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WILDLABS logoWildlabs.net : The conservation technology network

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AI for Conservation / Feed

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used in the field to analyse information collected by wildlife conservationists, from camera traps and satellite images to audio recordings. AI can learn how to identify which photos out of thousands contain rare species; or pinpoint an animal call out of hours of field recordings - hugely reducing the manual labour required to collect vital conservation data. The AI For Conservation group is intended to unite and inspire all WILDLABS community members—whether already involved in AI for conservation, or not—to understand how to use and/or directly contribute to open-source research and development efforts.

Group curators

Anna Vallery
Seabird biologist experienced in research and applied conservation. Dedicated to conducting and using innovative research to inform conservation decisions.
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Viktor Domazetoski
PhD student at University of Exeter & University of Queensland. Interested in researching AI and its responsible application to Ecology, Environmental Monitoring and Nature Conservation.
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discussion

AI for Conservation!

Alessandro Calo

4 March 2024 8:51pm

Hi everybody!I just graduated in artificial intelligence (master's) after a bachelor's in computer engineering. I'm absolutely fascinated by nature and wildlife and I'm trying to...

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Arky

22 March 2024 12:29pm

Welcome, Have you considered participating in any of the AI for Good challenges. I find it is good way to build a nice portfolio of work. Also contributing to existing open source ML projects such as megadetector or to upstream libraries such as PyTorch is good way to getting hired. 

 

 

 

Arky

25 March 2024 5:22am

We could always use more contributors in open source projects. In most open source companies Red Hat, Anaconda, Red Hat and Mozilla, people often ended up getting hired largely due to their contributions on open source projects. These contributions were both technical such as writing computer code and non-technical such as writing documentation and translating tools in their local language. 

 

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article

The Variety Hour: 2024 Lineup

Alex Rood

22 March 2024 4:30pm

You’re invited to the WILDLABS Variety Hour, a monthly event that connects you to conservation tech's most exciting projects, research, and ideas. We can't wait to bring you a whole new season of speakers and...

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event

Catch up with The Variety Hour: March 2024

Stephanie O'Donnell

21 March 2024 7:39pm

Variety Hour is back! This month we're talking about making AI more accessible with Pytorch, new developments from WildMe and TagRanger, and working with geospatial data with Fauna & Flora. See you there!

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Anton Alvarez

30 March 2024 3:08pm

Unfortunately, I can't be there. When will you upload the recording?    
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discussion

BirdWeather | PUC

Tim Clark

27 October 2023 7:45pm

Hi Everyone,I just found out about this site/network!I wanted to introduce myself - I'm the CEO of a little company called Scribe Labs.  We're the small team behind...

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Alex Rood

2 November 2023 9:20pm

I love the live-stream pin feature!

Wildlife Drones

14 March 2024 10:29pm

Hi Tim, I just discovered your great little device and about to use it for the first time this weekend. Would love to be directly in touch since we are testing it out as an option to recommend to our clients :) Love that it includes Australian birds! Cheers Debbie

Wildlife Drones

16 March 2024 10:47pm

Hi @timbirdweather I've now got them up and running and winding how I can provide feedback on species ID to improve the accuracy over time. It would be really powerful to have a confirmation capability when looking at the soundscape options to confirm which of the potential species it actually is or confirm it is neither to help develop the algorithms.

Also, is it possible to connect the PUC to a mobile hotspot to gather data for device that isn't close to wifi? And have it so that it can detect either wifi or hotspot when in range? Thanks!

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Link

Free AI Camera Trap Model for European Fauna!

Henry Rees

12 March 2024 12:33pm

EcoAssist has now incorporated the Deepfaune v1.1 species identification model for camera trap images, capable of recognizing 26 European species. The model is developed by Deepfaune initiative. More information is available at: https://www.deepfaune.cnrs.fr/.

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discussion

Labelled Terrestrial Acoustic Datasets

Jesse Turner

16 February 2024 10:24pm

Hello all,I'm working with a team to develop an on-animal acoustic monitoring collar. To save power and memory, it will have an on board machine learning detector and classifier...

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Jesse Turner

8 March 2024 11:54pm

Thanks for sharing Kim.

We're using <1 mA while processing, equating to ~9 Ah running for a year. The battery is a Tadiran TL-5920 C 3.6V Lithium, providing 8.6 Ah, plus we will a small (optional) solar panel. We also plan to implement a threshold system, in which the system is asleep until noise level crosses a certain threshold and wakes up.

The low-power MCU we are using is https://ambiq.com/apollo4/ which has a built-in low power listening capability.

Matthew Stanton

9 March 2024 6:25am

<1 mA certainly sounds like a breakthrough for this kind of device. I hope you are able to report back  with some real world performance information about your project @jcturn3 . Sounds very promising. Will the device run directly off the optional solar cell or will you include a capacitor since you cannot recharge the lithium thionyl chloride cell. I had trouble obtaining the Tadarian TL-5920 cells in Australia (they would send me old SL-2770s though) so I took a gamble on a couple of brands of Chinese cells (EVE and FANSO) which seemed to perform the same job without a hitch. Maybe in the USA you can get Israeli cells more easily than Chinese ones? 

Message me if you think some feeding sounds, snoring, grooming and heart sounds of koalas would be any use for your model training.

Kim Hendrikse

9 March 2024 7:01am

Really interesting project. Interesting chip set you found. With up to around 2mb sram that’s quite a high memory for a  ultra low power soc I think.

It might also be interesting while doing your research thinking about if there are any other requirements people could have for such a platform with a view towards more mass usage later. Thanks for sharing.

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discussion

Needing help from the community: Bioacoustics survey

Sofia Orellano Abal

14 February 2024 9:46am

I'm reaching out because I'm currently conducting a research project titled "UX-Driven Exploration of Unsupervised Deep-Learning in Marine Mammals Bioacoustic Conservation" for my...

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Liz Ferguson

24 February 2024 7:23pm

Was great to chat with you Sofia and I would encourage others in the Acoustics community to help provide input for Sofia's study!

Sofia Orellano Abal

26 February 2024 8:57am

Thank you so much for your encouraging words! I'm thrilled to hear that you enjoyed our conversation, and I truly appreciate your support in spreading the word about my survey within the Acoustics community. Input from individuals like yourself is incredibly valuable to my study, and I'm eager to gather as much insight as possible. If you know of anyone else who might be interested in participating, please feel free to share the survey link with them. Once again, thank you for your support—it means a lot to me!

Best regards,
Sofia

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discussion

Tools for automating image augmentation 

Lars Holst Hansen

26 January 2024 2:33pm

Does anyone know of tools to automate image augmentation and manipulation. I wish to train ML image recognition models with images in which the target animal (and false targets)...

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Lars Holst Hansen

16 February 2024 7:42am

Hi @arky !

Thanks for your reply.

I am running into pytorch/torchvision incompatibility issues when trying to run your script.

Which versions are you using?

Best regards,

Lars

 

Arky

18 February 2024 11:05am

@Lars_Holst_Hansen  Here is the information you requested. Also run Yolov8 in multiple remote environments without any issues.  Perhaps you'll need to use a virtual environment (venv et al) or conda to remedy incompatibility issues. 

$ yolo checks
Ultralytics YOLOv8.1.4 🚀 Python-3.10.12 torch-1.13.1+cu117 CUDA:0 (Quadro T2000, 3904MiB)
Setup complete ✅ (16 CPUs, 62.5 GB RAM, 465.0/467.9 GB disk)

OS                  Linux-6.5.0-17-generic-x86_64-with-glibc2.35
Environment         Linux
Python              3.10.12
Install             pip
RAM                 62.54 GB
CPU                 Intel Core(TM) i7-10875H 2.30GHz
CUDA                11.7

matplotlib          ✅ 3.5.1>=3.3.0
numpy               ✅ 1.26.3>=1.22.2
opencv-python       ✅ 4.7.0.72>=4.6.0
pillow              ✅ 10.2.0>=7.1.2
pyyaml              ✅ 6.0.1>=5.3.1
requests            ✅ 2.31.0>=2.23.0
scipy               ✅ 1.11.4>=1.4.1
torch               ✅ 1.13.1>=1.8.0
torchvision         ✅ 0.14.1>=0.9.0
tqdm                ✅ 4.66.1>=4.64.0
psutil              ✅ 5.9.8
py-cpuinfo          ✅ 9.0.0
thop                ✅ 0.1.1-2209072238>=0.1.1
pandas              ✅ 1.5.3>=1.1.4
seaborn             ✅ 0.12.2>=0.11.0
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discussion

Passionate engineer offering funding and tech solutions pro-bono.

Krasi

23 January 2024 12:06pm

My name is Krasi Georgiev and I run an initiative focused on providing funding and tech solutions for stories with a real-world impact. The main reason is that I am passionate...

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Danilo

26 January 2024 3:18pm

Hi Krasi! Greetings from Brazil!



That's a cool journey you've started! Congratulations. And I felt like theSearchLife resonates with the work I'm involved round here. In a nutshell, I live at the heart of the largest remaining of Atlantic forest in the planet - one of the most biodiverse biomes that exist. The subregion where I live is named after and bathed by the "Rio Sagrado" (Sacred River), a magnificent water body with a very rich cultural significance to the region (it has served as a safe zone for fleeing slaves). Well, the river and the entire bioregion is currently under the threat of a truly devastating railroad project which, to say the least is planned to cut through over 100 water springs! 



In face of that the local community (myself included) has been mobilizing to raise awareness of the issue and hopefully stop this madness (fueled by strong international forces). One of the ways we've been fighting this is through the seeking of the recognition of the sacred river as an entity of legal rights, who can manifest itself in court, against such threats. And to illustrate what this would look like, I've been developing this AI (LLM) powered avatar for the river, which could maybe serve as its human-relatable voice. An existing prototype of such avatar is available here. It has been fine-tuned with over 20 scientific papers on the Sacred River watershed.



And right now myself and other are mobilizing to manifest the conditions/resources to develop a next version of the avatar, which would include remote sensing capacities so the avatar is directly connected to the river and can possibly write full scientific reports on its physical properties (i.e. water quality) and the surrounding biodiversity. In fact, myself and 3 other members of the WildLabs community have just applied to the WildLabs Grant program in order to accomplish that. Hopefully the results are positive.



Finally, it's worth mentioning that our mobilization around providing an expression medium for the river has been multimodal, including the creation of a shortfilm based on theatrical mobilizations we did during a fest dedicated to the river and its surrounding more-than-human communities. You can check that out here:



 

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/850179762



 

Let's chat if any of that catches your interest!

Cheers!

Krasi

2 February 2024 1:22pm

Hi Danilo. you seem very passionate about this initiative which is a good start.
It is an interesting coincidence that I am starting another project for the coral reefs in the Philipines which also requires water analytics so I can probably work on both projects at the same time.

Let's that have a call and discuss, will send you a pm with my contact details

There is a tech glitch and I don't get email notifications from here.

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article

New paper - An integrated passive acoustic monitoring and deep learning pipeline for black-and-white ruffed lemurs in Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar

Carly Batist

23 January 2024 4:08pm

We demonstrate the power of using passive acoustic monitoring & machine learning to survey species, using ruffed lemurs in southeastern Madagascar as an example.

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Margaux Armfield

19 February 2024 4:22pm

What an awesome paper! Loved learning about such a promising research tool in PAM combined with a CNNs, and that lemur vocalizations are termed as "roar-shrieks" :)
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discussion

Monitoring setup  in the forest based on the wifi with 2.4 GHz frequency.

Dilip Singh

30 December 2023 4:39pm

I am planning to setup the network using the wireless with frequency 2.4GHz. Can I get the the data for this signal distortion in the forest area?Is there any any special...

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AMANI NGOMA

18 January 2024 8:17pm

Hi Dilip,

I do not have data about signal distortion in a forest area and with the signal you are intended to use.

However, in a savannah environment, when I put a tour on the highest point of the park, Lora signal (avg 900MHz) is less distorted than WiFi signal (2.4GHz). This is normal as a physics law: the frequency determines the wave length, and the less the length (obviously the less the frequency), the less obstructed the signal.

So, without interfering with your design, I would say that in a forest configuration, WiFi will need more access points deployed and may be more costly, and in your context, even when using LoRa, you will need more gateways than I have in a savannah.

To design the approximate number of gateways, you may need to use terrain Visibility analysis.

To design the cameras deployment, you will need to comply with the sampling methods defined in your research. However, if it is on for surveillance reasons, you may need to rely on terrain visibility analysis also.

Best regards.

Bill Gray

22 January 2024 6:22pm

I've got quite a lot of experience with wireless in forested areas and over long(ish) ranges.

Using a wifi mesh is totally possible, and it will work.  You will likely not get great range between units.  You will likely need to have your mesh be fairly adaptable as conditions change.

Wireless and forests interact in somewhat unpredictable ways it turns out.  Generally, wireless is attenuated by water in the line-of-sight between stations.  From the Wifi perspective, a tree is just a lot of water up in the air.  Denser forest = more water = worse communications. LoRa @ 900Mhz is less prone to this issue than Wifi @ 2.4Ghz and way less prone than Wifi @ 5Ghz.  But LoRa is also fairly low data rate.  Streaming video via LoRa is possible with a lot of work, but video streaming is not at all what LoRa was build to do, and it does it quite poorly at best.

The real issue I see here is to do with power levels.  CCTV, audio streaming, etc are high data rate activities.  You may need quite a lot of power to run these systems effectively both for the initial data collection and then for the communications.

If you are planning to run mains power to each of these units, you may be better off running an ethernet cable as well.  Alternatively, you can run "power line" networking, which has remarkably good bandwidth and gets you back down to a single twisted pair for power and communications.

If you are planning to run off batteries and/or solar, you may need a somewhat large power system to support your application?

Arky

23 January 2024 1:19am

 

I would recommend going with Ubiquity 2.4Ghz devices which have performed relatively well in dense foliage of the California Redwood forests. It took a lot of tweaking to find paths through the dense tree cover as mentioned in the previous posts. 

 

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