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Camera Traps / Feed

Looking for a place to discuss camera trap troubleshooting, compare models, collaborate with members working with other technologies like machine learning and bioacoustics, or share and exchange data from your camera trap research? Get involved in our Camera Traps group! All are welcome whether you are new to camera trapping, have expertise from the field to share, or are curious about how your skill sets can help those working with camera traps. 

discussion

Mini AI Wildlife Monitor

Luke Ditria

25 June 2025 12:27pm

Hi All!I've been working on various version of small AI edge compute devices that run object detection and Identification models for ecological monitoring!I've recently been...

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Luke Ditria

18 July 2025 9:29am

Hi Ross,

Nice project, thanks for sharing! 

How does it perform in the field? Have you tested out power usage and battery life etc? 

Happy to help where I can with the IMX500, I've got a discord Server linked on my youtube channel. 

 

 

Chris

14 August 2025 12:55am

Aloha Luke,

This is an amazing tool that you have created. Are your cameras availble for purchase? We use a lot of camera traps in the Hono O Na Pali Natural Area Reserve on Kauai to pasively detect animals. We do not have the staff knowledge and capacity to build our own camera traps like this.

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discussion

Camera Trapping Software

Nils Ratnaweera

21 March 2019 8:50am

Hi everyone, We're dealing with huge amounts of Camera Trapping data in different contexts. Probably as most people, we've been using spreadsheets to annotate the image...

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Lydia Katsis

25 July 2025 10:30am

Well either or really, but in this particular case we have massive datasets that have already been processed so more the data management side of things, but if there was a potential to include software that would be cool - but I find that its not always possible to necessarily combine them both with the ammount of desired flexibility. In terms of the database side, something like the Panthera IDS system would probably be closest to what I'm searching for (although I'm aware this does also have the software side of things)

Ed Miller

26 July 2025 8:19pm

@LydiaKatsis The latest version of TRAPPER has an integrated AI module with multiple models available. We are currently collaborating on a project, Trapper Keeper, sponsored by a WILDLABS Award to make TRAPPER even easier to use and deploy.

Some of the OSCF team, which drive TRAPPER development, are also on WILDLABS: @kbubnicki and @icorei 

Izabela Stachowicz

11 August 2025 11:25am

@LydiaKatsis Trapper was designed to process large-scale camera trap projects, and it offers two interfaces for data management: a simple citizen science interface and an expert interface that will likely meet your needs. As the Open Science Conservation Fund is also the initiator of the CamTrap DP standards, it is fully integrated with Trapper. More details can be provided by @kbubnicki .

 

Here a bit how Trapper infrastructure works:

 

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discussion

Free online tool to analyze wildlife images

Eugene Galaxy

4 August 2025 8:01am

Hey everyone!We made a free online tool to find animals on single images.Link is here: https://www.animaldetect.com/wildlife-detectorIt works very simple: drop an image -> get...

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Alejandro Duque

8 August 2025 5:23pm

Hello Eugene, I just tried your service:


Was wondering how possible will it be to have the option to upload a second image and have a comparison running to let the user know if body patterns are: 'same' or 'different', helping to identify individuals. 

Thanks and kind regards from Colombia,
Alejo

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discussion

What metadata is used from trail camera images?

Hugo Markoff

31 July 2025 8:52am

So, this week I have started looking into adding new and more fine-grained details and methods to the result page og Animal Detect. Including the CameraTrapDP format (coming soon...

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Cara Appel

4 August 2025 11:00pm

Hi Hugo, it's great that you are thinking about adding metadata features to Animal Detect! I'll share what I think would be useful from my perspective, but I think there is a lot of variation in how folks handle their image organization. 

Time and date are probably the most important features. I rename my image files using the camtrapR package, which uses Exiftool to read file metadata and append date and time to the filename. I find this method to be very robust because of the ability to change datetimes if needed -- for example, if the camera was programmed incorrectly, you can apply a timeshift to ensure they are correct in the filenames. Are you considering adding Exif capability directly to Animal Detect? Otherwise, I think that having a tool to parse filenames would be very helpful, where users could specify which parts of the filename correspond to camera site, date, time, etc., so that this information is included in downstream processing tasks.

I have found it frustrating that information such as camera name and temperature are not included in file metadata by many camera manufacturers. I have used OCR to extract the information in these cases, but it requires a bit of manual review, and I wouldn't say this is a regular part of my workflow.

Camera brand and model can be useful for analysis, and image dimensions and burst sequence can be helpful for computer vision tasks. 

Hope this helps!

Cara

Hugo Markoff

5 August 2025 7:43am

Thank you for your reply! 

It surely helps, we have use exif for a while to read metadata from images, when there is information available. Could be nice to maybe see if we could “write” some of the data into the metadata of the image, instead of just reading. Really good idea with the filename changes and structure. I will add it to a list of possible improvements and see if/how we could implement it. 

Again, thanks for the feedback 😊 

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discussion

Jupyter Notebook: Aquatic Computer Vision

Brett Smith

25 January 2024 5:50am

Dive Into Underwater Computer Vision Exploration OceanLabs Seychelles is excited to share a Jupyter notebook tailored for those intrigued by the...

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Brett Smith

27 January 2024 4:07am

This definitely seems like the community to do it. I was looking at the thread about wolf detection and it seems like people here are no strangers to image classification. A little overwhelming to be quite honest 😂

While it would be incredible to have a powerful model that was capable of auto-classifying everything right away and storing all the detected creatures & correlated sensor data straight into a database - I wonder if in remote cases where power (and therefore cpu bandwidth), data storage, and network connectivity is at a premium if it would be more valuable to just be able to highlight moments of interest for lab analysis later? OR if you do you have cellular connection, you could download just those moments of interest and not hours and hours of footage? 

Arky

27 January 2024 6:11am

Am working on similar AI challenge at the moment. Hoping to translate my workflow to wolves in future if needed. 

We all are little overstretched but it there is no pressing deadlines, it should be possible to explore building efficient model for object detection and looking at suitable hardware for running these model on the edge. 

 

 

Alfred Z. Agarap

28 July 2025 1:20pm

Wow this is amazing! This is how we integrate Biology and Information Technology. 

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discussion

Thermal imaging when it's 36 degrees outside

Kim Hendrikse

3 July 2025 4:58pm

I thought I'd share what our thermal camera images look like when it's a 36 degrees heat wave outside. The good news is that the AI still matches. It inverts the image to...

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Adrien Pajot

4 July 2025 3:07pm

Thanks for sharing, nice to see! 

Kim Hendrikse

17 July 2025 12:43pm

It's a wildlabs security innovations thermal camera product. We are a new company (The Netherlands), just formed last year. We just have one wildlife customer at the moment in Australia for the thermal modules, from a progressive early adopter :)



Our next work package will be to build a website to show all the products and options, this is sorely needed. In the meantime however, I'm happy to show you it operating over a video meeting if you like, please message me directly if you would like this. At the moment we have a camera that has the following functionality in the most extended version:



* Thermal module, options are 640x512, 384x288, 256x192

* Low light visible light module, currently testing different modules with very low light sensitivity based on star vis 2 chips and large pixel sizes

* Remote access via a VPN with a USB cell modem

* Local large model (25,000,000 parameters AI recognition of some animals

* Motion detection (Works really well with thermal as the images are very stable)

* Video alerting triggers

* 24/7 h264 recording with very high quality audio input, can make this be an audio ARU on the same device is desired, also a sound localizing one.

* Local relay response input/output

* Build in extensive GUI configured state machine



We are working towards and off the shelf self configured version, but in the meantime we are offering customizing and working with the customer.



We can also sell a fairly dumb version which is effectively just a network thermal camera if that's all you need.



There is a link to more videos on the inventory page below



 

https://wildlabs.net/inventory/products/wildlife-security-innovations-thermal-cameras

The radiometric version has really impressive onboard image processing. I uploaded a new video that shows this the other day.



 

The sound recording system we can add is from our open source sbts ARU project (

). Which provides sound localization if you want as well. Note, it can record flac files that are localizable as well as merging the broadcast quality sound into both the thermal and visible light h264 quicktime recordings at the same time on the same platform.

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discussion

Advise needed on Close Focus Camera Traps

Maristela Martins de Camargo

27 June 2025 7:30pm

Hi, everyone! Could someone advise me on best models of close focus (object at ~20cm) camera traps in the market? I only found a couple of models from GardePro, but I don't know...

5 0
Stacy Cotey

12 July 2025 12:50pm

I use the lenses from reading glasses (3.0 magnification) as mentioned. I pop the lens out of the frames and then tape it over the camera lens with electrical tape as we use the cameras for other projects and need to remove the reading lens. It does not seem to affect the image quality except in high moisture situations where it sometimes gets fogged but that happens with the regular camera lens sometimes too.

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discussion

Halow wifi, local AI, thermal + visible

Kim Hendrikse

6 July 2025 11:15am

I've just recently received a halow wifi bridge set. The pair I ordered claims up to 3km operation line of sight. Now I suspect that 2km line of sight might be more what one could...

2 1
Luke Ditria

12 July 2025 1:08am

Thanks for sharing! I've been thinking about using WiFi links for some applications. Any idea how much power they require?

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discussion

Need Assistance regarding selecting a camera

Vishnu T

23 December 2022 10:50am

I'm working on an island bird species which is elusive and can only be found near their nest mounds—planning to deploy Timelapse cameras to monitor their breeding time behaviour...

6 0
Harold Tay

11 February 2023 3:20am

Hi Vishnu,

Considering only motion detection video, it is possible to modify (most) camera traps to trigger an external piece of equipment like an audio recorder.  I'm not aware of any suitable off-the-shelf recorder, but I can build you one.  However many camera traps that will take video will also record audio, although the quality may not be suitable for all types of audio analysis.

Kim Hendrikse

11 July 2025 10:33am

We have a camera that could do this over some distance away due to a thermal module being involved. It will also record very high quality audio (Nature recording audiophiles rave about the microphone being used). can trigger on motion detection and also in addition to a thermal module has a low light module that can record in colour under moon light. Normally, the system records continuously and triggered for video alerting as it can be accessed remotely.



But it would draw much more power than microcontroller based systems (Around 5W for motion triggering) so you would need to place a solar panel with it and it would be quite a big one. This is offset by the ability to view from much greater distances, audio record, perfect visibility in pitch darkness.



Our next work packages will be to make a website to highlight all that, we don't have that yet. It would cost more than the brino as well, however likely you would need less instances (Maybe one versus many).



Below is a video review of the em272 microphone, which is what we use in our setup for recording the audio. We also merge in this external audio into our continuous video streams.



 

It could also record 24/7 continuously full motion h264 video with em272 microphone audio without replacing the media if you wish. It would need power for that whole time though.



Please contact me directly if this is relevant to your use case.

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discussion

What Can Camera Traps Data Tell Us? (Besides the Obvious)

Izabela Stachowicz

22 May 2025 10:24pm

Hi everyone,We all know camera traps are great at telling us what species showed up, where and when—and sometimes even temperature data. But is that all we’re...

15 10
Lucie Laporte-Devylder

16 June 2025 2:28pm

A related publication that might be of interest, with the Norwegian Arctic Fox monitoring program we used camera trap time series to study phenological plasticity in arctic fox moulting, specifically the transition from winter to summer coat. We were looking at how this process responds to environmental variation, such as the length of the snow season and temperature fluctuations (e.g., colder years with prolonged snow cover vs. earlier snowmelt and warmer winters). This builds on similar ideas of extracting phenological and climatic insights from camera trap data. :)

Here's a link to the publication "A camera trap-based assessment of climate-driven phenotypic plasticity of seasonal moulting in an endangered carnivore" https://doi.org/10.1002/rse2.304

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discussion

Monitoring Wolf Communication with DIY Camera Setup – Feedback & Advice Welcome!

Ilenia

23 June 2025 1:59pm

Hi everyone,For my PhD project, I’m monitoring wolf communication from birth until adulthood. I want to collect video and audio recordings inside and outside the dens all along...

8 1
Kim Hendrikse

30 June 2025 6:51pm

And a system with a 640x512 thermal and visible light camera (Cheap, not sensitive one) looks like this:

SBTS system

An alternative to getting really close is further away with a long thermal lens. These are more expensive than the lens above and the price goes up the bigger the lens, but it does open up possibilities. Also available for those with big budgets are 1280x1024 resolution thermal modules and zoomable thermal imaging lenses. The zoomable one has a 30-180mm zoomable lens and looks like this:

Twin1212 witth 30-180mm lens

 

Jared Marley

2 July 2025 10:59pm

A few bits of free/cheap improvement on waterproofing which is always a massive pain:

- if you can't seal it entirely then drill a drain hole in the bottom

- Cover every exposed electronic bit you can with a spray-on clear coat. Clear nail varnish for small areas. You can get electric specific products but most spray laquers work. 

- Smear dielectric grease on battery and cable connections you can't protect with clear coat. 

Lars Holst Hansen

6 July 2025 2:11am

Super nice project! 

How do you imagine thermal cameras will help with vegetation? It cannot exactly look though it.

Rather than placing the camera inside the metalbox have you thought about simply placing it high and out of reach of the wolves? 

Although it sounds like you are happy with locally saved footage, having some live feed is a great insurance that the system is up and running and not in need of service!

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discussion

I WANT TO TELL YOUR STORY

Barny Dillarstone

29 June 2025 10:22am

I create ocean exploration and marine life content on YouTube, whether it be recording nautilus on BRUVs, swimming with endangered bowmouth guitarfish, documenting reef...

3
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discussion

New Group Proposal: Systems Builders & PACIM Designers

Chad Richardson

18 June 2025 2:52pm

Co-Creating Collective Impact Across the Conservation Technology EcosystemDear WILDLABS Community,I am proposing the creation of a new WILDLABS group focused on...

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Frank van der Most

19 June 2025 9:08am

Hi Chad,

Thanks for the text. As I read it, PACIMs play a role in something else/bigger, but it doesn't explain what PACIMs are or what they look like. Now I've re-read your original post, I'm thinking, maybe I do understand, but then I feel the concept is too big (  an entire system can be part of a PACIM ? ) to get going within a WildLabs group. And you want to develop 10 PACIMS within a year through this group? Don't get me wrong, I am all for some systems change, but perhaps you're aiming too high. 

Chad Richardson

19 June 2025 12:19pm

Hello again sir - PACIMs really mean 'projects' is the way I see it. Each part of the acronym can be seen as a project (if you have an assignment to do, you have a project really).

 

As for your query on 10 projects in 'this' group - I should ask for clarification if you mean particularly acoustics or in any group (I see now this is the acoustics thread after I selected all the groups for this post). If you are asking on acoustics, you're right - I am unsure on 10 as I am not too keen on acoustics yet. If you are asking 10 projects as a whole like 10 projects in the funding and finance group - I believe 10 to be a very reasonable number. Our projects we have co-created are for the most part replicable, rapidly deployable, quickly scalable, fundable through blended finance and more. 

 

Thank you again for the feedback.

Frank van der Most

19 June 2025 1:43pm

Thank you for your reply, Chad

I meant 10 as a whole, indeed. Perhaps you see your post in one group, but since it is tagged for all groups, I assumed you meant 10 in total.

In your first post you explain PACIM stands for "Projects, Assignments, Campaigns, Initiatives, Movements, and Systems", so I understood it as more than just projects. Obviously, many things can be packed into a project or called a project, but then, what does it mean that 'Projects' is part of the list?

Well, if you think 10 projects is doable, then don't let me stop you.

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discussion

ICCB 2025 – Let’s Connect!

Stephanie M.

9 March 2025 5:06am

Hi Everyone,I’m excited to be attending my first ICCB 2025 as a student presenter and early-career researcher! My work sits at the intersection of computational epidemiology and...

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Arky

16 June 2025 8:33am

Hey Stephanie, 

I have dropped you couple of links. I believe we also have a booth somewhere. 

 

Fadhilla Golda

16 June 2025 8:41am

Hi Stephanie,

It’s great to hear about your exciting work and that you’ll be attending ICCB 2025 — congratulations on presenting!

The Savannah Tracking team is participating at the exhibition, and we’d love for you to stop by our booth 15.

Given your previous interest in collaring domestic dogs and collecting high-resolution GPS data, it might be a great opportunity for us to connect in person and dive deeper into how our lightweight collar solutions — like those currently deployed on Dingoes — could support your project. We'd be happy to show you how our satellite-enabled collars work, demo our data platforms, and explore a potential fit for your needs.

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discussion

Prototype for exploring camera trap data

Jeremy

20 January 2025 10:23pm

Hi, I would like to start a discussion around a prototype that aims at improving consumption of camera trap data. How is it different (in theory) from existing tools? I...

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Jakub Bubnicki

7 May 2025 10:49am

@Jeremy_ For the Python implementation of basic occupancy models (as suggested by @ollie_wearn ), please refer to these two projects:

I second @martijnB suggestion to use spatially explicit occupancy models (as implemented in R, e.g., https://doserlab.com/files/spoccupancy-web/). However, this would need to be added to both of the aforementioned Python projects.

Ajay Bhandari

17 May 2025 10:53am

Lively and informative discussion, I would very much like to contribute if there is some active development work with regards to this. 
I have recent experience with using Model Context Protocol (MCP) to integrate various tools & data repositories with LLMs like Claude. I believe this could be a good idea/path whereby we can do the following:
1. use the images & labels along with any meta-data, chunk/index/store it in vector db
2. integrate with existing data sources available by exposing the data through MCP server

3. Use MCP friendly LLM clients (like Claude) to query, visualize and do other open-ended things leveraging the power of LLM and camera trap data from various sources. 
 

Regards,

Ajay

Sanne Govaert

13 June 2025 1:38pm

Hi Jeremy,

I am copying here a reply from Juliane Röder, who is not on the forum here:

 

The GFBio VAT tool seems to do all the desired analysing and visualising stuff - but it isn't specialized on camera trap data. Instead, it harvests GBIF, GFBio data centers, and environmental data that you can combine in any way you want: https://vat.gfbio.org/#/

6:01

Documentation with some example code and notebooks is here: https://docs.vat.gfbio.org

6:04

A standalone tool for camarea trap data and images is nice, but maybe joining forces and adding some functionality to the VAT tool to better handle camera trap data would be a more sustainable solution...?

The VAT tool can give you some simple statistics of the chosen data (e.g. occurences of wild cats in central Europe in winters 2000-2015), and some simple analyses (wild cat occurences and snow depth). It's focus is on geospatial analyses of occurrence data. They do not have any functionality specific for camera trap data - yet.

My point was, that if you want geospatial analyses and/or additional data to compare to camera trap data, you probably don't have to build a new tool.

I'm not involved with the development of the VAT tool, but I could help with the contact. I know the VAT team.

You can contact her on juliane.roeder@uni-marburg.de.

I did a quick exploration of the VAT tool. It is built quite differently, and my first impression is that it is less accessible; however, as you become more familiar with it, you discover a wide range of options to explore for DwcA occurrences.

I believe it is extremely valuable to also have a tool that works directly with the richest data (Camtrap DP), rather than relying on translated data (Darwin Core), where important details and data structure are lost.

I also think the goals of both tools are different: map-based analysis vs. exploration.

But still usefull to get to know about each other :-)


 

 

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discussion

Cellular Camera Traps in Europe

Oren Rittenberg

6 March 2025 12:17pm

Hi All,Looking for a camera trap that will work on European 4G network (Greece). I've identified a few, but they have questionable reviews/experiences. Has anybody here deployed...

1 1
Shaun Ryan

10 March 2025 3:46am

We manufacture the DOC AI Cam. It's a thermal camera, so particularly good for nocturnal animals. It comes with a 4G modem. It might meet your needs?

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discussion

WILDLABS AWARDS 2025 - Trapper Keeper - a scalable and energy-efficient open-source camera trap data infrastructure

Izabela Stachowicz

30 May 2025 12:05pm

With the support of the WILDLABS Awards and Arm, we are about to launch Trapper Keeper, an open-source, AI-powered infrastructure for next-generation camera trap...

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Russ Van Horn

2 June 2025 10:24pm

I'm excited to see this project begin; I think its focus on versatility and functionality for users in diverse environments will allow Trapper Keeper to have a broad impact, organically!
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discussion

Help needed : Overview of Image Analysis and Visualization from Camera Traps

BIBOUD Manon

2 June 2025 1:59pm

As part of my thesis internship, I’m exploring ways to improve ecoSecrets – an open-access web application designed by Natural Solutions to support...

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Ethan Caldwell

2 June 2025 2:17pm

This camera trap survey addresses the crucial need for a unified and comprehensive solution to improve data reliability and standardize monitoring techniques in wildlife research. Well done !

Meslard-Schlick

2 June 2025 3:18pm

This survey on camera trap use is a valuable effort to improve data quality and consistency in wildlife monitoring. Looking forward to the results and how they will help shape best practices and future research. Great initiative!

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discussion

Dual-/Multi-Use Technology Strategies

Deepak Sathyanarayan

1 April 2025 11:46pm

Hi Everyone, I am new to the WildLabs community and relatively new to conservation technology. I have been working in this space since 2018 (marine and coral focused with NOAA),...

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Deepak Sathyanarayan

15 April 2025 6:17pm

That is a great point and the current international trade climate has been making supply chain even more difficult. This also deeply affects US companies given much of the US goods manufacturing and assembly happening in China. Over the last few years, I have been seeing US hardware companies (e.g. drone platform and component OEMs) sourcing their goods from India, Turkey, Canada, and more recently in African and South American nations. Because of the last 3-to-5 years of increasingly restrictive and costly international hardware trade, there has been a emergence of specialized component manufacturers internationally. For European companies interested in providing hardware services to the US, I would suggest diversifying the supply chain beyond China. Given the current climate and trends, that added supply chain resilience may be a good idea, regardless of work with the US.

Kim Hendrikse

15 April 2025 7:36pm

This is more than the supply chain though. The point was the company itself cannot use any tech for anything from the 5x companies. So in my case my ISP is incompatible. Essentially I see the only companies making that kind of sacrifice are ones that want to devote themselves to defence only.


Of course. That’s US defense as a customer. European defence is fully on the table.


It’s just sad that it’s not restricted to defence. US government wildlife organisations cannot buy European tech unless that European company was pure in their eyes.

Deepak Sathyanarayan

15 April 2025 8:37pm

True, the US ecosystem is a challenging space right now, for basically all sectors. 

We should not let the US chaos prevent us from engaging with opportunities in other nations' multi-use markets. A company's ability and journey to tap into other markets is very unique to them (product, team, finances, infrastructure, agility), and some simply cannot adapt. There is no one size fits all (or even most) solution when it comes to multi-use strategies. It is important that  we are systematic about evaluating the cost to adapt our product-service to a different market, and the value of new opportunities in that new market, without losing track of underlying conservation and social good needs.

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