Hello everyone, today we are happy to announce Project SPARROW (Solar-Powered Acoustic and Remote Recording Observation Watch), our self-sustained solar-powered wildlife monitoring solution using satellite for camera trapping and bioacoustics! Our goal is to create a monitoring system that collects and processes the data through edge computing and send the results to the cloud using satellite. 

There are three major advantages: 

1) It does not rely on GSM coverage because of the use of satellites.

2) Every component in this system (including the edge computers, cameras, audio recorders, and satellites) is powered by solar panels, so we don’t need to change batteries.

3) Data collected are preprocessed with Pytorch-Wildlife using MegaDetector and other classification models and are directly send to the cloud. There will no manual data collection needed!  

Everything we use for this solution are based on off-the-shelf devices with minimum hardware engineering, and we are starting a physical deployment in the Amazon Rainforest in January. We will release more technical details in the next couple of months! We will keep you posted and feel free to ask us any questions! Happy holidays!