Powerful conservation tech tools are gathering more data in the field than ever before. But without equally powerful and effective data management and processing tools, that data - no matter how groundbreaking or interesting - will not be able to reach its full potential for impact.
Data management can sometimes seem intimidating to conservationists, especially those just getting started in the world of conservation tech or experimenting with new data collection methods. While every community member's workflow and preferred data management and processing methods may be different, this group can serve as a resource to explore what works for others, share your own advice, and develop new strategies together.
Below are a few WILDLABS events dealing with datasets collected from various conservation tech tools:
Nicole Flores: How do I get started with Wildlife Insights?
Jamie Macaulay: How do I analyse large acoustic datasets using PAMGuard?
Sarah Davidson: Tools for Bio-logging Data in Conservation
Whatever conservation tech tools you work with, and whatever your preferred data management methods, we hope you'll find something helpful and effective in this group when you become a member!
- @KB
- | she/her
Wildlife ecologist specializing in animal movement modeling and habitat selection with a strong interest in conservation policy and management decisions.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 17 Groups
- @vfhawkinson
- | she/her
University of Washington
PhD student assessing multi-scalar livestock-wildlife interactions in the American West
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 8 Groups
- @dmwilliams
- | she/her
Behavioral ecologist and community science coordinator
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 8 Groups
- @williamkingwill
- | Mr
Hi, my name is William. I am Senior Data Scientist/ Remote Sensing Engineer with experience in GIS, Machine Learning, Systems Engineering, Data Science Pipelines. I am motivated and passionate about using my skills for wildlife and biodiversity conservation.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 7 Groups

- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 5 Groups
- @Frank_van_der_Most
- | He, him
RubberBootsData
Field data app developer, with an interest in funding and finance





- 54 Resources
- 177 Discussions
- 9 Groups
WILDLABS & Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)
I'm the Bioacoustics Research Analyst at WILDLABS. I'm a marine biologist with particular interest in the acoustics behavior of cetaceans. I'm also a backend web developer, hoping to use technology to improve wildlife conservation efforts.





- 27 Resources
- 34 Discussions
- 34 Groups
- @SamuelNtimale
- | Him
Samuel Nti, a conservationist at APLORI, uses bioacoustics to protect endangered birds. His current work focuses on the African Grey Parrot in Nigeria, where he employs Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) to inform conservation strategies.

- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 7 Groups
- @Jeremy_
- | He/His
Recently teamed up with https://www.earthtoolsmaker.org/ founder



- 0 Resources
- 16 Discussions
- 4 Groups
Sustainability Manager for CERES Tag LTD. An animal health company; animal monitoring, conservation, & anti-poaching/ rural crime. Wildlife, livestock, equine & companion. #CeresTrace #CeresWild #CeresRanch





- 2 Resources
- 20 Discussions
- 24 Groups
Movement ecologist using conservation technology to study the behaviors of animals in the wild and understand how they cope with change to most effectively address conservation- and conflict-related issues.


- 0 Resources
- 9 Discussions
- 11 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 3 Groups
Tom Swinfield and colleagues at the Forest Ecology and Conservation Group have assessed the quality of three dimensional forest models produced from drone surveys, and conclude that concerns about their quality for...
31 May 2019
Ted Schmitt joined us for a lunchtime lecture in which he shared his experiences working across Africa the past five years with protected area managers, anti-trafficking organisations, and scientists to effectively...
22 November 2018
Funding
The European Space Agency is calling for Kick-Start ideas to leverage space technology for wildlife protection. Three main topics of interest have been identified: 1) Wildlife monitoring, tracking and inventory, 2)...
5 July 2017
The Conservation Leadership Programme (CLP) is a training and capacity building programme that targets individuals from developing countries who are early in their conservation career and demonstrate leadership...
21 November 2016
Do you work on conserving Neotropical migratory birds? Do you need funding? Why not apply for a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service through the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act's grant program? The...
8 November 2016
Operating the largest tropical forest camera trap network globally, TEAM Network has accumulated over 2.6 million images. How can large datasets coupled with new techniques for data management and analysis provide...
28 April 2016
From artificial “sniffer” technologies to portable DNA sequencers, the Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge received hundreds of innovative ideas to help stamp out wildlife crime. Now, the Challenge is proud to announce 16...
22 January 2016
Dr. Lucas Joppa, Scientist at Microsoft Research, considers the evolving impact of data in conservation and society. He examines the difference between ‘big data’ and ‘small data’, and explores how models such as the...
22 December 2015
John Amos, President of SkyTruth, explores how remote sensing is being used in conservation today and the importance of sky-truthing. He examines the role that citizen scientists can play in increasing transparency in...
21 December 2015
The speed at which data travels from the point of collection to a format which is understandable and useful for decision makers can be of critical importance. In this case study, Tim Wilkinson discusses a powerful suite...
6 November 2015
June 2025
event
event
event
October 2025
event
event
November 2025
April 2025
event
March 2025
event
85 Products
Recently updated products
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
---|---|---|---|---|
All sound, would be nice if there were only 5, though! |
|
AI for Conservation, Citizen Science, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Ethics of Conservation Tech, Funding and Finance, Geospatial, Open Source Solutions, Software Development | 1 month 4 weeks ago | |
Thank you so much! This is super helpful and I really appreciate the feedback! |
|
Acoustics, Data management and processing tools | 2 months 1 week ago | |
Hi everyone, I’m excited to become a member of Wild Lab! I’m currently working on my master’s thesis, focusing on dormouse conservation. My research explores the behavioral... |
|
AI for Conservation, Animal Movement, Camera Traps, Citizen Science, Community Base, Data management and processing tools, Early Career, Geospatial | 2 months 1 week ago | |
That's amazing thanks so much! |
|
Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Data management and processing tools, Early Career | 2 months 1 week ago | |
Hi Dan, Not right now but I can envision many uses. A key problem in RS is data streams for validation and training of ML models, its really not yet a solved problem. Any... |
|
Emerging Tech, AI for Conservation, Animal Movement, Build Your Own Data Logger Community, Camera Traps, Connectivity, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools, Geospatial, Sensors | 3 months ago | |
Another question. Right now pretty much all camera traps trigger on either PIR sensors or small AI models. Small AI models would tend to have a limitation that they would... |
|
AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools, Open Source Solutions, Software Development | 3 months 1 week ago | |
Hi everyone - I would like to announce a new case study paper out at CHI 2025! https://mattziegler.net/papers/Cross-Section-... |
|
Connectivity, Data management and processing tools, Ethics of Conservation Tech | 3 months 1 week ago | |
Hi, I'm collecting screenshots (and explanation if needed) of visualisations that you found useful. It could be charts, maps, tables... |
|
Data management and processing tools, Animal Movement, Camera Traps | 3 months 1 week ago | |
We are putting together a special issue in the journal Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology and are welcoming (review) papers on the use of AI in bird research. https://www.... |
|
AI for Conservation, Software Development, Citizen Science, Data management and processing tools | 3 months 2 weeks ago | |
Hello everyone!During my master thesis in engineering (past autumn), I developed Machine Learning for anti-poaching. As such, I recorded a... |
|
Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Data management and processing tools | 3 months 2 weeks ago | |
Thanks! I am familiar with EarthRanger but wasn't aware it could be used for behavioural data collection |
+6
|
Build Your Own Data Logger Community, Data management and processing tools, Open Source Solutions | 3 months 2 weeks ago | |
thanks kristy! super helpful list. |
|
Data management and processing tools, AI for Conservation | 4 months 1 week ago |
What Can Camera Traps Data Tell Us? (Besides the Obvious)
22 May 2025 10:24pm
Apply for Free Access to Nature FIRST Conference (innovative solutions for biodiversity monitoring and human-wildlife coexistence)
22 May 2025 2:37pm
AniMove Summer School 2025
21 May 2025 1:08pm
Governance in Action: How Practitioners Use ElinorData.org to Drive Conservation Results
19 May 2025 6:57pm
Prototype for exploring camera trap data
20 January 2025 10:23pm
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.
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
The Boring Fund 2024 - MoveApps
17 January 2025 12:54pm
2 April 2025 12:15pm
We are pleased to inform you that we have now finalized point 2 and 3. Here some details of the update:
- App browser improvements:
- Improved overview and search: we have added a description of each category and
the search and filtering options are improved. Searching for Apps within a Workflow: we have added the option to include Apps
that are not compatible with the IO type, making it easier to decide if a translator
App is needed to include one of the incompatible Apps.
- Improved overview and search: we have added a description of each category and
- Public Workflows improvements:
- Improved overview: the public Workflows are now organized by categories which
can be also used for filtering. - More information: the details overview contains now the list of Apps included in
each Workflow. - Sharing Workflows: when creating a public Workflow you will have to select one
or more existing categories, but you can also always request a new category.
- Improved overview: the public Workflows are now organized by categories which
Go and check it out in MoveApps!
4 April 2025 2:53pm
That's so great, thanks for the update!
16 May 2025 12:20pm
We are please to inform that we have implemented the point 1 and 4 and with this have finalized the project. The latest improvements:
- Improvement in findability of help documentation: we have started to populate the platform with links (question mark icon) to the relevant
sections of the user manual. - The log files of each App can now be downloaded and when an error occurs directly be sent to MoveApps support. Find more details here.
Again a great thank you for giving us the opportunity to implement these changes. We think they have greatly improved the user friendliness of MoveApps
HawkEars: a high-performance bird sound classifier for Canada
13 May 2025 11:00am
Survey on Earth Observation in Wildlife Ecology
8 May 2025 12:42pm
Prospective NSF INTERN
11 February 2025 10:00am
8 May 2025 8:51am
My name is Frank Short and I am a PhD Candidate at Boston University in Biological Anthropology. I am currently doing fieldwork in Indonesia using machine-learning powered passive acoustic monitoring focusing on wild Bornean orangutans (and other primates). I am reaching out because as a student with a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, I am eligible to take advantage of the NSF INTERN program which supports students to engage in non-academic internships through covering a stipend and other expenses, with the only caveat being that the internship must be in-person and not remote. I was wondering if any organizations in conservation technology would be interested in a full-time intern that would be coming in with their own funding?
In addition to experience with machine learning and acoustics through training a convolutional neural network for my research, I also have worked with GIS, remote sensing, and animal movement data through other projects. Further, I have experience in community outreach both in and outside of academic settings, as I previously worked for the Essex County Department of Parks and Recreation in New Jersey for 3 years where I created interpretive signs, exhibits, newsletters, brochures, and social media posts. Now while doing my fieldwork in Indonesia, I have led hands-on trainings in passive acoustic monitoring placement and analysis as well as given talks and presentations at local high schools and universities.
I would love to be able to use this opportunity (while the funding still exists, which is uncertain moving forward due to the current political climate in the US) to exercise and develop my skills at a non-academic institution in the conservation technology sphere! If anyone has any suggestions or is part of an organization that would be interested in having me as an intern, please contact me here or via my email: fshort@bu.edu geometry dash. Thank you!
Hi Frank, your work sounds incredibly valuable and well-aligned with current needs in conservation tech. With your strong background in machine learning, acoustics, GIS, and outreach, you’d be an asset to many organizations. I’d recommend looking into groups like Rainforest Connection, Wildlife Acoustics, or the Conservation Tech Directory (by WILDLABS)—they often work on acoustic monitoring and might be open to in-person internships, especially with funding already in place. Best of luck finding the right match—your initiative is impressive!
CMS Survey on Ecological Connectivity and Infrastructure
30 April 2025 10:03pm
Connecting the Dots: Integrating Animal Movement Data into Global Conservation Frameworks

30 April 2025 1:38am
No-code custom AI for camera trap images!
25 April 2025 8:33pm
28 April 2025 7:03am
When you process videos, do you not first break them down into a sequence of images and then process the images ? I'm confused as to the distinction between the processing videos versus images here.
28 April 2025 3:57pm
We do, but the way the models handle the images differs depending on whether they're coming from videos or static images. A quick example: videos provide movement information, which can a way of distinguishing between species. We use an implementation of SlowFast for one of our video models that attempts to extract temporal information at different frequencies. If the model has some concept of "these images are time sequenced" it can extract that movement information, whereas if it's a straight image model, that concept doesn't have a place to live. But a straight image model can use more of its capacity for learning e.g. fur patterns, so it can perform better on single images. We did some experimentation along these lines and did find that models trained specifically for images outperformed video models run on single images.
Hope that helps clear up the confusion. Happy to go on and on (and on)...
28 April 2025 5:58pm
Interesting. Thanks for the explanation. Nice to hear your passion showing through.
Overview of Image Analysis and Visualization from Camera traps
28 April 2025 8:09am
Project Update — Nestling Growth App
22 April 2025 10:45pm
Off-The-Shelf Drones & Open Source GIS Software for Dam Site Surveying?
15 April 2025 3:57pm
The boring fund: Standardizing Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) data - Safe & sound
27 January 2025 3:47pm
8 February 2025 11:00pm
This is such an important project! I can't wait to hear about the results.
12 February 2025 4:15pm
Hey Sanne, awesome - we definitely need a consistent metadata standard for PAM.
If you haven't already, I would suggest sharing this on the Conservation Bioacoustics Slack channel and the AI for Conservation Slack channel. You would reach a lot of active users of PAM, including some folks who have worked on similar metadata efforts.
If you're not a member of either one of those, DM me your preferred email address and I'll send you an invite!
7 April 2025 11:07pm
Hello everyone,
Thank you all for your contribution!
You can read some updates about this project in this post.
Julia
Free Webinar by Nature FIRST: Bridging Ecology and ESG – Smarter Decisions with Knowledge Graphs
2 April 2025 10:59am
Nature Tech for Biodiversity Sector Map launched!
1 April 2025 1:41pm
4 April 2025 1:57pm
Multiple grants
28 March 2025 1:42pm
SCGIS International Conference: Geospatial Technology Innovations for Conservation
27 March 2025 6:35pm
Nature Tech Unconference - Anyone attending?
8 March 2025 12:11pm
15 March 2025 8:28am
Definitely!
21 March 2025 12:07pm
The Futures Wild team will be there :)
26 March 2025 7:54pm
Yep see you on friday
Generative AI for simulating landscapes before and after restoration activities
26 March 2025 1:59pm
26 March 2025 7:50pm
Yep we are working on it
#berlin #ia #paysage #naturetech #solutionsfondéessurlanature #greentech… | Olivier Rovellotti 🌍 | 11 comments
🌿 Quand la Technologie Devient L'alliée du Paysagiste 🌍 🎨 Imaginer & Générer Grâce à l’IA générative (Stable Diffusion, Segment Anything), on peut imaginer #Berlin plus verte et tester différents scénarios d’aménagement. Une nouvelle manière d'explorer les possibles, en s’inspirant des principes des plus grands (McHarg, Clément, Burle Marx). 🌳💡 https://lnkd.in/g-uM7d-k 📚 Apprendre Les plateformes comme NBS EduWORLD rendent les solutions fondées sur la nature plus accessibles à tous. https://lnkd.in/gnBTkyN5 🔎 Cartographier & Anticiper Des outils comme ecoTeka permettent d’identifier les espaces à renaturer en croisant données SIG et IA. Cartographie, suivi des arbres, calcul des services écosystémiques… https://lnkd.in/daTBxbwn 🔗 Réfléchir: Dans "Harnessing generative AI to support nature-based solutions", Sandra Lavorel et Al nous donne des pistes d'explorations pour aller plus loin https://lnkd.in/gSH6Au9s 💬 Et vous ? 🌱🤖 #IA #Paysage #NatureTech #SolutionsFondéesSurLaNature #GreenTech #Biodiversité #NBSEduWorld #FosterTheFuture #TeachFromNature #NatureBasedSolutions #ClimateChange #STEM | 11 comments on LinkedIn
1/ segment
2/remote unwanted ecosytem
3/get local potential habitat
4/generate
5/add to picture
United Nations Open Source Principles
13 March 2025 4:13pm
25 March 2025 11:54am
All sound, would be nice if there were only 5, though!
Modern GIS: Moving from Desktop to Cloud
12 March 2025 7:10pm
Standard Threshold for "Habitat Use" in Avians?
7 March 2025 9:05pm
9 March 2025 7:47am
Is that not a statistical question and depending in the classification performance of the SW (Birdnet), which itself may depend on the species and the variability of the call?
I, myself, have no practical experience with Birdnet, but use a commercial product that derives from Birdnet and found in about 1000 days, for example, the following tail statistics (22 x 1), (12 x 2), (6 x 3), (5 x 4) bird detections. In total, 223 different species were classified, with black birds being on top with 149000 detections. Overall, there seems to be a nearly exponential decay of different bird detections, which to me shows a problem with NN-based classifications, as there seems to be no clean separation between 'signal' and 'noise', as one can find in traditional signal processing.
From these statistics (histogram) I would conclude that in the end there is no meaningful threshold, as there is no meaningful 'misclassification floor' that could be used to define a threshold.
Consequently, you may have to consider context, inspect every suspect snippet and let human decide.
11 March 2025 2:44pm
Hey Cortney, this is such a good question!
First off - I'd be very careful about interpreting the number of BirdNET detections of a species as a vocalization index for that species. For example, let's say a recorder captures a lot of Species A, which sounds like Species B, but Species B isn't present at that site. You will often find that BirdNET (or any other sound ID model) reports many detections for Species B and Species A, making it seem like both species are present. So, the number of detections of a species at a site isn't necessarily a more reliable indicator of species presence at that site.
One alternative to consider would be to verify species presence at each site and each day, then use the number of days that species was present as a threshold for habitat use. What threshold to use depends on the species - we've used three consecutive days of presence for some songbirds, for instance.
You could also remove dates when the species is expected solely to be migratory. However, this can get tricky... For example, I've observed that Cerulean Warblers that breed at a particular site will arrive there a week or two before migrants pass through at nearby non-breeding migration hotspots.
Doing a day-by-day analysis of presence enables you to more easily check machine learning detections than if you were checking for the number of detections for each species. You can verify the presence of the species at each site and day by listening to the highest-scoring clips for each day for each species.
If you have 18 days of recording * 12 sites and you listen to the top 5 highest-scoring clips per species and day, that's a maximum of 1,000 five-second clips per species. In my experience, reviewing that amount of clips takes me only a few hours using a Jupyter notebook like this one:
bioacoustics-cookbook/tdl-notebook at main · kitzeslab/bioacoustics-cookbook · GitHub
Jupyter Notebooks for interactive review and annotation of audio files - bioacoustics-cookbook/tdl-notebook at main · kitzeslab/bioacoustics-cookbook
12 March 2025 5:43pm
Thank you so much! This is super helpful and I really appreciate the feedback!
ICCB 2025 – Let’s Connect!
9 March 2025 5:06am
12 March 2025 1:55pm
Hi everyone, I’m excited to become a member of Wild Lab! I’m currently working on my master’s thesis, focusing on dormouse conservation. My research explores the behavioral responses of dormice to temperature and habitat patterns using camera trap data.
Additionally, I’d like to incorporate agent-based modeling to simulate species behavior. However, I’m a bit unsure about how to effectively apply modeling for predictions. If anyone here has experience with modeling, I’d love to connect and discuss!
Looking forward to learning from you all.
Best regards,
Nature FIRST Conference: Innovation and Collaboration in Conservation
11 March 2025 9:39am
Do more with Data: Online Workshop
11 March 2025 9:12am
Sea turtle Bioacoustics Project
17 February 2025 8:16pm
7 March 2025 12:47pm
Hi Sam, I did my master's on hatchling turtle vocalisations and their role in nest emergence behaviours (currently under review for publication). I recorded nest emergence behaviour in-situ using microphones and camera traps. I worked with snapping turtles, but the methods could be quite useful. I would be happy to share my thesis if that would be helpful.
there are a few sea turtle papers that describe hatchling vocalisations but not many experiments testing hypotheses for these vocalisations.
here are some papers that could help you get you started:
Shoot me a message if interested in chatting more :)
7 March 2025 1:32pm
Hello Sam ...great work, would like to see the paper when it comes online. I would like to know about the device....Bests Zahir
10 March 2025 11:24am
That's amazing thanks so much!
Advancing Hierarchical Classification of Ocean Life
4 March 2025 10:09pm
4 March 2025 10:13pm
6 May 2025 4:53pm
I think the app sort of covers this, using the pie chart layover on leaflet in the activity tab. However, it would be nice to have a more direct way of visualizing the species richness (i.e. scale the radii of the circle markers with the number of species detected). In addition to this you may want to think about visualizing simple diversity indices (there's alpha diversity which captures the species richness at each trap, gamma diversity to summarize the total richness in the area and beta diversity to assess how different species compositions are between traps). Note: I do not use diversity indices often enough to provide more specific guidance. @ollie_wearn is this what you were referring to?
I can help you with setting up the models in R, Python or Stan/ C++. But I have no idea on how to overcome the technical challenge that you are referring to. I agree with @ollie_wearn that allowing variable selection and model building would take this to far. One thing I would suggest is to allow users to fit a spatially-explicit version of the basic occupancy model (mind that these can be slow). This type of model leverages the correlations in species detections between trap locations to estimate differences in occupancy across the study area rather than just estimating a single occupancy for the entire area.
Yes, I would leave users with the following options: a UI-switch that let's them pick either:
to visualize on the leaflet map - and barchart on the side in the activity tab.
Regarding density: you could add a tab that calculates density using the Random Encounter Model (REM), which is often used when estimating density of unmarked animals without info on recaptures.
Regarding activity patterns: I would also add a tab were users can visualize either diel or annual activity cycles (often called activity patterns) computed through the activity R-package (or integrate this in an existing tab). And maybe even allow computing overlap in daily activity cycles among selected species.
If you manage to include all of these, then I think your app covers the 90% of use cases.
Some other features worth discussing: