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:



 

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

Cheers!

Lorawan is a great tech for various applications. In essense, a lorawan gateway communicates with a provider endpoint to send through data that is receives. This can then be received by applications with subscriptions to that data over the Internet. Gateways can be had quite cheaply, Seeed Studios has one for around 100 euros. This is just adding a solar charge unit and there must be some sort of Internet communications, be it cell based or otherwise satellite I guess.

You should aware of all of the profiles of Lora and the constraints, it's intended for low bandwidth data. There are several modes of operation, Lora itself uses spread spectrum transmission with error correction. If you use a high degree of error correction you can transmit successfully longer distances, but with a longer period between allowable transmissins. For example, on spreading factor 12 (SF12) I think you may only transmit again 5 minutes or so later. With SF7, you have less power and less error correction and you can retransmit 5 seconds later.

So think it terms of small amounts of information to be transmitted. It's not a network replacement. The same also applies to zigbee or xbee pro, although they would be more suitable for larger amounts of data and can be used as I understand it as a sort of very, very low bandwidth meshed network. But lorawan is really for individual packets of data.

The Things Network has a lot of information regarding Lorawan in general that's well written I think.

The things network can also be used for free up to a certain number of nodes as a understand it.

Will you accept personal/hobbyist focused on conservation on their small plots of land (10-100 acres)?

I would, and know others, who would happily pay more than the official conservationists rate for the service, which could help to further subsidize the project. (Referring to your statement here: https://wildlabs.net/discussion/instant-detect-20-and-related-cost)

Hi Lisa,

Not my area of expertise either and hopefully I'm not way off base here as it's not a cheap tracker but...have you looked at near vertical incident skywave (NVIS) radio systems?  I was trialling them in Nouabalé-Ndoki - we didn't have the terrain issues but we did have vegetation issues - and they worked really well over long distances.  Also possible to integrate with Earthranger if I recall correctly.  

Hope this is of at least a little help.

Best,

Emma

Hi Lisa. 

Did you ever find a solution for this? Would love to chat more about the use case and requirements.

Akiba

Have you tried or considered Garmin Inreach or Zoleo trackers?

I have experience with Garmin Inreach in relatively rugged terrain in Greenland (probably not as steep as what you have).

They work relatively well. One disadvantage with the early models is that the tracking data can not be downloaded directly from the devices as .gpx but needs to take the detour over the Garmin cloud. The newer models have direct download of tracks available.

I like the fact that the Garmin units are proper standalone handheld GPS units to be used for navigation and waypoint marking and you can also relatively easily share your own location and even points of interest with team members in the field (by sending geotagged messages - not actual waypoints, unfortunately). 

Garmin Inreach is listed as an EarthRanger partner at https://www.earthranger.com/partner but I have no idea if there is any possibility of real integration.

Cheers,

Lars

Hi!

I am not aware of any such connected loggers/recorders but they would be nice. 

The AudioMoths have been revolutionary in providing audologging at a low cost but they take a lot of "data muling" (carrying SD cards in and out of the field sites) and swapping of batteries.

Cheers,

Rainforest Connection's (RFCx) Guardian devices may be of interest. They are solar-powered and have connectivity options for Wifi, GSM and satellite transfer. They've previously been used for detecting e.g., gunshots or chainsaws (using edge computing) and then sending positive detections/alerts to folks on the ground. RFCx also hosts Arbimon, a free, no-code software platform that facilitates analysis of audio data as well. Happy to chat more if you'd like to talk further about it!