With new technologies revolutionizing data collection, wildlife researchers are becoming increasingly able to collect data at much higher volumes than ever before. Now we are facing the challenges of putting this information to use, bringing the science of big data into the conservation arena. With the help of machine learning tools, this area holds immense potential for conservation practices. The applications range from online trafficking alerts to species-specific early warning systems to efficient movement and biodiversity monitoring and beyond.
However, the process of building effective machine learning tools depends upon large amounts of standardized training data, and conservationists currently lack an established system for standardization. How to best develop such a system and incentivize data sharing are questions at the forefront of this work. There are currently multiple AI-based conservation initiatives, including Wildlife Insights and WildBook, that are pioneering applications on this front.
This group is the perfect place to ask all your AI-related questions, no matter your skill level or previous familiarity! You'll find resources, meet other members with similar questions and experts who can answer them, and engage in exciting collaborative opportunities together.
Just getting started with AI in conservation? Check out our introduction tutorial, How Do I Train My First Machine Learning Model? with Daniel Situnayake, and our Virtual Meetup on Big Data. If you're coming from the more technical side of AI/ML, Sara Beery runs an AI for Conservation slack channel that might be of interest. Message her for an invite.
Header Image: Dr Claire Burke / @CBurkeSci
Explore the Basics: AI
Understanding the possibilities for incorporating new technology into your work can feel overwhelming. With so many tools available, so many resources to keep up with, and so many innovative projects happening around the world and in our community, it's easy to lose sight of how and why these new technologies matter, and how they can be practically applied to your projects.
Machine learning has huge potential in conservation tech, and its applications are growing every day! But the tradeoff of that potential is a big learning curve - or so it seems to those starting out with this powerful tool!
To help you explore the potential of AI (and prepare for some of our upcoming AI-themed events!), we've compiled simple, key resources, conversations, and videos to highlight the possibilities:
Three Resources for Beginners:
- Everything I know about Machine Learning and Camera Traps, Dan Morris | Resource library, camera traps, machine learning
- Using Computer Vision to Protect Endangered Species, Kasim Rafiq | Machine learning, data analysis, big cats
- Resource: WildID | WildID
Three Forum Threads for Beginners:
- I made an open-source tool to help you sort camera trap images | Petar Gyurov, Camera Traps
- Batch / Automated Cloud Processing | Chris Nicolas, Acoustic Monitoring
- Looking for help with camera trapping for Jaguars: Software for species ID and database building | Carmina Gutierrez, AI for Conservation
Three Tutorials for Beginners:
- How do I get started using machine learning for my camera traps? | Sara Beery, Tech Tutors
- How do I train my first machine learning model? | Daniel Situnayake, Tech Tutors
- Big Data in Conservation | Dave Thau, Dan Morris, Sarah Davidson, Virtual Meetups
Want to know more about AI, or have your specific machine learning questions answered by experts in the WILDLABS community? Make sure you join the conversation in our AI for Conservation group!
- @Ebennitt
- | She/her
Working primarily in Botswana and other southern African countries, on wild mammal movement, ecology and physiology
- 0 Resources
- 4 Discussions
- 5 Groups
- @sehuebner
- | she/her
Wildlife Ecologist and Program Manager at the Smithsonian Institution
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 9 Groups
I have mixed experiences from 20+ years doing SATCOM and other IT roles with the US Army. I also have 4 years experience working in the marine environment doing forage fish spawning research. My goal is to advance my abilities in AI to bring into the realm of wildlife research.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 5 Groups
- @jguenter
- | he/him/his
Species360 CEO - passionate about using data to care for and conserve species
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 5 Groups
I have worked in the vertebrate pest industry for over 11 years and am on the practical, on the ground implementation of AI animal control systems.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 1 Groups
- @steventay
- | TAY
Dynamique ET PROACTIF, JE SUIS PASSIONNÉ PAR LA PROTECTION DE L'ENVIRONNEMENT, LE TOURISME RESPONSABLE ET LA CONSERVATION DES ÉCOSYSTÈMES.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 8 Groups
- @Aurel
- | She/Her
Looking to reconcile biodiversity conservation and finance.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 10 Groups
- @Kyle_Birchard
- | He/Him
Building tools for research and management of insect populations
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 6 Groups
- @diego_ellis_soto
- | he/him
University of California & California Academy of Sciences
Biodiversity |Technology | Socio-Ecological Systems | Wildlife Ecology | Remote Sensing | Conservation | K12STEM-education | Music | diegoellissoto.org
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 20 Groups
- @dka32
- | He
I am a highly motivated individual with a background in Natural Resources Management. I am a conservationist who desire to make an impact in the field of conservation using technology.
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 1 Groups
Retired Engineer / UAV interests / Photographer
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 1 Groups
- @ColleenEarthScape
- | She/her/hers
- 0 Resources
- 7 Discussions
- 7 Groups
Article
Plant-Powered Camera Trap Breakthrough
Alasdair Davies
Microbial fuel cells, developed by Plant-powered Camera Trap Challenge winners Plant-E, have been used successfully with Xnor.ai's energy harvesting camera technology to capture what are thought to be the world's first...
15 October 2019
Article
In a first, UMass Amherst, Cornell use AI to mine big migration data on massive scale
9 October 2019
Article
Rutgers University, Microsoft AI for Earth, Google Earth Outreach and San Diego Zoo Global are proud to announce the world’s first camera trap technology symposium, to take place November 7th and 8th at Google...
2 September 2019
Article
ICCB 2019: 5 Key Discussions about the Future of Conservation Tech
Stephanie O'Donnell
Sharing failure, tech support for conservation, roaming mentors, conservation tech hype cycles and developing new road maps - participants in our tech workshops at ICCB 2019 shared an abundance of ideas for how to shape...
21 August 2019
Article
Automated Identification of Indonesian Rhinos
Cooper Oelrichs
In this case study, Cooper Oelrichs of Save Indonesian Endangered Species Fund (SIES) breaks down his proposal for the development and training of an automated rhino identification system from limited camera trap data.
27 July 2019
Article
The WILDLABS TECH HUB is supporting technology solutions tackling the illegal wildlife trade, in collaboration with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Digital Catapult, Satellite Applications Catapult, Amazon Web...
4 June 2019
Funding
AI for Earth Innovation Grant (extended)
Microsoft
To further their missions, LDF and Microsoft are collaborating on the AI for Earth innovation grant to support applicants in creating and deploying open source machine learning models, algorithms, and data sets that...
4 June 2019
Article
Traditionally, illegal wildlife trade thrived in physical markets. But today it has also moved online. In China, more than half of the trade in elephant ivory items happens on e-commerce platforms. Enrico Di Minin and...
31 May 2019
This webinar recording will provide a brief overview of current SMART functionality, highlight case studies of large scale and innovative SMART deployments, and detail how SMART is embracing and leveraging new...
21 May 2019
Article
Meet the WILDLABS TECH HUB Winners
WILDLABS Team
In February, we released an open call for the WILDLABS TECH HUB, offering 3 months of support for solutions using technolgy to tackle the illegal wildlife trade. We were overwhelmed by an incredible 37 submissions,...
13 May 2019
Article
Huge appetite for data trusts, according to new ODI research
Open Data Institute (ODI)
To realise the potential benefits of data for our societies and economies we need trustworthy data stewardship. We need to establish different approaches to deciding who should have access to data, for what purposes and...
15 April 2019
Article
#Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Our Favourites from 2019
WILDLABS Team
Happy World Wildlife Day! To celebrate, this week we've asked our community to share photos showing how they are using tech in the field or the lab, using the #Tech4Wildlife hashtag.
3 March 2019
June 2025
event
Nalini
July 2025
October 2025
event
Lacey Hughey and 3 more
November 2023
event
Stephanie O'Donnell
event
Stephanie O'Donnell
73 Products
Recently updated products
16 Products
Recently updated products
| Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One thing I love about software is that in an ever-changing landscape of languages, frameworks, and tools, you can never stop learning.... |
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Software Development, AI for Conservation | 6 months 1 week ago | |
| Hi Eugene!Interesting project!I already signed up to test it!Cheers,Lars |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps | 6 months 2 weeks ago | |
| I am certainly a somewhat vertical thing with a lump on top, so I get it... |
|
AI for Conservation | 6 months 3 weeks ago | |
| Hi all! I wanted to open a discussion on a topic that I've been thinking about ever since I entered the job market-- how to get a... |
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Software Development, AI for Conservation, Early Career, Open Source Solutions | 6 months 4 weeks ago | |
| That's great, thanks Lars! |
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AI for Conservation | 6 months 4 weeks ago | |
| I did a short presentation on our work with the polar bear alarm in the Wildlabs Variety Hour October 30th.It can be found here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr2Q8bUJZ8U... |
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Human-Wildlife Conflict, AI for Conservation | 7 months ago | |
| Comma.ai would be your best bet. Not sure if it's officially open source but was started by a noteable hacker with an open source ethos. Could try reaching out to them. |
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AI for Conservation | 7 months ago | |
| For the record now that this is here:This error typically occurs when the wrong number of classes is given to timm.create_model. You should try to specify num_classes=30... |
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Camera Traps, AI for Conservation | 7 months 1 week ago | |
| WildMon, Terra Genesis, The VF Foundation, Thaksin University, and the Wanakaset Symbiosis Network have teamed up on a new project in... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Community Base | 7 months 1 week ago | |
| Do you use camera traps? If so, we'd love if you could take five minutes to fill out this survey: tinyurl.com/zambasurveyWith our WILDLABS... |
|
AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools, Software Development, Open Source Solutions | 7 months 2 weeks ago | |
| I'm not affiliated, I just happened across it... not sure who is actually leading it. |
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Software Development, Early Career, AI for Conservation, Citizen Science, Climate Change, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Funding and Finance | 7 months 3 weeks ago | |
| Great and difficult question Lisa! I think, yes, we are adding to the problem. We have been already when ML was introduced as a solution to big data problems, and perhaps we have... |
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AI for Conservation | 7 months 3 weeks ago |
How do I perform automated recordings of bird assemblages?
Carlos Abrahams
19 June 2020 12:00am
How do I train my first machine learning model?
Daniel Situnayake
9 June 2020 12:00am
How do I get started using Machine Learning for my camera traps?
9 June 2020 12:00am
Innovator Interview: Hack the Poacher
4 June 2020 12:00am
The Perfect Paw Print: Collecting Data with FIT
3 June 2020 12:00am
Competition: 2020 Hackaday Prize
26 May 2020 12:00am
WILDLABS Tech Tutors: Season One
WILDLABS Team
19 May 2020 12:00am
Get To Know FIT
6 May 2020 12:00am
Competition: iWildCam 2020
4 May 2020 12:00am
Training Course: Quantitative Analysis of Marine & Coastal Drone Data
Duke Marine Lab
29 April 2020 12:00am
Call for Submissions – Arm Research Summit 2020
24 April 2020 12:00am
WILDLABS Tech Hub: WWF PandaSat
13 April 2020 12:00am
Webinar 11PST 3/20 - Deep Learning for Airborne Tree Detection
17 March 2020 1:28am
24 March 2020 9:57am
Hello Ben. Unfortunately I couldn't make it on Friday. It would be great if I could take a look at your slides. I'm interested in trying to count mangrove trees. I have some WorldView 2 data. Do you think I could use DeepForest for this?
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.
WILDLABS Community Call Recording: Rainforest X-PRIZE
30 March 2020 12:00am
Open, challenging dataset for audio classification
27 March 2020 10:52am
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
27 March 2020 12:25pm
Steph, thank you so much for this, this is wonderful :) Really, really apreciate you sharing this with me :) Diving into all of the wonderful resources from you, thank you so very much for this!
Radek
Help collate list of Ecology/Conservation Data Sets for grad students
27 March 2020 12:07pm
Automated species detection from camera traps
30 January 2020 8:43am
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.
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.
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.
WILDLABS Tech Hub: Poreprint
26 March 2020 12:00am
Webinar: Citizen Science Online
SciStarter
26 March 2020 12:00am
Enter the Zooniverse: Try Citizen Science for Yourself!
18 March 2020 12:00am
Tutorial: Train a TinyML Model That Can Recognize Sounds Using Only 23 kB of RAM
16 March 2020 12:00am
Accepting Applications: ArcGIS Solutions for Protected Area Management
4 March 2020 12:00am
Call for Nominations: Tusk Conservation Awards
3 March 2020 12:00am
Competition: Plastic Data Challenge
Ellie Warren
3 March 2020 12:00am
Hawai'i Conservation Conference
Hawaiʻi Conservation Alliance
28 February 2020 12:00am
Competition: The Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge
26 February 2020 12:00am
Listening to Nature: The Emerging Field of Bioacoustics
24 February 2020 12:00am
Team for Building of ML app for horse identification and conservation
20 February 2020 11:09pm
HWC Tech Challenge Update: Thermal Elephant Alert System
17 February 2020 12:00am
ICEI2020: 11th International Conference on Ecological Informatics
ICEI 2020
14 February 2020 12:00am
17 March 2020 3:52pm
Thanks Ben. I'll see what I can do.