INTERNSHIP FOR COMPUTER VISION BASED INSECT DETECTION AND CLASSIFICATION
25 February 2025 10:46am
APCalign: an R package workflow and app for aligning and updating flora names to the Australian Plant Census
25 February 2025 9:04am
CSIRO PUBLISHING | Australian Journal of Botany
The Australian Journal of Botany is an international journal publishing original research encompassing all plant groups including fossil plants. Plant science areas covered by the scope are as follows: ecology and ecophysiology, conservation biology and biodiversity, forest biology and management, cell and molecular biology, palaeobotany, reproductrive biology and genetics, mycology and pathology, structure and development.
Conservation Tech Career Pathways - what do you want to know?
17 June 2022 1:30pm
20 April 2024 5:41pm
Hi Soumya ,
Interested to know if you are pursuing distance education in ML while at your current job. I would love to hear more about your journey on course specifics and the platform you use to complete the education, and I would love to hear if you have any recommendations based on your experiences.
Thanks,
Savi
25 February 2025 1:19am
Hi Savi,
Apologies for the delayed response.
I have finished my Marters in AI and ML. Happy to share.
Soumya
WILDLABS Behind the Buzz: Country-Level Applications
Talia Speaker
and 1 more
24 February 2025 8:49pm
AI/ML x Nature Job
NewtCAM observations
24 February 2025 7:06pm
Bat Identification Tools Comparison
16 May 2023 3:32pm
8 June 2023 1:38pm
Hi Stuart, Thanks for your response, and nice to e-meet someone behind the BTO acoustic pipeline! I have been testing out BTO quite a lot recently, and have started comparing results to Kaleidoscope this month, and have been manually checking classification results against raw audio. Will keep you updated with any findings if of interest.
Is there a minimum frequency recording that needs to be taken when uploading the BTO acoustic pipeline? I'm also interested in small mammals, and suspect that 96 KHz should be fine, rather than 192/384 when recording for bats.
22 June 2023 6:57pm
Another option for you could be Arbimon - it's free and does not require any coding/programming knowledge!
24 February 2025 3:20pm
As someone who is looking for a relatively simple solution for multiple collaborators (all with very little expertise in bats or acoustics) in a large consortium, I am curious as to the results of your comparison. I have been looking at both BTO and Kaleidoscope, though my previous experiences with Kaleidoscope were that it was far from perfect. However, it may be more cost-efficient.
Audiomoth with solar panel in desert for anthropogenic noise and wildlife limitations and configuration
21 January 2025 12:18pm
24 February 2025 4:09am
Hi Tom
Saffron do a retrofit for the Sng Metre Mini and Micros (Versions 1 and 2). We have them doing a 12 month survey in very hot and dry conditions here in Australia. Will not touch them until October 2025, and they are run by a solar power pack.
Retrofitted Solar Power Pack - Saffron Aid
Expand the life of your longitudinal study by increasing the recording time of your Song Meter Micro or Mini. Have your recorder retrofitted to take power from our Solar Pack. Do not fit any batteries into the recorder all power is supplied by the Solar Pack's inbuilt lithium battery. With a 512GB SD card set
24 February 2025 7:05am
Hi Tom!
I have no experience with deployment in extreme heat or solar panels with Audiomoth.
If you go with AudioMoth, I would consider the new injection molded case for the AudioMoth Dev version: https://github.com/OpenAcousticDevices/Application-Notes/blob/master/An_Injection_Moulded_Case_for_AudioMoth_Dev/An_Injection_Moulded_Case_for_AudioMoth_Dev.pdf
This case is prepared for external power which I believe will be hard to fit reliably with the standard case.
Also, it has room for a GNSS/GPS unit which can help mitigate time drift (very useful for long deployments) AND be used to precisely schedule recordings in relation to sunrise and sunset.
Read more about the GPS possibilites here: https://github.com/OpenAcousticDevices/Application-Notes/tree/master/Using_AudioMoth_GPS_Sync_to_Make_Synchronised_Recordings
&
In any case, I would also ask @alex_rogers for direct advice on your plans.
Cheers,
Lars
24 February 2025 11:36am
Highly recommend the Saffron Aid modified Song Meter Mini for a professional deployment.
If you want to go down the audiomoth route it makes sense to look at options for the AudioMoth Dev. @Lars_Holst_Hansen made a great comment on this application above.
On another note, we are about to release a recorder that might be retrofit-able at Smith Robotics. So keep an eye out for that.
Equally, what is the real reason for the solar, as the SD card might be the limiting factor in some deployments. There are a few 4G options on the horizons fairly soon I think!
advice on tech and conservation career
21 October 2024 5:41pm
21 November 2024 8:16pm
Hi Adam,
I am an employer in wildlife tech in Canada. Unfortunately, we don't have an overlap with your skill set and training but I can offer some advice.
From an employer perspective, I always prefer hiring people with a passion and background in wildlife. However, it is extraordinarily rare to get applicants with this background. A combo of applicable technical training and passion/experience in wildlife at least for me is a guarunteed interview. I would recommend you do an extensive search of potential employers in wildlife tech and start introducing yourself. Call, email, visit ones close if you can, even if they are not actively hiring.
You may also want to consider going to the dark side to get an early stage boost - for profit environmental consulting often done by engineering firms. They always need GIS work. The work of course is environmental compliance for development purposes not conservation but you get a lot of hours and gain seniority quickly if you choose to move back to the good side.
Lots of service side or non-profits at the least view GIS as an asset so you may have luck there. Organizations doing drone work would be a good place to start.
For your resume, some feedback:
- I prefer a 1 or 2 page max resume for an early stage person. You can cut some block text from your descriptions. You may want to format the resume using a designed template as well.
- A photo of yourself, date of birth, and health status are not common or expected in North America. Most employers do not want to overtly get this information and may filter out your resume because of it. Consider a separate format for N. America if you look here.
Best of luck in your job search.
20 February 2025 9:32pm
Hi @Adamtours , in case you are still looking for an internship this opportunity at SOLOM EARTH might interest you. Alternatively, the Satellite Applications Catapult will be advertising soon several interhsips (they may or may not be conservation related though but keep an eye out for those).
Hope this helps!
24 February 2025 10:23am
Adam,
I work for the Zoological Society of London. We currently have a 9-month paid internship in the Estuary and Wetlands team, supporting inshore marine habitat restoration projects. The closing date is soon (26th Feb).
See here:
New Affordable Autonomous Insect Camera Trap
14 January 2025 2:59pm
21 February 2025 7:30pm
On a similar topic, I'm curious about how technology like this could be adapted to terrestrial insects - such as pest beetles in agricultural fields. Any landscape level monitoring effort usually demands dozens if not hundreds of sites monitored over many days or weeks. At this scale, the costs add up, even with cheap devices.
From what I understand, a large part of the cost of these devices is the need for big batteries powering bright lights. Have you done any tests using sunlight alone? I can imagine that this would introduce variation in shadows based on the time of day, and that would make automated ID harder, but is this an insurmountable challenge?
23 February 2025 4:23pm
Very cool! Looks like a repurposed case for other wildlife cameras?
Do you have custom electronics?
24 February 2025 2:57am
Thanks! Yes, we added electronics to power an external UV light only during periods when the camera is set to take pictures.
Program to rent/borrow large numbers of camera traps?
9 January 2025 8:55pm
10 January 2025 7:27pm
I think this is a great idea and I don't know of any! But... I can tell you that we loan out remote cameras to hunters to help us collect data through a participatory science research project. More and more people have remote cameras for personal use and our project employs those as well, from willing participants. Happy to share more if you want to hear about our protocols!
23 February 2025 8:10pm
Sounds like an important program, Grace! I'd love to learn more about your org just out of curiosity.
24 February 2025 12:16am
I don't know any, but we have the same program idea (basically democratizing resource on conservation tech) that focuses on Indonesia region. But we are progressing slow. Hopefully we can loan huge number of camera traps in this 5 years.
Small mammal detection
21 February 2025 3:43pm
21 February 2025 10:51pm
BTO definitely has the best classifiers out there at the moment. I know of a few people attempting to improve their small mammal sets, but none are great yet.
What hardware are you using?
23 February 2025 10:25am
Thanks Ryan, we've been trying the BirdNeT and BatDetect2 models using Acoupi on a pi and it seems to work well, considering it's running on a pi... A small mammal model that worked as well would be great for live alerts to rodent incursions on offshore islands, but it sounds like it's not something that's possible at this stage.
23 February 2025 4:15pm
I think its possible. I spoke to Stuart at the BTO a while ago about this. It's just not available as an off the shelf solution yet. If you can get real time outputs on the pi (or even an esp32), it would not be difficult to add the 4G or wifi part to it!
Building the perfect camera trap (Guide)
17 February 2025 8:06am
18 February 2025 4:15pm
If you are the least interested in camera traps, you should definately go and check out Hugo's interesting article!
Cheers,
Lars
21 February 2025 4:22pm
Great Article! (and thanks for the ping re: "PIR Sensors" )
I like the idea of a simple magnetic trigger. As an alternative, I've often wondered about an ultra-low-power "wake on Radio" receiver that could be connected wirelessly to a range of different trigger devices.
Also, there is an interesting tradeoff between battery life and trigger speed you didn't cover. Namely, all the commercial trail cameras I know of turn themselves almost completely off between triggers to save power. An ultra low power "boot controller" monitors the PIR sensor, and when triggered, initiates the boot sequence for the main SoC. I've found that the boot process (rather than PIR bandwdith, configuring the image sensor, shutter speed, etc. ) dominates the "trigger time". It is remarkable that this all happens in less than 400 ms for the newer trail cameras. There are some hacks to help this along, for example, locating the time-critical code early in the EEPROM boot image so that the firmware can start executing before all the firmware is loaded (ask me how I discovered this).
For those interested in the inner workings of a typical commercial trail camera, check out my series of articles documenting reverse engineering (and hacking) a few Browning models.
Deep Tech: Hacking Trail Camera Firmware 1 - Overview - Winterberry Wildlife
Introductions to tools and flow I used to reverse engineer embedded firmware for Browning trail cameras, and to introduce new functions.
23 February 2025 8:11am
Hey Bob, thanks for the kind words! Your articles on Winterberry Wildlife have really been a big inspiration for me! There are extremely limited numbers of articles on trial cameras, and you have some nice in-depth hardware level which I have been reading 😊
You are completely right about the battery life and trigger speed tradeoff. If I remember right, there are a few cameras which offered “real time” images but in return the battery was drained in a few days and people started to complain on forums. In early stages of development there is also much about limiting the services at boot, as you mention putting the camera function as early in the boot sequence as possible, creating your own camera configs and so on.
Mothbox: Field Testing Amphibious Deployments on Jungle Rivers
23 February 2025 12:52am
World Wildlife Day 2025: Wildlife Conservation Finance, Investing in People and Planet
21 February 2025 3:03pm
FLORITY
21 February 2025 9:24am
Flority is a precise GPS Field App for Land Restoration
A precise GPS Field App allowing capture of GPS-Photos and GPS-Polygons, powered by Wells for Zoë and developed specifically for Reforestation and Land Restoration projects.
New WILDLABS Navigation Menu
20 February 2025 8:48am
20 February 2025 2:13pm
Woooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
21 February 2025 6:42am
WOOT WOOT!
What is the framework you are building on?
21 February 2025 9:22am
Hi @eugenegalaxy , Filip at #Octophin Digital here. The whole Platform is built ontop of the Drupal framework (with many custom features) but most of the frontend like the menu is bespoke framework-less HTML, CSS (using Tailwind classes) and JavaScript built by our wonderful frontend developer @rowan . Happy to answer any questions in a direct message or such!
Saving Peatlands, Securing Our Climate Future
21 February 2025 8:32am
Saving Peatlands, Securing Our Climate Future
A Vital Yet Overlooked Ecosystem at Risk
Thermal imaging, convservation & highschool science
17 February 2025 10:36pm
18 February 2025 7:14am
I love your enthusiasm for thermal, it's a facinating technology and a great way to encourage people to get familiar with the natural world. One product I'm planning on bringing out I'll hoping will help encourage people's interest in what happens during the night.
If you have any interest in higher resolution thermal, please reach out. Here's an earlier thread on the subject.
20 February 2025 6:18pm
Thanks @kimhendrikse - I have enjoyed using my existing camera with students. I'd be interested in trying a higher resolution depending on the logistics.
21 February 2025 7:06am
I'll direct message you.
Global Forest Watch
6 February 2025 7:50pm
7 February 2025 1:26pm
Hi Elsa,
I've used it in both and found it easy and useful to use. Just left a review. Thank you for the prompt!
Best,
Vance
10 February 2025 7:04pm
Amazing! thank you :)
20 February 2025 9:21pm
And if you are new to GFW...this new glossary that was added recently is very helpful to understand some key terms.
Check it out here!
WILDLABS Leadership Update
20 February 2025 9:11pm
eDNA sampling kits
17 February 2025 9:02pm
20 February 2025 11:40am
Hi Nabil,
What medium do you want to sample for your eDNA (soil/air/water)?
If its soil then you can simply collect a sample in a bag and freeze.
This is a nice soil collection protocol with a kit list.
Nature Conservation Crowdfunding Platforms
19 February 2025 11:14pm
Free tool to generate your spirit animal
19 February 2025 7:58am
19 February 2025 2:10pm
Just tried it again :D 
19 February 2025 2:18pm
Not bad, sir, not bad!
19 February 2025 2:19pm
This is probably the most realistic one I've seen made by this tool (stable-difussion v1.5)
20 April 2024 5:36pm
Unfortunately , not yet . Still digging into it in my free time. And trying to setup a camera in my bord feeder for a mini conservation project in my back garden :)