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Human-Wildlife Coexistence / Feed

Human-wildlife coexistence is a significant challenge that only grows as habitats shrink and other issues like climate change alter the natural world. Technologies like biologging gear have become essential for proactively reducing human-wildlife conflict before it escalates, and tech projects that seek to understand population ranges and behaviour can help people learn to live with wildlife as part of our own environments. If you're interested in using technology to enhance human-wildlife coexistence, this group is the place for you!

discussion

Audio play back device when elephant crop raids

Antoine Ede

7 November 2019 7:55am

Dear all,  As audio playback shows some results to deter elephants, we were considering using them for protecting crops (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301708132...

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Joshua Siva

23 September 2020 7:27am

I've worked on a similar project to try to scare lions away from bomas in Kenya that's pretty much a bunch of stuff from Adafruit rigged together with cheap marine speakers in an overly complicated custom case (picture is of previous generation, new generation in development). We also run LEDs to show various light displays. I imagine you could imitate a muzzle flash to deepen the illusion of gunfire. I'm also happy to discuss things (although I don't think I can match the technical expertise of Freaklabs).

Juliana Masseloux

27 September 2020 1:57am

Suraci et al. have published a few papers about the use of an automated behavioral response system for sound playback when triggered by a camera trap. Their methods (see supplementary materials) are entirely open source and I even commissioned an engineer to make a few for me. The only issue is that the MP3 players need a separate battery pack to keep them charged or need to be charged weekly, as the sound runs continuosly since there would otherwise be a delay between the camera trigger and the MP3 player being turned on. This could probably be fiddled with to suit your needs, if the previous options don't work out.

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.12711  

Akiba

27 September 2020 3:31am

We actually designed Boombox, the audio player shown above, based on the ABRS system by the Suraci paper and with Dr. Meredith Palmer. We made some optimizations on it since the paper advocates an approach to infer when the camera was triggered. We reverse engineered our camera traps and took the actual trigger signal from the trailcam PIR motion sensor. Later, we were contacted by one of the authors of the paper and he mentioned they had come to the same conclusion.

We built the MP3 playback system using a discrete MP3 decoder IC which allowed us more control over playback, power management, and we could pick out the output amplifier to drive the speakers. We knew we would need to put the system to sleep and immediately play sounds on wakeup which most players aren't suited to do.

We also made it so that it's solar rechargeable with lithium-ion batteries so that it could last in the field as long as possible. Unfortunately we couldn't use that feature because there's no point in outlasting the trailcams. But for this application, it seems we might be able to use the solar recharging functionality. 

We've volunteered for a possible TechTutors season 2 workshop on open source MP3 playback and recording with Arduino.  We're waiting to discuss it with Steph and Ellie. If this sounds interesting, please let us know.

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funding

Challenge: ElephantEdge

Smart Parks

11 August 2020 12:00am

Protecting elephants from conservation's most pressing issues like poaching and human-wildlife conflict requires big, bold, and innovative solutions. Hackster.io, Smart Parks, Edge Impulse, Microsoft, and several other...

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discussion

Did you know that Wildtrack's Footprint Identification Technique (FIT) can be used to promote human-wildlife coexistence!

Zoe Jewell

3 June 2020 6:47pm

By Amy FitzmauriceThe collaborative Living with Tigers Project run by Chester Zoo in collaboration with Green Governance Nepal (GGN), the Department of National Parks and...

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Zoe Jewell

18 June 2020 4:38am

Hi Santhosh, welcome to the FIT community, we're glad you joined!

Karin has explained very nicely the difference between the footprint identification technique (FIT) that we use and the old 'pugmark' technique. I'd say that every technique, FIT included, has strengths and weaknesses. FIT, for example, will not work in an area where footprints can't be found. The pugmark technique was very reliant on expert assessment and was prone to inaccuracies for that reason, but on the plus side it could be rolled out over a huge area and engaged the traditional ecological knowledge that is part of India's cultural heritage. The camera traps that replaced it have had their fair share of problems (difficulties arranging the traps for optimal sampling, cameras being stolen, cameras are expensive etc). Our belief is that using several different non-invasive techniques for any one survey yields the most reliable results. I hope this helps. 

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article

Get To Know FIT

WILDLABS Team

6 May 2020 12:00am

We're excited to welcome the WildTrack FIT group to our community! Today, we'd like to introduce you to the Footprint Identification Technique (FIT) and share how you can incorporate this tracking method into your field...

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discussion

Technology Showroom of Artificial Intelligence (AI) aided Elephant Early Warning Systems

Timothy Vedanayagam

6 March 2020 6:09pm

Hello, I’m in the process of setting up a Technology Showroom in Classic Village, Pannimadai, Coimbatore, South India,  highlighting the various types of Artificial...

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Alasdair Davies

19 March 2020 9:15am

Hi @Tim+Vedanayagam 

Thank you for posting this. I'd be happy to contribute to the thermal sensing work under way. Can you confirm - have you built a thermal AI model and trained / labelled data for a particular camera?

We have been training a model for low cost (Lepton 3.5) thermal cameras via a challenge with WWF / Wildlabs and have 30,000 labelled images as our training dataset of Asian elephants. We're focusing on Deeplabel and YOLO with a plan to port to Tensorflow and it will be open source, so applicable for others to use and adopt in their early warning systems that use thermal.

More info here - https://www.zsl.org/blogs/conservation/zsl-whipsnade-zoo-becomes-a-space-for-high-tech-wild-elephant-conservation

Kind regards,

Alasdair

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funding

Call for Nominations: Tusk Conservation Awards

Tusk

3 March 2020 12:00am

The 2020 Tusk Awards are now accepting nominations of outstanding individuals who have made a significant impact on conservation in Africa. These nominations offer the rare and exciting opportunity to honor your peers...

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article

Fence-Based Elephant Early Warning System

Appiko

25 February 2020 12:00am

Technology is rapidly changing the way communities monitor wildlife movement and prevent or mitigate human-wildlife conflict. This case study from Appiko delves into field testing of the open source sensor warning...

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discussion

AI powered mobile app to save snakes

Nilaksha Rathnayake

4 October 2019 7:10am

Hi, I'm currently working on a solution to save snakes from humans by helping humans to identify whether a particular snake is venomous or not. The idea came into my mind...

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Drue Freeman

9 October 2019 8:45pm

Hi Nilaksha,

Interesting idea.  My ideas are usually not that helpful, but I thought I would chime in with the following:

(1) Start small and local, this will help reduce the size of the training data set you will need.  So if you can work with a specific set of communities in a particular area that has a known set of snake species, both venemous and non-venemous, you only need images for those species and you won't need as many.

(2) iNaturalist has a pretty decent database (not thousands, but hundreds) of identified images.  I have no idea what the restrictions would be around getting access to the database, but this is a Citizen Science organization, so I don't THINK it should be too complicated, especially if your initial scope is limited.

(3) Venemous snakes need "love" too.  PLEASE make sure the app does not encourage the locals to kill the venemous snakes unless absolutely necessary.  While it is admirable to prevent the accidental killing of a non-venemous snake, you shoudl not be encouraging the purposeful killing of the venemous snakes, but should be encouraging people to stay clear if the snake is in the wild and get professional assistance if the snake somewhere that could be dangerous to humans or other animals.

(4) Look into organizations like the Rainforest Aliance, OpenAI, etc., which are non-profits doing work in or with AI, they might be able to help give you a leg up.

(5) If you start local, you could build into the app the contact information for the professionals to come in and deal with the dangerous snakes.

Hopefully some of this is useful.

Good luck,

Drue

Nilaksha Rathnayake

10 October 2019 1:57pm

Thanks Drue for your valuable input.

This is certainly not to encourage killing venomouse snakes. We can actually incorporate the featurs you pointed out to save venomouse snakes as well. Ideally we can let the user know how to deal with a venomouse snake and whome to contact if he/she needs professional assistance. 

Thanks again.

Nilaksha

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event

Tech In the Wild: Where technology meets conservation

Fauna & Flora

22 August 2019 12:00am

Join FFI on Wednesday 25 September for our AGM and a special presentation aiming to explore the range of tech projects we currently engage in, and a look to the future to see what technological advances could mean for...

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event

Conservation and Technology Conference

Bat Conservation Trust

29 July 2019 12:00am

The Bat Conservation Trust is hosting a one-day conference exploring conservation and technology for all wildlife (not just bats!) at the University of Nottingham this fall. The conference will bring together wildlife...

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discussion

Makerspaces to empower communities to develop/refine their own solutions to HEC

Aditya Gangadharan

27 May 2019 8:27am

Does anyone know of or have experience in setting up 'makerspaces' or similar innovation centres in forest areas, with the aim of empowering communities to develop/...

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Harold Tay

28 May 2019 11:37pm

Hi,

You should talk to @hikinghack ; also take a look here.

Thanks,

-harold

Stephanie O'Donnell

3 June 2019 3:31pm

Hi Aditya, 

If you haven't already found it, you should check out our last virtual meetup, it was all about tools and spaces for collaboration and we featured a number of members who have set up and are working on conservation focused makerspaces. You can watch in and connect to the members featured here. 

Steph

 

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