Hi Stephanie,

A postdoc friend at Newcastle University has been involved in developing and implementing Tumbling Dice's  Rana camera trap project for detecting pollinators. Not your average camera trap, Rana detects frames in which a substantial number of pixels in that frame differ from the previous frame and in which these motion-pixels are concentrated into a small area, “the blob”. They used this technology for monitoring pollinator visits to pasqueflower (Pulsatilla vulgaris) in the Chilterns. They are off to Utah to start a new job in 2017 but they could be a great candidate?

It's also well worth checking out Tumbling Dice's other projects including Daisy for automated species recognition at http://www.tumblingdice.co.uk/.

Hi JC, 

I'm looking for similar information for E.Africa (particularly Kenya). Not sure how much these overlap, but have found the following; SMART, Cybertracker, Jigzaw, WILD, MIST, METT, Land PKS. Seems like a big focus on anti-poaching/security. Are you aware/can you please point me to others you may have heard of? 

Best Wishes,

Deepali

Thanks a lot for this!

Thank you very much @StephODonnell 

Hi John, I have two good friends in Kenya who have some answers. I'll ask them to come here and tell you more...

Marie 

Unfortunately, I could not see the full article, but the executive summary makes a lot of sense.  I think there might be a couple of other considerations. 

1) As drones become more ubiquitous it is possible that poachers also adopt the technology.  

2) Even if poachers don't adopt the technology, in some high value poaching scenarios they may be able to eavesdrop on the drone communication.   Eventually some kind of security may be necessary to protect the information collected by the drones.  

Overall, I think drone technology is developing at a rapid pace and will prove to be very helpful in conservation.

For anyone interested in an overview of how drones are being deployed for conservation, this piece by Serge Wich (of ConservationDrones.org) provides a comprehensive run through the possibilities.  

A new paper in Biological Conservation assesses the efficacy of camera trapping as a tool for increasing detection rates of wildlife crime in tropical protected areas:

The future of biodiversity in Asia is increasingly dependent on networks of effective protected areas. Three wildlife sanctuaries of the Bangladesh Sundarbans are typical examples of protected areas where detection and monitoring of threats is difficult due to low densities of patrol staff and low frequency of patrolling relative to the area that requires monitoring. The aim of this study was to use camera traps to quantify: 1) the levels of different types of illegal human activities (IHA), 2) spatio-temporal variation in illegal human activities, and 3) what proportion of camera trap records can be used to identify perpetrators. Each photograph was categorized as either illegal human activity (IHA) or legal human activity (LHA) based on interpretation of the particular human activity and equipment observed in photograph. For IHA, infraction type was based on the Bangladesh Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2012. A total of 914 unique human activity events were recorded (872 IHA and 42 LHA) in camera trap photos over a total of 1039 trap nights. The best model suggests that during spring tide 91% of camera trapped locations in the West Sanctuary had IHA occurring in them during the survey period, while 84% and 74% locations had IHA in the South Sanctuary and East Sanctuary respectively. Camera trapping in remote areas can potentially help protected area managers to increase rates of detection of IHA in their conservation landscapes and increase rates of arrests and prosecutions by providing appropriate supporting evidence.

I'm interested to hear from the community on this one - are you using camera traps for purposes other than wildlife monitoring? 

Here's a set of tools that could be applicable to this idea

 https://github.com/pfr/VideoSpeedTracker

Hi Steph - just to follow up on your post: @MarcusRowcliffe , James Durrant and I have been working on a bit of software to implement the "computer vision" techniques that are mentioned in that paragraph. You can see a demonstration of it in action here. It requires camera-trappers to "calibrate" their camera traps during setup (or take-down), by taking pictures of a standard object (for example, we use a 1m pole held vertically) at different distances. The calibration takes ~10 mins per location. From this, you can reconstruct the paths that animals take infront of cameras, the total distance they travelled, and therefore their speed.

Hi Gautam, 

Really interesting idea, thanks for sharing the post. Although this isn't quite the expansive action plan identified in the piece, it reminded me of the #pokeblitz hashtag that's sprung up in parallel with the Pokemon Go frenzy. If you find an actual creature while playing #PokemonGO, you can tweet pic with #PokeBlitz & experts will help you identify it! It seems to me to be a nice first step for 'making pokemon go real'. 

Cheers, 

Steph

'Pokémon-Go players could capture 400 years of wildlife sightings in 6 days' - what an incredible figure! Like you, @mygshah , and Jordan, Dr Tom August has also been thinking about how Pokemon go could be applied to conservation:

http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/blogs/pok%C3%A9mon-go-players-could-capture-400-years-wildlife-sightings-6-days

Hi Steph,

Only just discovered this site, so I'm a bit late to the game.

I'd love to hear what your main take-aways were from this meeting!

Best,

Louise

Hi Rory, 

Thanks for sharing this survey - it'll be really interesting to hear what comes out of it. How are the results going so far? Has anything unexpected come up?

Cheers,

Steph 

Great survey idea, Rory! I am completing it for my organization now so you should see another form input shortly.