WILDLABS logoWildlabs.net : The conservation technology network

WILDLABS logoWildlabs.net : The conservation technology network

Group

Citizen Science / Feed

Anyone can become a citizen scientist - even experts! If you're excited about exploring new areas of conservation tech, contributing to projects, or developing and launching your own citizen science projects or apps, this is the group for you.

discussion

Passionate engineer offering funding and tech solutions pro-bono.

Krasi

23 January 2024 12:06pm

My name is Krasi Georgiev and I run an initiative focused on providing funding and tech solutions for stories with a real-world impact. The main reason is that I am passionate...

2 1
Danilo

26 January 2024 3:18pm

Hi Krasi! Greetings from Brazil!



That's a cool journey you've started! Congratulations. And I felt like theSearchLife resonates with the work I'm involved round here. In a nutshell, I live at the heart of the largest remaining of Atlantic forest in the planet - one of the most biodiverse biomes that exist. The subregion where I live is named after and bathed by the "Rio Sagrado" (Sacred River), a magnificent water body with a very rich cultural significance to the region (it has served as a safe zone for fleeing slaves). Well, the river and the entire bioregion is currently under the threat of a truly devastating railroad project which, to say the least is planned to cut through over 100 water springs! 



In face of that the local community (myself included) has been mobilizing to raise awareness of the issue and hopefully stop this madness (fueled by strong international forces). One of the ways we've been fighting this is through the seeking of the recognition of the sacred river as an entity of legal rights, who can manifest itself in court, against such threats. And to illustrate what this would look like, I've been developing this AI (LLM) powered avatar for the river, which could maybe serve as its human-relatable voice. An existing prototype of such avatar is available here. It has been fine-tuned with over 20 scientific papers on the Sacred River watershed.



And right now myself and other are mobilizing to manifest the conditions/resources to develop a next version of the avatar, which would include remote sensing capacities so the avatar is directly connected to the river and can possibly write full scientific reports on its physical properties (i.e. water quality) and the surrounding biodiversity. In fact, myself and 3 other members of the WildLabs community have just applied to the WildLabs Grant program in order to accomplish that. Hopefully the results are positive.



Finally, it's worth mentioning that our mobilization around providing an expression medium for the river has been multimodal, including the creation of a shortfilm based on theatrical mobilizations we did during a fest dedicated to the river and its surrounding more-than-human communities. You can check that out here:



 

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/850179762



 

Let's chat if any of that catches your interest!

Cheers!

Krasi

2 February 2024 1:22pm

Hi Danilo. you seem very passionate about this initiative which is a good start.
It is an interesting coincidence that I am starting another project for the coral reefs in the Philipines which also requires water analytics so I can probably work on both projects at the same time.

Let's that have a call and discuss, will send you a pm with my contact details

There is a tech glitch and I don't get email notifications from here.

See full post
discussion

Seeking Host Organisations for Travel Scholarship Application

Eva Neill

19 December 2023 12:54am

Hi all,I'm Eva, a final year undergraduate studying Joint Honours Biology and Geography at the University of St Andrews.  I've recently joined the WildLabs community in...

1 0
Herdhanu Jayanto

20 December 2023 3:07am

Hi Eva, 

Me and my colleagues run a small NGO based on Yogyakarta in Indonesia, although our projects are spread around the country. One of our active project is working with the movement ecology of Sunda gharials in Berbak-Sembilang National Park. One of the other is for Malayan Giant Turtle conservation using one-plan approach, which we are planning to start in situ phase. We can't give you promise about anything, but are able to be the host organization and would love to talk the opportunity!

Cheers,

Dhanu

See full post
careers

Thomas D Sisk Graduate Fellowship

Esther Githinji

13 December 2023 9:36am

Northern Arizona University, School of Earth and Sustainability is searching for a candidate to take up a unique fully funded Masters opportunity (upgradeable to PhD depending on performance and fund-raising) at the...

0
See full post
discussion

Sharing interesting DIY or low-cost projects?

Surfing psychedelic chicken

12 July 2023 9:03pm

Hi all first post here, I just stumbled onto this forum. I really liked the video with Tom August shared in another thread here that I happened to see just now, especially the...

5 2
Pen-Yuan Hsing

28 July 2023 5:43pm

Thanks for starting this thread @Surfingpsychedelicchicken! 

I've been working with folks mostly in the Gathering for Open Science (GOSH) community on giving wildlife camera traps stereovision capabilities. See this thread for our extensive discussion on the subject. Stereovision allows camera traps to capture spatial data about the scene in addition to images of wildlife, and this piece of information can greatly help estimate population size.

Recently, one of my colleagues developed a 3D-printed addon that could provide that function. It's looking promising and we're at 95% for a crowdfunding campaign on Experiment.com with just under a week left (also posted here). Sorry to sound self-promoting, but I genuinely believe we've got something going here, and would definitely appreciate some support big or small!

Happy to discuss more here or in the other threads linked to.

P.S. I love your point about anti-disciplinarity!

Kim Hendrikse

16 August 2023 12:46pm

Super duper getting that mesh network working. Valuable resources. I have been working with IP camera systems since 2008 and have tried a lot of them. Ubiquiti itself is a great networking brand, the only comment I have about their cameras though is that they do not support a motion jpeg (mjeg) stream of any sort. What this means is that in order to get a still image for use in an AI computer vision system you have to waste GPU power somewhat getting the still. Generally speaking I would suggest to new things that have in their mind future AI integration is to choose a camera that supports an mjpeg stream with a custom frame rate. For example, I have 15x cameras around my home. They are all being analyzed in real time with the highest scoring object detector (Currently)  (That is published using the coco dataset from microsoft) yolov6. I also double check matches sometimes with yolov7 to provide extra resilience to false positives.

For this I tend to consume an mjpeg camera stream at 640x480 resolution at a frame rate of just 6 frames per second. That means that any system that is performing local object detection on something like the jetson series SBCs do not have to use any of their capacity first decoding mpeg streams to images.

Andrew Quitmeyer

31 August 2023 9:46pm

Hi! @Surfingpsychedelicchicken ! yeah we run a conference kind of about this (well actually i've been helping run two conferences about this!) Dinacon and the GOSH gathering! Thanks @StephODonnell !

www.dinacon.org is about an anti-disciplinary gathering of people to explore field biology and design and it's a long form conference (minimum stay 7 days, whole conference is 1 month+)

 

GOSH is another group kind of like wildlabs here, a bit less focused on field tech, but still has lots of international folks working on open science hardware of many sorts

And they also have an "unconference" that happens every couple of years (last year it was in panama) that is more traditional (4-5 days) but chock full of wonderful folks!

 

 

See full post
discussion

Seedbank Project on iNaturalist

Arky

25 August 2023 4:28am

Am helping a conservation project use iNaturalist for their work in bio-diversity monitoring and also citizen science, STEM program with schools.Looking to connect with anyone who...

0
See full post
Link

Earth Observation Tech Saved Critically Endangered Giraffes

Esther Githinji

14 August 2023 3:42pm

Here is a great story of how earth observation technologies and a specially-built barge dubbed the 'GiRaft' helped save critically endangered Rothschild's giraffes from Longcharo Island when rising lakes proved a significant threat.

0
discussion

Interested in being part of the Enduata Emaa CBO's Green Planet Ambassadors Project in Amboseli? 

Esther Githinji

5 July 2023 10:28am

About the Enduata Emaa Community Based OrganizationEnduata Emaa Community-based Organization was founded in 2021 by its Chairman Samuel...

1 0
Esther Githinji

25 July 2023 1:14pm

@richardturere Hello :) and a warm welcome to WILDLABS! Here is the link to @Lekato Samuel Lekato - Founder and Chairman, Enduata Emaa CBO. Sam is interested in conservation technology focused on how to keep wild animals away from community homesteads in Amboseli and I reckon your Lion Lights could help. I'll let you two take on the conversation from here. Thanks! 

See full post
discussion

Animal tracking stories

Wildlife Drones

22 May 2023 2:19am

Do you have a wild animal tracking story that involves adventure or misadventure? Share it with us! From going around in circles for hours to discovering predators instead of your...

0
See full post