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!
Chartered Geographer and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. 35 years in GIS, currently Nature Products Lead at CreditNature. Main interests: biogeography, biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, ecosystem services, rewilding, nature tech, nature fintech.
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KONKLUSI (Kolaborasi Inklusi Konservasi - Yayasan)
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Senior Freshwater Scientist, The Nature Conservancy
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Underwater Bioacoustician interested in developing PAM for freshwater systems
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Ecologist and conservation researcher, currently an Assistant Professor at University of Michigan-Flint, research areas include landscape ecology, forestry and wildlife interactions, wildlife habitat relationships, spatial ecology, GIS.
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Nature Conservation Foundation
I'm a PhD student from India, interested in utilising bioacoustics and technology to answer ecological questions. I'm a frog nerd :)
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Article
HawkEars: a high-performance bird sound classifier for Canada
Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute
HawkEars is a deep learning model designed specifically to recognize the calls of 328 Canadian bird species and 13 amphibians.
13 May 2025
Link
Survey on Earth Observation in Wildlife Ecology
Helena Wehner
Hi together, I am working on detecting causalities between land surface dynamics and animal movement by using satellite-based earth observation data. As this is might be your expertise I kindly ask for your support...
8 May 2025
Link
Weed-AI: Supporting the AI revolution in weed control
Amber Balfour-Cunningham
Weeds, by definition, are plants in the wrong place but Weed-AI is helping put weed image data in the right place. Weed-AI is an open source, searchable, weeds image data platform designed to facilitate the research and...
7 May 2025
Careers
Global Science Data Management and AI Graduate Intern
World Wildlife Fund
The intern will help the Global Science team expand our understanding of nature-based solutions through artificial intelligence (AI) and support our efforts to create a model for data collection and analysis that can...
18 April 2025
Article
Driving off-highway vehicles (OHVs), which contributes to habitat degradation and fragmentation, is a common recreational activity in the United States and other parts of the world, particularly in desert environments...
8 April 2025
Article
Nature Tech for Biodiversity Sector Map launched!
Carly Batist and 1 more
Conservation International is proud to announce the launch of the Nature Tech for Biodiversity Sector Map, developed in partnership with the Nature Tech Collective!
1 April 2025
Funding
$3 millions of funding for NGO in Brazil using AI for conservation / $ 3 milhões em financiamento para ONGs no Brasil que usam IA para conservação!
1 April 2025
Funding
Multiple grants
Frank van der Most
I have been a bit distracted the past months by my move from Costa Rica to Spain ( all went well, thank you, I just miss the rain forest and the Ticos ) and have to catch up on funding calls. Because I still have little...
28 March 2025
Funding
AI Weather Quest
Alex Rood
The AI Weather Quest, organised by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), is an ambitious international competition designed to harness artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in...
25 March 2025
InsectSet459 - the first large-scale open dataset of insect sounds, featuring 26,399 audio clips from 459 species of Orthoptera and Cicadidae.
24 March 2025
Careers
Naturalis is looking for a postdoc in AI for Ultrasonic Bioacoustic Monitoring
24 March 2025
Funding
The Compute for Climate Fellowship is a global R&D funding program that empowers climate tech startups to leverage advanced cloud computing and AI in the fight against climate change.
22 March 2025
June 2025
event
Nalini
July 2025
October 2025
event
Lacey Hughey and 3 more
October 2024
event
Arky
September 2024
event
Vanesa Reyes
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| Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Great new!! |
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AI for Conservation | 9 months 2 weeks ago | |
| Hi Carly, thank you for the advice! I am only focusing on the two birds for now - my goal is to use part of the iNaturalist data I have pulled to train the model and the rest to... |
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AI for Conservation | 9 months 2 weeks ago | |
| Thank you so much! Now everything is in the hands of amazing organizations and companies! But the first results of the Disaster Management cohort are bringing a very optimistic... |
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AI for Conservation, Climate Change, Early Career, East Africa Community, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech, Ending Wildlife Trafficking Online, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Open Source Solutions | 9 months 3 weeks ago | |
| great! |
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AI for Conservation | 9 months 3 weeks ago | |
| interesting!!! |
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AI for Conservation, Animal Movement, Data management and processing tools | 9 months 3 weeks ago | |
| so great!!! |
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Software Development, AI for Conservation, Animal Movement | 9 months 3 weeks ago | |
| @bluevalhalla thanks for sharing the awesome video, sounds like a great project! |
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AI for Conservation | 9 months 3 weeks ago | |
| Hi everyone, I am conducting a research project as part of my MSc in Environment and Development at the London School of Economics. I... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Ethics of Conservation Tech | 9 months 4 weeks ago | |
| @cmwainaina please take a look |
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Animal Movement, AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Connectivity, Data management and processing tools, East Africa Community, Emerging Tech, Ethics of Conservation Tech, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Marine Conservation, Protected Area Management Tools, Geospatial, Sensors, Software Development | 10 months ago | |
| Glad to announce that a new tutorial is available on Firetail: |
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AI for Conservation, Animal Movement | 10 months 2 weeks ago | |
| The use of synthetic training data such as interpolated sequence values is common, but fraught with the issue of your synthetic signal generating features that are not true to... |
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Data management and processing tools, AI for Conservation | 10 months 3 weeks ago | |
| In that case, you might want to keep an eye on the project from @Lars_Holst_Hansen |
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Camera Traps, AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Early Career, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Protected Area Management Tools | 11 months 1 week ago |
The Inventory User Guide
1 May 2024 12:46pm
Introducing The Inventory!
1 May 2024 12:46pm
23 July 2024 2:05pm
23 July 2024 2:53pm
Hiring Chief Engineer at Conservation X Labs
1 May 2024 12:19pm
AI for wolf ID
29 April 2024 7:09pm
Earth Blox dataset review: Meta Global Canopy Height (1m)
23 May 2024 7:23pm
27 May 2024 8:58am
AI volunteer work
3 February 2024 12:29pm
24 April 2024 10:59am
Hi Phani,
An entry point might be to participate in a challenge related to conservation on:
You could also reach out to a conservation organization (e. g. WWF or something smaller and more local) and ask them directly whether there's an opportunity for you to volunteer, perhaps even suggest an idea and maybe they find it useful.
I hope you find an opportunity you're looking for!
MegaDetector v5 release
20 June 2022 9:06pm
23 April 2024 9:43pm
Hi @dmorris,
might you have encountered this issue while working with Mega detector v5?
The conflict is caused by:pytorchwildlife 1.0.2.13 depends on torch==1.10.1pytorchwildlife 1.0.2.12 depends on torch==1.10.1pytorchwildlife 1.0.2.11 depends on torch==1.10.1
if yes what solution helped?
23 April 2024 10:38pm
I'm sorry, I don't use PyTorch-Wildlife; I recommend filing an issue on their repo. Good luck!
23 April 2024 10:38pm
[oops, the same reply got submitted twice and there doesn't seem to be a "delete" button]
Pytorch-Wildlife: A Collaborative Deep Learning Framework for Conservation (v1.0)
21 February 2024 10:30pm
26 February 2024 11:58pm
This is great, thank you so much @zhongqimiao ! I will check it out and looking forward for the upcoming tutorial!
17 April 2024 11:07am
Hi everyone! @zhongqimiao was kind enough to join Variety Hour last month to talk more about Pytorch-Wildlife, so the recording might be of interest to folks in this thread. Catch up here:
23 April 2024 9:48pm
Hi @zhongqimiao ,
Might you have faced such an issue while using mega detector
The conflict is caused by:pytorchwildlife 1.0.2.13 depends on torch==1.10.1pytorchwildlife 1.0.2.12 depends on torch==1.10.1pytorchwildlife 1.0.2.11 depends on torch==1.10.1
if yes how did you solve it, or might you have any ideas?
torch 1.10.1 doesn't seem to exist
Navigating AI and good governance for INGOs
23 April 2024 10:27am
Program Manager: Integrating movement and camera trap data with international conservation policy
22 April 2024 10:16pm
Postdoc: Biologging & Camera Trap Data Integration
22 April 2024 10:10pm
WILDLABS AWARDS 2024 - No-code custom AI for camera trap species classification
5 April 2024 7:00pm
10 April 2024 3:55am
Happy to explain for sure. By Timelapse I mean images taken every 15 minutes, and sometimes the same seals (anywhere from 1 to 70 individuals) were in the image for many consecutive images.
17 April 2024 5:53pm
Got it. We should definitely be able to handle those images. That said, if you're just looking for counts, then I'd recommend running Megadetector which is an object detection model and outputs a bounding box around each animal.
21 April 2024 5:19pm
Hi, this is pretty interesting to me. I plan to fly a drone over wild areas and look for invasive species incursions. So feral hogs are especially bad, but in the Everglades there is a big invasion of huge snakes. In various areas there are big herds of wild horses that will eat themselves out of habitat also, just to name a few examples. Actually the data would probably be useful in looking for invasive weeds, that is not my focus but the government of Canada is thinking about it.
Does your research focus on photos, or can you analyze LIDAR? I don't really know what emitters are available to fly over an area, or which beam type would be best for each animal type. I know that some drones carry a LIDAR besides a camera for example. Maybe a thermal camera would be best to fly at night.
4th International workshop on vocal interactivity in-and-between humans, animals, and robots
19 April 2024 3:03pm
WILDLABS AWARDS 2024 – MothBox
15 April 2024 5:06am
18 April 2024 10:39am
Already an update from @hikinghack:
19 April 2024 12:00pm
Yeah we got it about as bare bones as possible for this level of photo resolution and duration in the field. The main costs right now are:
Pi- $80
Pijuice -$75
Battery - $85
64mp Camera - $60
which lands us at $300 already. But we might be able to eliminate that pijuice and have fewer moving parts, and cut 1/4 of our costs! Compared to something like just a single logitech brio camera that sells for $200 and only gets us like 16mp, we are able to make this thing as cheap as we could figure out! :)
19 April 2024 12:54pm
Gotcha, well I look forward to seeing future iterations and following along with your progress!!
Early Warning Systems for Human-Wildlife Conflict, Zoonotic Spillover, and Other Conservation Challenges
17 April 2024 5:43pm
Faces, Flukes, Fins and Flanks: How multispecies re-ID models are transforming Wild Me's work
17 April 2024 11:10am
Join the Seeed Vision Challenge and Explore Conservation Tech!
10 April 2024 9:15am
Job Opportunity - Wildlife Protection Solutions
5 April 2024 9:22pm
Completely irrational animals...
3 April 2024 7:13pm
3 April 2024 9:09pm
3 April 2024 9:20pm
4 April 2024 5:05am
Rescuers hope AI will help reunite orphaned whale with its family in B.C.
3 April 2024 4:43pm
ibm-nasa-geospatial (IBM NASA Geospatial)
28 March 2024 9:22am
ibm-nasa-geospatial (IBM-NASA Prithvi Models Family)
Foundation models and downstream applications for Earth Observation and Weather and Climate.
Applying Open-Source AI to Camera Trap Imagery
27 March 2024 4:34pm
AI for Conservation!
4 March 2024 8:51pm
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.
GitHub - alexvmt/awesome-data-and-ml-for-good: Collection of resources for data and ML for good and how to get involved.
Collection of resources for data and ML for good and how to get involved. - alexvmt/awesome-data-and-ml-for-good
22 March 2024 5:57pm
Thank you for the tip! I'll definitely consider contributing to open source projects and taking part in challenges :)
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.
Add Bio-accoustics support · Issue #441 · microsoft/CameraTraps · GitHub
Please kindly add support for using pytorch wildlife platform for bio-acoustics to analyses audio recordings of insects, birds and animals including sounds that are inaudible to human ears. Having a single code base to analysis both opti...
The Variety Hour: 2024 Lineup
22 March 2024 4:30pm
Catch up with The Variety Hour: March 2024
21 March 2024 7:39pm
21 March 2024 9:48pm
30 March 2024 3:08pm
31 March 2024 12:43pm
SLN Webinar: Tech for wildlife: The role AI and technology can play in nature conservation
18 March 2024 9:17am
BirdWeather | PUC
27 October 2023 7:45pm
2 November 2023 9:20pm
I love the live-stream pin feature!
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
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!
Data Manager and Technology Coordinator, ABC Global Climate Center
15 March 2024 5:01pm
22 July 2024 10:55am