What about thermal cameras and drones with thermal cameras for monitoring of mammals?

Hi,

maybe this could be a candidate for a best practice guide 😉 My free manual 'Drones in Biomonitoring' - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8077113 It canhelp to get (more) knowledge how to proceed easily and successfully 😉 

It covers topics from buy to fly and data processing.

📖 The manual was developed to help authorities, landscape conservation / maintenance or nature conservation associations etc. in nature conservation to manage their growing monitoring tasks more effectively and cost-efficiently.
🛸 The use of drones can contribute in many ways to increasing the effectiveness of monitoring, reducing costs and minimizing disturbance - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steffen-Doering.

Best regards!
Steffen

This is really interesting, thank you for sharing this knowledge

Support for two cameras (or more) can be done by using two USB powered cameras if you have the right platform. Then in principle you can place each camera up to 2m from the processor.

I’ll will be experimenting with such a setup as soon as my USB global shutter camera arrives. Global shutter camera work really well with the AI computer vision that my system uses. Quite a different power category than microcontrollers though.

Currently I’m testing a Raspberry Pi based camera system that is capturing images and video, scanning 3x cameras with ai triggering.

very nice paper Cathy!!! 

This would be awesome Andrew! Happy to help with some organization of this/identifying potential chapter authors. 

I'm sure you know about this already, but there is also this book from Wich & Piel: https://www.amazon.com/Conservation-Technology-Serge-Wich/dp/0198850255 

Hi Andew,

Whatever became of your book? Also have you seen jupyterbook.org and mystmd.org? Both are free and open source software for publishing articles and books.

Best,

Vance

so great!!

It would be great to address data collection, handling and storage. It starts with keeping good records of field deployments so that devices can be refound and helps at the time of analysis and reporting and so studies can be reproduced. Having an understanding of metadata standards for data types as these are often overlooked when projects are starting up. Knowing if there are existing databases or repositories for your data or if you will have to 'roll your own' (something more than an Excel spreadsheet, or at least knowing the potential pitfalls of relying on spreadsheets). That would be a great advantage when entering the workforce and working in this field.

Hi Amit,

The most important thing is that the livestock owners contact you as soon as possible after finding the carcass. We commonly do two things if they contact us on the same day or just after the livestock was killed:

1. Use CyberTracker (or similar software) on an Android smart phone to record all tracks, bite marks, feeding pattern and any other relevant signs of the reason for the loss with pictures and GPS coordinates. [BTW, Compensation is a big issue -- What do you do if the livestock was stolen? What do you do if a domestic animal killed the livestock? What if it died from disease or natural causes and was scavenged upon by carnivores afterwards?]
2. In the case of most cats, they would hide the prey (or just mark it by covering it with grass or branches and urinating in the area). In this case you can put up a camera trap on the carcass to capture the animal when it returns to its kill (Reconyx is good if you can afford it - we use mostly Cuddeback with white flash). This will normally only work if the carcass is fresh (so other predators would not be able to smell it and not know where it is yet), so the camera only has to be up for 3-5 days max.

This is not really high-tech, but can be very useful to not only establish which predator was responsible (or if a predator was responsible), but also to record all the evidence for that.

Hey Amit, 

This is a great question; from our work, we've seen people do a couple of things. We've even seen people using Ring doorbell footage in urban areas as evidence. 

The best thing we've seen is matching the community needs with existing infrastructure: 

• Are there existing cameras you can leverage, like the doorbell cameras? 
• Can public participation monitoring service this, i.e. public submitted photos and videos? 

It also totally depends on the wildlife species you're working with, the interaction, damages, etc. If you've found any good solutions, let me know. I'd love to share that information with our clients here who have constant bear problems. 

Congratulations, very exciting! Keep us updated!

This is so cool @Mauricio_Akmentins - congrats and look forward to seeing your project evolve!

Congratulations! My first hydromoth was just arrived yesterday and so excited! Looking forward for the update from your project!!!