Ten years ago, we couldn't have imagined how tools like machine learning, eDNA, and satellites would advance and transform conservation work. Now technology is advancing faster than ever, and as tools become smaller, lighter, and more affordable, it's vital to have a space where community members can discuss the next big thing, share ideas, compare tool options, and tell the story of their experiences - positive, negative, and anything in between - while using new technologies.
In 2021, the WILDLABS State of Conservation Tech report detailed what tools show the most promise according to community members, as well as what tools are currently seen as the most effective. And as new tools enter the field, we're excited to see how this data will change over time, and how this group grows over time as well.
Our State of Conservation Tech research also discusses something called the "Hype Cycle" - the pattern that occurs when a new technology bursts onto the scene, promises to be an exciting solution, encounters challenges as new users adopt the tool and put it into practice beyond just theory, and eventually settles into its most effective state as users acquire the right skills to use it to its actual potential. Machine learning, one of the most promising technologies, is currently in the middle of its own hype cycle, and we see community members working through their own hurdles to incorporate ML into their work effectively. Despite what you may think, this Hype Cycle can also be positive for tech development, as it means that users have big ideas for new tools, and with the right resources and skills, they can work toward bringing those ideas to life. And as our community members experiences the Hype Cycle for various tools at their own paces, we hope this group will also serve as a place to discuss that process and overcome hurdles together.
Ready to discover new possibilities? Join our Emerging Tech group now and get to know your forward-thinking conservation tech peers!
Header photo: Internet of Elephants
No showcases have been added to this group yet.
- @LuVentura
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Biologist, veterinary and president NGO Bioventura Brazil. Study jaguar, puma and wild cat in Atlantic Rain Forest.
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- @TheDataEnthusiastic
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Hi, I'm pursuing Master's in Data Science. And I want work help protect nature and wildlife.
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WILDLABS
This account is managed by the WILDLABS Team. Tag us or DM whenever you need help from our community team.



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I am a Geoscientist interested in using geospatial data science to contribute to solutions of today’s environmental challenges. I mostly worked with land surafce temperature data from satellites and drones to study how high mountain landscapes respond to climate change.
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- @Helga_Kuechly
- | she/her
World Wide Fund for Nature/ World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
I am a Geo-ecologist, who loves to use GIS, remote sensing, citizen science and knowledge transfer to shape for a better future for nature - We are part of nature, so let's act like it!
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Director of Icoteq Ltd, an electronics and software design consultancy developing wireless products and solutions to organisations working in the conservation, wildlife monitoring and anti-poaching sectors. Developers of the TagRanger® novel wildlife tracking products.



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- @Harsha
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I am a marine biologist / acoustic ecologist from Australia. Fascinated by bioacoustics, I always look forward to learning from people in conservation!
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- @Adwait
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Postdoc at Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour
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- @nabilla.nuril
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University College London (UCL)
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Product management professional w/ 12+ years in software dev.
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If you're a Post-Doctoral Fellow, a PhD student, or a member of the research staff interested in applying your computational skills to support active research publications, please read on to learn about the Cross-...
5 August 2025
The Marine Innovation Lab for Leading-edge Oceanography develops hardware and software to expand the ocean observing network and for the sustainable management of natural resources. For Fall 2026, we are actively...
24 July 2025
Lead a growing non-profit to sustain open source solutions for open science!
19 July 2025
Funding
2025 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge seeks innovations for open biodiversity data
17 July 2025
Careers
Rewilding Europe is seeking a Business Intelligence Analyst to support measuring rewilding impact through data automation, dashboards, and cross-domain analysis.
3 June 2025
The intern will support CI in exploring and implementing AI solutions that address conservation challenges. We are looking for someone familiar with modern AI technologies (genAI, AI agents, LLMs, foundation models, etc...
2 June 2025
Conservation International is proud to announce the launch of the Nature Tech for Biodiversity Sector Map, developed in partnership with the Nature Tech Collective!
1 April 2025
The FLIR ONE thermal camera is a compact and portable thermal imaging device capable of detecting heat signatures in diverse environments. This report explores its application in locating wild animals across large areas...
27 March 2025
We are hiring for a customer support / marketing specialist.
20 February 2025
Osa Conservation is launching our inaugural cohort of the ‘Susan Wojcicki Research Fellowship’ for 2025, worth up to $15,000 per awardee (award value dependent on project length and number of awards given each year)....
10 February 2025
Lake Nakuru National Park is one of the first rhino sanctuaries in Kenya where Artificial-Intelligence enabled Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera systems were installed to help curb the escalating poaching of black...
8 February 2025
Are you interested in developing new 3D motion capture techniques to for measuring super fast wildlife like cheetahs? Are you interested in working with fusing exciting technologies such as event cameras, audio and...
3 February 2025
August 2025
event
September 2025
event
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March 2026
September 2024
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Getting to you. |
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Climate Change, Emerging Tech | 1 year ago | |
Really interesting, I will take a look |
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AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech | 1 year ago | |
Thank you so much! Now everything is in the hands of amazing organizations and companies! But the first results of the Disaster Management cohort are bringing a very optimistic... |
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AI for Conservation, Climate Change, Early Career, East Africa Community, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech, Ending Wildlife Trafficking Online, Human-Wildlife Coexistence, Open Source Solutions | 1 year ago | |
@cmwainaina please take a look |
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Animal Movement, AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Connectivity, Data management and processing tools, East Africa Community, Emerging Tech, Ethics of Conservation Tech, Human-Wildlife Coexistence, Marine Conservation, Protected Area Management Tools, Geospatial, Sensors, Software Development | 1 year ago | |
Thank you very much for this Esther. I also came across Trade in Wildlife Information Exchange (TWIX) which is a enforcement tool for international wildlife trade. |
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Women in Conservation Tech Programme (WiCT), Citizen Science, Emerging Tech, East Africa Community | 1 year 3 months ago | |
Hi Steph, We appreciate the support! Thanks for the tag and your help managing the community!Patrick |
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Sensors, Acoustics, Conservation Dogs, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions | 1 year 3 months ago | |
Hi Sol,If the maximum depth is 30m, it would be worth experimenting with HydroMoth in this application especially if the deployment time is short. As Matt says, the air-filed case... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 3 months ago | |
Congratulations! My first hydromoth was just arrived yesterday and so excited! Looking forward for the update from your project!!! |
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Acoustics, Animal Movement, Climate Change, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Protected Area Management Tools, Sensors, Software Development, Latin America Community | 1 year 3 months ago | |
Gotcha, well I look forward to seeing future iterations and following along with your progress!! |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, AI for Conservation, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Latin America Community | 1 year 3 months ago | |
'Most importantly, we have to make it play a MIDI version of the DoctorWho theme song when you arm the device. That has to be the #1 feature if you ask me!' Seconded! |
+9
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Acoustics, Animal Movement, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 1 year 4 months ago | |
Hi @Alasdair Great to hear from you! Thanks for the comment and for those very useful links (very interesting). And for letting @Rob_Appleby know. I can't wait to hear... |
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Emerging Tech, Camera Traps, Conservation Tech Training and Education | 1 year 4 months ago | |
Hello everyone, I'm interested in gathering insights on how the behavior of different species impacts the development and efficacy of... |
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Animal Movement, Acoustics, Camera Traps, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech, Marine Conservation | 1 year 4 months ago |
Quantum sensing for environmental sciences
14 July 2022 4:17pm
Service Designer
13 July 2022 9:05am
What emerging technologies could make conservation technology more sustainable?
1 July 2022 4:34pm
Intro webinar - The Biodiversity Digital Twin: a new solution to support protection & restoration of ecosystems
30 June 2022 1:22am
Conservation Tech Award: Apply For Two $15K Grants
23 June 2022 6:38pm
Cofounder needed
9 June 2022 4:23pm
17 June 2022 6:54pm
How exciting @Joyeeta ! I'd love to learn more about the companies and projects you worked on, can you share more info about them?
I once chatted to an entrepreneurial advisor with a couple of my conservation tech ideas, and he said my ideas are good/impactful but don't make for a product worth millions of $$$ of turnover per year that would interest investors. So I am very curious about how you got your conservation tech businesses off the ground!
18 June 2022 8:33pm
Some folks doing work in this space - Wildlife Drones, Conservation Drones, UAV Wild, AfricanDrones, Oceans Unmanned, Geonadir.
Join Seeed’s “IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Planet 2022” on Hackster to Get 100 Free Hardware and to Win $14,000+ in Prizes!!
14 June 2022 11:04am
Join Seeed’s “IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Planet 2022” on Hackster to Get 100 Free Hardware and to Win $14,000+ in Prizes!!!
14 June 2022 9:14am
Video: Delivering edge computing on Robinson Crusoe Island (Chile) to preserve biodiversity
13 June 2022 2:08pm
Virtual Meetup Discussion: Future Questions & Tools in Movement Ecology
7 June 2022 9:38pm
11 June 2022 4:42pm
We've actually been looking into NFC to automatically provision field devices to set/read/store metadata. We're staring down the barrel of a large deployment and metadata is one of the issues that we think really needs automation. We're thinking of having a dedicated device to write and read the tags that would go on the devices as stickers and automagically sync the metadata with the database. An added bonus would be that most recently modern phones support NFC protocols like NTAG or MiFare Classic. That would mean that they could also be both read and written with the GPS coordinates, timestamp, etc as they're deployed in the field. It's still under discussion with the many other things that need to be implemented, though. I do think it's interesting that what we're seeing in a lot of conservation technology applications is not just a need for new technology but also the less exciting but more practical need for things that improve productivity like automating metadata management.
12 June 2022 1:08am
Using NFC makes a lot of sense too. I'm just on an older lower-end device that doesn't support it, which is why it didn't pop immediately to mind. Would be interesting to see what the adoption rate for NFC-capable phones is across countries though I'd imagine some phone manufacturer or something already has that data.
12 June 2022 2:29am
A bit opposite of what you're looking for but according to this, the share of non-NFC enabled phones was 10% in 2020. They don't state their source unless you pay, but I suspect that's in terms of total phone models, not total phones in use. So it's highly likely that phones with no NFC in use is much higher than that.

UKAN+ Monitoring UK Biodiversity Symposium 15-16th June
31 May 2022 2:58pm
New paper: A practical approach with drones, smartphones, and tracking tags for potential real-time animal tracking
29 May 2022 1:15pm
New wildlife forensics lab - Singapore
29 May 2022 12:34pm
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Future Questions & Tools in Movement Ecology
24 May 2022 10:10pm
Job Opening - VR / Unity Game Developer for Wildlife
28 January 2022 2:23pm
Technical Difficulties: The Path to Success
14 October 2021 12:00am
Internet of Elephants is seeking test users for our early prototypes
3 October 2016 6:13pm
25 October 2016 9:43am
Thanks Stephanie for giving it a go. It is most certainly very basic right now - hardly a game yet - but purposely left that way so as to leave a lot of space for feedback and ideas. We'll put out another version in a few weeks - what is promising is that a lot of the things we were thinking to do next align with a lot of the feedback that is coming in.
25 October 2016 9:44am
Hi John - thanks for giving it a try - It is so basic that I'm surprised at all the positive response we get - nice to see people are open minded about this being version 0.000001 :)
Yes - definitely - the idea is to do this for maybe 10-15 different species around the world. We want the user to eventually come in and 'spin' the globe, see what is happening with real wild animals in different parts of the world, and have a fun way of engaging with them.
We don't yet even know which animal we would go live with first - that is still discovery to see what data is the most interesting from a game perspective combined with what captures the attention of people the most. Elephants certainly do the latter, so we're testing out with some elephant data we have. But we're seeing that wildebeest data and migratory bird data could be far more fun.
8 July 2021 8:40am
That's pretty cool
Can you send us the info at contact@natural-solutions.eu
happy to help
Get To Know FIT!
8 May 2020 6:36pm
29 June 2020 4:04pm
Upper level undergraduates
29 June 2020 8:14pm
Can we take this to email Roland? : info@wildtrack.org
Happy to have a video call sometime to discuss how we can help!
Z
10 November 2020 11:20am
Dear Zoe,
I wonder whether FIT would be good for species-level (rather than individual level) identification of small mammals. We use track tunnels to get prints of dormice (3 species) on carbon soot (metal surface covered by soot). We do have bibliographical reference of those species (Glis glis, Dryomys nitedula, Muscardinus avellanarius) and other "usual suspects" (e.g. Apodemus sp.). Fom some of them, we also have some tracks from captive animals (although not as many as you describe you need in the videos, but we could arrange for more in the future...once the dormice wake up again in the Spring). Is this something worth exploring? We can manually do the id for our current project, but I am interested in developing know-how for the future as well (and use the current project to achieve this).
Alternatively - and equally interestingly for us - we could work on individual level identification of animals of a small Dryomys nitedula population that we have within our research institute's ground (and hence we can easily do lots of field tests etc.) - ideally involving an undergraduate student in the process as well (come Spring 2020). Would this be something that we could work on, with some guidance - collaboration for you - with the intent of getting a model out for peopel to use across Europe?
Maybe we could discuss sometime? My email is christos.astaras@gmail.com
regards,
Christos
Introduction
29 June 2020 9:19pm
6 July 2020 11:16pm
Guess not!
27 July 2020 6:50pm
I only know Internet of Elephants! Have you heard about them?
I think their new competitor is Google, have you seen? https://9to5google.com/2020/07/10/google-3d-animals-list/
Internet of Elephants last launch was Wildeverse - https://www.wildeversegame.com/
Thinking Outside the Box: Using FIT for Box Turtle Shell ID
8 July 2020 5:22pm
14 July 2020 4:10am
The issue of how community-gathered data can be made safe yet accessible is rapidly emerging as a huge challenge in conservation biology. We'd love to hear input from the Wildlife Crime Forum on this.
15 July 2020 8:46am
Hi,
Our tortious tracks look like this. we still haven't started to work on this project.
tracking is the best way to monitor the population of Kleinmann's tortoise in its andy habitat.
Hopefully, we will be able to begin next year a project with drones.
16 July 2020 7:37pm
How neat, thanks for sharing! We'd love to hear more about your drone project once it's underway, please keep us updated on that one!
Advancing Monitoring of Endangered Forest Carnivores using Footprint Identification Technology (FIT)
29 June 2020 10:42pm
Explorer Classroom: Gautam Shah

19 May 2020 12:00am
Endangered Species Day Friday 15th May!
14 May 2020 9:04pm
Creating the Wildeverse
13 May 2020 12:00am
Introductions
15 February 2016 8:13am
26 June 2018 10:58am
Hi - my name is Rogue Marechal, founder of HAL-13, a game board publisher specifically interesting in connecting the gaming community to the world and challenges of wildlife conservation.
Our first game, Serengeti: A Race For Life is an attempt to raise players/consumers awareness to the importance of biodiversity, by emphasizing the need to study and protect a wide range of species, as a means to help the enrire ecosystem.
By joining this community, I’m hoping to gain useful insight into wildlife protection, to enrich my knowledge of this field, and feed it back into my game designs.
Applications of AR/MR for Wildlife Conservation
22 December 2017 6:10am
Pokemon Go concepts for wildlife conservation
14 July 2016 10:10am
14 July 2016 10:47am
Hi Gautam,
Really interesting idea, thanks for sharing the post. Although this isn't quite the expansive action plan identified in the piece, it reminded me of the #pokeblitz hashtag that's sprung up in parallel with the Pokemon Go frenzy. If you find an actual creature while playing #PokemonGO, you can tweet pic with #PokeBlitz & experts will help you identify it! It seems to me to be a nice first step for 'making pokemon go real'.
Cheers,
Steph
4 August 2016 5:26pm
'Pokémon-Go players could capture 400 years of wildlife sightings in 6 days' - what an incredible figure! Like you, @mygshah , and Jordan, Dr Tom August has also been thinking about how Pokemon go could be applied to conservation:
http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/blogs/pok%C3%A9mon-go-players-could-capture-400-years-wildlife-sightings-6-days
6 August 2016 2:25am
Yes - good points in there about why traditional attempts at these attempts have hit a ceiling - we have some great approaches to that - will have some prototypes to share very soon, but happy to tell people about these ideas if interested.
Gaming with real data
4 January 2016 11:55am
17 June 2022 1:14pm
What about developing a drone conservation training course for field conservation staff teaching specific skills for specific research needs.