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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 trap 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.

discussion

Tech Tutors: How do I get started using ML for my camera traps? Building Accurate Project-Specific Models​

Ellie Warren

25 June 2020 12:02am

Hi Wildlabbers,  We're so excited for our second Tech Tutors session tomorrow with Sara Beery, who will be tackling the question: How do I get started using...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

26 June 2020 2:32pm

Hi everyone! 

We've now posted Sara's session to our youtube channel, and I've also popped it up the top of this thread.

The collaborative notes worked really well! I've now updated them to capture what happened in the chat - it should be a helpful companion to go alongside the recording. The notes have links, projects, and key discussions we saw in the chat, and summarise the questions Sara coverd in the discussion as well as the Qs we weren't able to get to (40mins overtime was our limit!). If your question was one of the outstanding ones and you'd like to have it answered, please drop it in the discussion below. 

The notes now also have the participant check ins (such an awesome range of places, projects and interests!) - I'm sharing these as seeing what other people are doing might help you connect with each other. If you see someone you want to connect with, try and find them using  our member direcyour people tab. If you can't, email Ellie and she will see if that person is happy to hear from you before connecting you.

Reminder, registration is open for Carlos' tutorial next week: How do I perform automated recordings of bird assemblages? Register here.  

Thanks everyone! 

Steph 

sameerk

2 July 2020 8:58pm

Great talk! I thoroughly enjoyed it. Some  high schoolers have done small AI projects(s) and have interest in the wildlife.
What resources would you all suggest to further develop high schooler’s interest in AI?
 

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How do I perform automated recordings of bird assemblages?

Carlos Abrahams

19 June 2020 12:00am

Our third WILDLABS Tech Tutor is Carlos Abrahams, who tackled the question: How do I perform automated recordings of bird assemblages? You can catch up on this tutorial on our youtube channel and read through the...

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How do I train my first machine learning model?

Daniel Situnayake

9 June 2020 12:00am

Our first WILDLABS Tech Tutor is Daniel Situnayake, who tackled the question: How do I train my first machine learning model?  To join one of our upcoming tutorials, visit the Tech Tutors series page. 

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article

Innovator Interview: Hack the Poacher

WILDLABS Team

4 June 2020 12:00am

Conservation technology largely consists of two categories: tools to monitor and study wildlife and their habitats, and solutions to mitigate or prevent negative human impacts. The fight against poaching in particular...

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funding

Competition: 2020 Hackaday Prize

Conservation X Labs

26 May 2020 12:00am

The 2020 Hackaday Prize competition has begun! This year, Conservation X Labs has partnered with the Hackaday Prizes as one of four nonprofits seeking tech-based solutions to urgent challenges. Conservation X Labs'...

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event

WILDLABS Tech Tutors: Season One

WILDLABS Team

19 May 2020 12:00am

We've wrapped season one of Tech Tutors! Thank you to all of our Tutors, and to everyone who attended and made these episodes so exciting! You can find all of our episodes on the WILDLABS Youtube Channel, and find...

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article

Get To Know FIT

WILDLABS Team

6 May 2020 12:00am

We're excited to welcome the WildTrack FIT group to our community! Today, we'd like to introduce you to the Footprint Identification Technique (FIT) and share how you can incorporate this tracking method into your field...

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funding

Competition: iWildCam 2020

WILDLABS Team

4 May 2020 12:00am

Want to compete in the iWildCam 2020 competition identifying species in camera trap images to support biodiversity monitoring efforts and automatic species classification model improvements? Because the Workshop on Fine...

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article

Call for Submissions – Arm Research Summit 2020

Arm

24 April 2020 12:00am

The 2020 Arm Research Summit is accepting submissions from all research disciplines focusing on the role of technology in solving global challenges. Submissions should reflect the potential of sustainable, secure, and...

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article

WILDLABS Tech Hub: WWF PandaSat

WILDLABS Team

13 April 2020 12:00am

At the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference, we announced the WILDLABS Tech Hub, an accelerator programme created to support the development and scaling of groundbreaking technological solutions addressing the ...

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discussion

Webinar 11PST 3/20 - Deep Learning for Airborne Tree Detection

Ben Weinstein

17 March 2020 1:28am

Hi all, I am part of a regular meetup group on Deep Learning for Environmental Remote Sensing that I think would be of interest to a wide audience. All are welcome. I happen to be...

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Mark Brown

17 March 2020 3:52pm

Thanks Ben. I'll see what I can do.

Ben Weinstein

31 March 2020 4:21am

DeepForest docs are here.

https://deepforest.readthedocs.io/

 

Welcome to have a look. My experience is that individual trees cannot be distinguished in satellite imagery. The coarest resolution we've had success with is 0.3m. However, the deepforest weights may still useful as a starting location. If there are visible objects in your image that you want to detect, collecting a few hundred training data samples and retraining the model for 2-3 epochs could be useful. See the link for details. Happy to help, submit issues on the github repo is something isn't clear/doesn't work. Everything is in dev.

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discussion

Open, challenging dataset for audio classification

Radek Osmulski

27 March 2020 10:52am

Hi! Do you know of an open audio dataset that could be used for audio classification? I am a part of a group of students doing the fast.ai deep learning course right now. I...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

27 March 2020 11:51am

Hi Radek, 

I'm sure others can help here, but check out our recent virtual meetup (it'll be posted here in about an hour), the speakers - particularly Dave Watson - shared open datasets that might be what you're looking for. 

Over on Twitter, Jesse Alston is collating a google sheet so that people can advertise data sets that grad students can use to finish theses. @arik 's reply here might be of particular interest: 'We have been recording 24/7 soundscapes in remote US locations like Yellowstone NP and rural central Wisconsin with multiple GPS synced recorders. Our goal is to study wolf and coyote vocalisations, but if anyone can make use of these data for their own studies, drop me a line!.'

Hope this helps!

Steph 

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discussion

Automated species detection from camera traps

Mark Brown

30 January 2020 8:43am

Hello. I'm looking into the possibility to automatically identify species from camera traps. This is for work based in the Middle East, mainly the United Arab Emirates and...

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Musab

25 March 2020 2:59pm

I see. Im interested and would like to help. I will need the images to train the network. As many as possible. 
if you dont have them yet, try to find similar images preferably of the same species. I will use them to test the performance of the detection.

Alexandros Kellaris

25 March 2020 6:49pm

I'm not familiar with camera traps, but there are a couple of options:

1) If the animals tend to cover most part of the image, then you can train a CNN classifier to distinguish between species (available with the keras-Tensorflow modules in Python)

2) If, however, the animals only cover a small part of the image (e.g. in the distance), it might be better to use an object detector (I've used YOLOv2 in the past for fish detection), which however is not that straightforward, especially with Python (I used MATLAB)

In any case, keras-Tensorflow classification with Python might be the most straightforward option for your goal. You should also certainly have a look at Google's Wildlife Insights platform which is specialized for species classification from camera trap images.

Radek Osmulski

27 March 2020 10:33am

This can be done, happy to help :) But I think I need to understand the situation a little bit more.

Do you already have the data for training / inference? Do you have any example images with the species in them annotated? Say a still from the camera with a tiger and a csv file referencing that file and annotating that there is a tiger in the image?

Would you like someone to do the developing and training of the deep learning model for you? I work as an AI research engineer at the Earth Species project and I am also a part of a community of deep learning practitioners where we apply cutting edge research to various problems. Here you can check a little initiative I started a couple of days ago to teach people how to work with audio (there is a related forum thread but unfortunately it is in closed forums for the time being as it is associated with a course that is under way). My main point is this - if you have the data and would like someone to help you out on the modelling part, I can coordinate this.

 

Alternatively, if you cannot release the data, I can point you to materials that can get you started to carry out the work yourself.

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article

WILDLABS Tech Hub: Poreprint

WILDLABS Team

26 March 2020 12:00am

At the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference, we announced the WILDLABS Tech Hub, an accelerator program created to support the development and scaling of groundbreaking technological solutions addressing the ...

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event

Webinar: Citizen Science Online

SciStarter

26 March 2020 12:00am

Join WILDLABS community member Dr. Meredith Palmer from Snapshot Safari and other researchers from various disciplines in SciStarter's webinar, Citizen Science Online! Speakers will celebrate this April's Citizen...

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funding

Call for Nominations: Tusk Conservation Awards

Tusk

3 March 2020 12:00am

The 2020 Tusk Awards are now accepting nominations of outstanding individuals who have made a significant impact on conservation in Africa. These nominations offer the rare and exciting opportunity to honor your peers...

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funding

Competition: Plastic Data Challenge

Ellie Warren

3 March 2020 12:00am

Are you ready for the Plastic Data Challenge? This global contest wants your innovative ideas for improving the plastic waste management and recycling chain in South and Southeast Asia. Participants can consider...

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event

Hawai'i Conservation Conference

Hawaiʻi Conservation Alliance

28 February 2020 12:00am

The Hawai'i Conservation Conference is accepting abstracts in several categories, including emerging technological advances in the conservation field. This is an exciting opportunity to present your latest research to...

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