian bushfire crisis Alasdair Davies took the initiative to launch a collaborative WILDLABS community effort to coordinate teams for addressing urgent ecological issues caused by the recent Australian bushfires. After Alasdair's initial idea of detecting surviving and distressed wildlife in burn zones using UAVs with thermal camera, the community began coordinating several other long-term and short-term projects like setting up monitored water points, feeders, and shelter tunnels, working with local Australian citizen science organizations to replace nest boxes and establish remote volunteer programs that can be accomplished digitally, analyzing air quality data, and much more. Visit the Slack community linked in Alasdair's post to get involved in one of the groups. (32 replies)
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Team for Building of ML app for horse identification and conservation Ben Harries is looking for potential collaborators to answer a call for a wild horse recognition app to help manage populations in Nevada. This app would address the need to identify individual horses, making it possible to more efficiently administer immunocontraceptive vaccines in order to humanely control wild horse populations. Ben is seeking machine learning engineers like himself and app developers to create this mobile database. (Be the first to collaborate with Ben)
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Proximity Data - Analysis methods Daniela Gawehns wants to collaborate with someone willing to share proximity data from RFID tags. This proximity data would be used to test Daniela's new method to extract subgroups from dynamic network data. Her recent test used data collected from people wearing RFID tags, but she would now like to expand this possibility to wildlife data collected in the field. (Be the first to collaborate with Daniela)
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The WILDLABS YouTube channel now features every talk from our Virtual Meetup Series. We've invited 34 leading engineers and conservation practitioners join us to in our meetups, covering topics like big data in conservation, camera traps, maker spaces, eDNA, drones, sensors, machine learning and next gen wildlife tracking. Check out our channel and subscribe to discover them all.
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NB: Please check in with all event pages linked below for the latest information about in person meetings and alternative arrangements.
- March 20, Online: Regular meetup group on Deep Learning for Environmental Remote Sensing will be meeting this Friday about Deep Learning for Airborne Tree Detection at 11am PST / 2pm EST / 8pm CET. This week Ben Weinstein will be discussing his work on tree crown detection using weakly supervised deep learning methods. We can look forward to a fun discussion around multi-sensor data, geographic generalization, and semi-supervision.
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Late March, Online (TBC): WILDLABS Virtual Workshop to share how we facilitate our Virtual Meetups. We will share our process, flag lessons learnt, and run a troubleshooting/brainstorming session. We’ll also record the session and have all of our documentation ready to share as well. We'll keep WILDLABS and twitter updated as we progress in planning, and will send out an email with an invitation in the coming days.
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March 31-April 2, USA: Save the date for a US Southeast and Caribbean regional workshop on applications of drones in coastal ecosystem management to be held in Beaufort, North Carolina jointly hosted by NOAA and Duke University Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab. The workshop will cover aspects of drone technology including governmental policy and procedures, mission planning and data management, and demonstrations on emerging drone technologies, imaging and data analysis and visualization techniques.
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April 1, Online (TBC): WILDLABS Community Call: Rainforest X-Prize entry. We're considering turning this into a regular call where we take a topic that's come up in the community to discuss on a live call once a month. Call details to be shared in the x-prize thread.
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June 11-19, France: Held once every four years, the IUCN World Conservation Congress brings together several thousand leaders and decision-makers from government, civil society, indigenous peoples, business, and academia, with the goal of conserving the environment and harnessing the solutions nature offers to global challenges.
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June 19, USA: The Seventh Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization will take place in Seattle, WA.This workshop will focus on the work happening on the spectrum between object recognition and recogntion of individuals, and will cover topics such as novel datasets and data collection strategies, machine teaching, product recognition, and animal biometrics and camera traps. This workshop is also accepting paper submissions for presentation until March 27.
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June 20-21, USA: CAPSULE is the World’s Largest Hackathon for Conservation is taking place in Austin, Texas, and you are invited to submit your best challenge so it can be ‘hacked’ by event participants. The event that aims to solve challenges at the intersections of the Environment + Health, Art, Education, Cities, Food or Energy. Project submission will open on January 27, and remain open until April 15.
- July 23, England: CIEEM is hosting a course covering the potential to use drones in ecology and land management. This session is ideal for beginners with no previous experience using drones, and may also be useful for those with previous drone experience looking to learn new ways for incorporating drones into land management work. The focus will be on producing habitat maps with orthomosaic images. Registration is open now.
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September 7-18, Germany: Animal Movement Analysis summer school is offered as a two-week professional training course, that targets students, researchers and conservation practitioners that are interested to work or even have already collected animal tracking data and want to learn how to analyze these data.
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October 11-16, USA: The International Bio-Logging Society's The 7th International Bio-Logging Science Symposium is now accepting abstract and workshop submissions for their annual event taking place in Honolulu, Hawaii. This symposium will bring together researchers using animal-borne technologies of all kinds to discuss the latest innovations and research using radio telemetry, sensors, satellite tracking, and more. Registration to attend the symposium is also now open. Workshop submissions close April 17, abstract submissions close May 1.
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November 17-21, India: CEI 2020 has an open call for session proposals in the upcoming 11th International Conference on Ecological Informatics (ICEI 2020), which will be held at the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management – Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. Call for proposals closes 15 March 2020
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Late 2020, UK: A pilot Conservation Technology event is being planned for late 2020 in London, aiming to bring together a wide range of expertise to discuss, present and workshop things happening at the forefront of conservation technology. To stay updated with what's happening and for opportunities to input into the shape of the event, there is a signup link in the post.
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Applications are now open for a second round of the £10 million UK Seafood Innovation Fund to transform the future landscape of the seafood industry. Closes April 20 |
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The Esri Conservation Program is accepting applications for grant assistance to access its ArcGIS Solutions for Protected Area Management Application, a system aimed at making conservation area management more efficient. Apply here |
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FLIR announces the launch of their Conservation Discount Program, which offers projects the opportunity to qualify for a 30% discount on select thermal, visible, and maritime products. Share your conservation plan and technology needs with the FLIR Conservation Committee to be considered today. |
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This year marked our fifth year holding our annual #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge, and our community made it a milestone to remember. Conservationists took to Twitter 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!
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Are you recruiting? Email community@wildlabs.net to get your position in front of our community.
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- Conservify is seeking a hands-on Quality Assurance Tester / Production Assistant to help us validate the quality and usability of the FieldKit platform across its hardware and software components. This includes the set-up and deployment of environmental sensors using the mobile app, and management and sharing of sensor data via the website. Closes ASAP
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ZSL seeks a Director of Science to lead the ZSL conservation science community and support the centre's research and collaborative strategies with zoological institutions, partnering organisations, and in the field. Experienced scientists urged to apply. Closes March 29
- Internships studying animal behavior at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute are now open to candidates. This opportunity will allow the interns to gain experience collecting and analyzing data on endangered species, and will also involve camera traps, GPS, and accelerometers. Applications accepted on a rolling basis for spring, summer, fall, and winter.
- Point Blue Conservation Science is accepting applications for their Adelie Penguin Population Ecology Internship, to take place in the field on Ross Island in Antarctica. This intern will have the chance to conduct UAV surveys as an FAA certified remote pilot, use GPS, geolocation, and automated PIT-tag readers, and build skills in digitizing data.Candidates should be comfortable living in extremely remote field locations in unpredictable cold weather. Closes April 10.
- Heriot Watt University offers a funded PhD opportunity studying the impacts of human activities on marine mammals throughout three different UK regions. Focusing on mapping and assessing these human effects, this PhD student will analyze large spatial datasets, explore how cumulative effect maps can be integrated into longterm work in the region, and identify how policymakers, scientists, and others can incorporate an understanding of human effects on marine mammals into their own work. Closes May 5.
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Visit the People tab of your Dashboard to discover who is a part of our community
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Angela Kabari
Kenya Project Manager for Project Nguila, which aims to develop and deploy technology such as long-range radar, motion and heat tracking sensors, combined with AI to assist in animal conservation.
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Applying AI & Emerging Tech for Good | Sr Advisor @ The Nature Conservancy
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Lucy Mitchell
Current postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hull in the UK, working on the development of the Motus tracking network.
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In a first, UMass Amherst, Cornell use AI to mine big migration data on massive scale. MistNet can automate the processing of a massive data set that has measured bird migration over the continental U.S. for over two decades, allows us to go from limited 20th-century insights to 21st-century knowledge and conservation action.
Read more >>
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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 of both the system hardware and software, which included spending a month doing intensive field testing in Tsavo West National Park in Kenya. In this update Sam Seccombe shares their progress to-date and some of the system’s key capabilities.
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This week, conservation organizations released over 4.5 million camera trap records as a part of Wildlife Insights, a groundbreaking cloud platform that provides vital, near real-time information about the wildlife populations across the globe.
Read more >>
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How do we actually know a whale weighs 40 tonnes? After all, we can’t exactly capture an animal the size of a bus and simply put it on a scale. Fredrik Christiansen explains their new, non-invasive way of weighing whales,
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Microbial fuel cells, developed by Plant-powered Camera Trap Challenge winners Plant-E, have been used successfully with Xnor.ai's energy harvesting camera technology to capture what are thought to be the world's first plant-powered photographs.
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Everyone agrees that we need to learn more from failure, but… you first. Emily Janoch once sat on a ‘failure panel’ once where two speakers weren’t even allowed to mention the organization where they worked, much less use current failure examples. Over coffee, everyone will talk about what’s not working, but going on the record is hard. People are afraid they will look bad, or their organization will lose funding, or that they’ll hurt their careers. As a result, we keep repeating the same mistakes because we can’t admit they already happened elsewhere.
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Rutgers University, Microsoft AI for Earth, Google Earth Outreach and San Diego Zoo Global hosted the world’s first camera trap technology symposium in November at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA. All sessions were recorded are now available to watch.
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The Camera Trapping Technology Symposium organiser Arie Hammond has compiled a list of key resources for camera trapping, covering everything from reading lists for beginners to data sets, models and tools for advanced users.
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 Community Review to learn more.
Download now >>
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