Hi, I'm really interested in your project. If you're open to it, I’d be happy to build and send you a couple of data logger units — free of charge — to help monitor temperature, humidity, pressure, and possibly hive weight using a load cell. I’m also considering adding a simple bee traffic sensor to track how often bees enter and leave the hive. This could help reveal patterns related to foraging behavior or colony stress. 

 It would also be an interesting use case for using LoRaWAN to send node data to a central gateway. The data could be exported in line protocol format so you can easily import it into InfluxDB or another dashboarding tool if you'd like to visualize it.

 I’m quite busy with other projects, but I’d be happy to throw something together to get you started, and I’ll include the source code in case you'd like to modify or expand it in the future. Let me know if this sounds helpful — I'd love to support your work.

 Best regards, Travis

This is such an important project! I can't wait to hear about the results. 

Hey Sanne, awesome - we definitely need a consistent metadata standard for PAM.

If you haven't already, I would suggest sharing this on the Conservation Bioacoustics Slack channel and the AI for Conservation Slack channel. You would reach a lot of active users of PAM, including some folks who have worked on similar metadata efforts. 

If you're not a member of either one of those, DM me your preferred email address and I'll send you an invite!

Hello everyone,

Thank you all for your contribution!

You can read some updates about this project in this post.

Julia

Hi Johnathan, 



There is a Canadian company more or less doing that. They have their own endurance drone and optical/thermal cameras. Very much keyed into surveys and they may have success given the number of helicopter accidents we have had in Western Canada. Not sure if the AI part is there yet. 



I know they've done surveys with at least one department here but not much beyond that. I talked to one of the developers their just as a point of interest. The current leadership today looks different than I remember though. 



 

Read "Superwake" on Superwake

Superwake

" /> <link rel=

Superwake

Hi all, I'm the founder of a company in Texas that provides thermal drone surveying for private game ranches. Right now, we're doing everything completely manually in terms of counting during both the initial flight as well as the review. Automating our process with an AI program would be great, but there are multiple limitations I'd imagine:

1.) Thermal imaging has pretty poor resolution even when you're only 100 feet or so above the ground. We'll often need to bring the drone down even closer to identify a buck vs doe. I'd imagine an AI model would be even more limited by this poor resolution

2.) Using a visible zoom camera in tandem with the thermal can help with this issue, but then you are very limited. Thermal works great at night, but requires cool, cloudy days if you're wanting to fly in the daylight to use the optical camera. In Texas, these are few and far between.

3.) Even if you were to figure out everything else, there are often animals that rewuire a pilot to move the drone off its path in order to identify (for example if they're bedded down behind a tree we will often need to swing around to the other side. 

If anyone is interested, we do record all of our surveys, so I have 1000+ hours of thermal footage of animals from whitetail deer to nilgai to zebra. I'd be happy to share this with someone who's interested in potentially building a model if they think they can solve the limitations.

So great to hear that you're interested in this incredible sector! I echo Tom in that I don't know of too many specific "conservation tech" degrees as it's such an interdisciplinary field. Perhaps Intro to Conservation Tech Course would be helpful in learning about which direction is most interesting to you to pursue?

About a year ago, @emmahiggins  asked for feedback on a course design for a MsC on Conservation Technology at the University of South Wales. I don't know if that course has started in the meantime, but Emma's email is in her post.

See: https://wildlabs.net/discussion/thoughts-new-msc-conservation-technology

I hope you'll find what you're looking for, Max !

Hi @ziggy_4 , 

I agree with those who commented before, there are a lot of ways to get into the field. I went down the Biology route and then learnt more via my PhD. 

However, we have a Conservation Technology Module as Part of out Wildlife Biology BSc at the University of South Wales - BSc (Hons) International Wildlife Biology - University of South Wales . The course is being rewritten to be 'Ecology and Conservation' and will include this new Conservation Technology Module, where we also link with our engineering department. 

If you have any questions, feel free to email me - emma.higgins@southwales.ac.uk 

Good luck! 

@Frank_van_der_Most  - thanks for the tag!