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.

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

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.

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.

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. 

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? 

Read "[Official] Reolink Go Ranger PT - 1st 4K 4G Cellular Trail Camera" on

[Official] Reolink Go Ranger PT - 1st 4K 4G Cellular Trail Camera

The Go Ranger PT offers true 4K image quality and excellent night vision with a large F1.6 aperture and the invisible 940nm no-glow IR LEDs. The battery camera also comes with a solar panel and works over a 4G mobile network, perfect for a wilderness adventure, such as observing wildlife, etc.

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!

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.

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

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 :-)