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Latin America Community / Feed

This group aims to establish a regional hub in Latin America that provides a space for knowledge sharing and network-building among the growing number of people working in conservation technology in the region.  Este grupo tiene como objetivo establecer un centro regional en América Latina que proporcione un espacio para el intercambio de conocimientos y la creación de redes entre el creciente número de personas que trabajan en tecnología para la conservación en la región.

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Latin America Community Announcement: Introducing a New Group and Its Leaders // Anuncio de la Comunidad Latinoamericana: Presentación de un Nuevo Grupo y sus Líderes // Apresentamos o grupo da Comunidade Latinoamericana

Juan Sebastián Ulloa and 1 more

27 September 2024 6:16pm

We are thrilled to start a brand new group, the Latin America Community, and introduce the new Group Leaders for the 2024-2025 term: Vanesa Reyes and Juan Sebastián Ulloa Chacón. // Estamos muy contentos de iniciar un...

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Frank van der Most

15 October 2024 1:01am

Did you add the Portuguese later on, or did I overlook it?
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discussion

Mothbox Updates v4.12

Andrew Quitmeyer

11 September 2024 5:27pm

We have been super busy deploying another dozen mothboxes around panama while also adding cool new features! So i have a backlog of updates to post about! So here's a bunch...

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Kim Hendrikse

15 September 2024 6:51am

Super effort. Nice reporting!

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discussion

Testing, Deployment, Solar, Conferences - Mothbox update v3.21

Andrew Quitmeyer

24 May 2024 8:46pm

The last two months have been bustling with fun mothbox developments!Deployment in AzueroOur first full deployment went wonderfully! Andy and Kitty trained @Hubertszcz  's...

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Julian Richardson

3 June 2024 10:35am

Thank you for the detailed post. This is amazing! 

 

Have you experimented with ways of reducing power consumption? How much of the power is used by the LEDs vs the RPi? You could try having the LEDs on for less time, or less bright. 

 

Julian

Andrew Quitmeyer

4 June 2024 7:54pm

The LEDs use most of the energy, the UV leds are about 12-15 watts. the pi hangs out around 3 watts. and the white flashing LEDs use about 10 watts each, but we reduced their time to like .8 seconds for a flash photo, so they aren't as much of a big deal.

 

you basically need a lot of power to make a really bright thing to attract the bugs, but we are testing out some more efficient UV leds

Julian Richardson

5 June 2024 10:23pm

I was thinking that you might be able to reduce the amount of time the lights were on by blinking them, but this paper seems to show that flickering mostly reduces the number of specimens attracted, though it affects some orders more than others, and, rarely, it increases the number attracted. On the other hand, the numbers of  insects captures only seemed to go down by around 50% even with quite extreme flickering (10% duty cycle I.e. light only on 10% of the time) and if that had a big effect on how long the battery lasted it might be worth it, as you could run more capturing sessions between charges.

 

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discussion

WILDLABS AWARDS 2024 - Underwater Passive Acoustic Monitoring (UPAM) for threatened Andean water frogs

Mauricio Akmentins

30 March 2024 3:54pm

In our project awarded with the "2024 WILDLABS Awards", we will develop the first Underwater Passive Acoustic Monitoring (UPAM) program to assess the conservation status and for...

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Liz Ferguson

7 April 2024 6:09pm

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

Herdhanu Jayanto

1 May 2024 5:17pm

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

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discussion

WILDLABS AWARDS 2024 – MothBox

Hubert Szczygiel

15 April 2024 5:06am

 We are incredibly thankful to WILDLABS and Arm for selecting the MothBox for the 2024 WILDLABS Awards.  The MothBox is an automated light trap that attracts and...

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Andrew Quitmeyer

19 April 2024 12:00pm

Yeah we got it about as bare bones as possible for this level of photo resolution and duration in the field. The main costs right now are:

 

Pi- $80

Pijuice -$75

Battery - $85

64mp Camera - $60

which lands us at $300 already. But we might be able to eliminate that pijuice and have fewer moving parts, and cut 1/4 of our costs! Compared to something like just a single logitech brio camera that sells for $200 and only gets us like 16mp, we are able to make this thing as cheap as we could figure out! :)

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discussion

Mothbox + Mothbeam Update: 4

Andrew Quitmeyer

31 January 2024 7:09pm

Prepping for DeploymentIt's been mega busy at dinalab here in panama as me, Kitty, and @Hubertszcz prepped for his big field deployment in western panama.We finalized our designs...

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Andrew Quitmeyer

15 February 2024 4:49pm

We did some more testing with the Mothbeam in the forest. It's the height of dry season right now, so not many moths came out, but the mothbeam shined super bright and attracted a whole bunch of really tiny things that swarmed a lot

 

 

and some nocturnal bees

 

you could also see the mothbeam's aura from  far away in the forest! so that was impressive!

I also tested out attaching a 12V USB booster cable to the Mothbeam, and it works 

 

nice! So you can attach regular USB 5V battery packs to the mothbeam as well!

 

 

 

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careers

Program Officer - Bioacoustics, WILDLABS

Henry Rees

22 January 2024 9:37pm

Come join our team! We're looking for a Program Officer to join the WILDLABS Community, hosted by WCS in Argentina. This role will support our research program, with the chosen candidate leading our horizon scanning...

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discussion

Update 3: Cheap Automated Mothbox

Andrew Quitmeyer

31 December 2023 9:37pm

Wanted to share a final set of updates on the work we have been cranking on here in Gamboa, Panama making this inexpensive portable night insect surveyor! There's been a lot of...

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Travis Bayer

1 January 2024 9:18pm

This looks amazing! I'm currently work with hastatus bats up in Bocas, it would be really interesting to utilize some of these near foraging sites. Be sure to post again when you post the final documentation on github!

 

Also, Gamboa......dang I miss that little slice of heaven...

 

Super cool work Andrew!

 

Best,

Travis

Michael Bunsen

10 January 2024 11:33pm

Great work! I very much look forward to trying out the MothBeam light. That's going to be a huge help in making moth monitoring more accessible.

And well done digging into the picamera2 library to reduce the amount of time the light needs to be on while taking a photo. That is a super annoying issue!

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discussion

Update 2: Cheap Automated Mothbox

Andrew Quitmeyer

23 October 2023 8:32pm

Here's an update of the work we are doing building the cheap open source mothbox for @Hubertszcz External design In a lot of wilderness tool development...

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Maximilian Sittinger

24 October 2023 9:05am

Hi Andrew,

thanks for sharing your development process so openly, that's really cool and boosts creative thinking also for the readers! :)

Regarding a solution for Raspberry Pi power management: we are using the PiJuice Zero pHAT in combination with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W in our insect camera trap. There are also other versions available, e.g. for RPi 4 (more info: PiJuice GitHub). From my experience the PiJuice works mostly great and is super easy to install and set up. Downsides are the price and the lack of further software updates/development. It would be really interesting if you could compare one of their HATs to the products from Waveshare. Another possible solution would be a product from UUGear. I have the Witty Pi 4 L3V7 lying around, but couldn't really test and compare it to the PiJuice HAT yet.

Is there a reason why you are using the Raspberry Pi 4? From what I understand about your use case, the RPi Zero 2 W or even RPi Zero should give enough computing power and require a lot less power. Also they are smaller and would be easier to integrate in your box (and generate less heat).

I'm excited for the next updates to see in which direction you will be moving forward with your Mothbox!

Best,

Max

Lars Holst Hansen

27 October 2023 6:44am

Thanks a lot for this detailed update on your project! It looks great!

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discussion

Cheap Automated Mothbox

Andrew Quitmeyer

31 August 2023 10:19pm

Hi everyone! @Hubertszcz has a biodiversity monitoring project in Panama, and we have been working on quick and dirty, ultra low cost high quality insect monitoring. We built a...

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Ryan Ruttan

25 October 2023 5:04pm

I'm looking into writing a sketch for the esp32-cam that can detect pixel changes and take a photo, wish me luck.

Ryan Ruttan

25 October 2023 5:11pm

One question, does it even need motion detection? What about taking a photo every 5 seconds and sorting the photos afterwards?

Andrew Quitmeyer

25 October 2023 6:23pm

It depends on which scientists you talk to. I am an favor of just doing a timelapse and doing a post-processing sort afterwards. There's not much reason i can see for such motion fidelity. For the box i am making we are doing exactly that, though maybe a photo every minute or so

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discussion

Indigenous groups working with camera traps in Latin America

Talia Speaker

19 April 2023 10:53pm

Does anybody work with or know of Indigenous groups in Latin America who are proficient with camera trapping and using cam trap data for conservation/management action? A...

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Amanda L Gonzales

21 April 2023 1:27pm

Hello,

Happy to put you in contact with some of my grantees working in Mexico who have extensive experience in capacity building for indigenous communities focused in species monitoring, including: Eco-Creando Soluciones, AC, Bosque Antiguo, AC, Bioconciencia, AC. Let me know.

Best,

Amanda

Eric Greenlee

21 April 2023 2:23pm

I've heard that Alianza Ceibo and Amazon Frontlines use camera traps in the Amazonian regions of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru to monitor poaching and land encroachment. You can reach out to them directly or I can put you in touch with one of their program managers if you'd like (I only have her # and don't want to post her personal info directly on here though).

Talia Speaker

21 April 2023 8:22pm

Great, thank you both! I'll follow up for introductions/ contact info

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discussion

Mangrove soundscape

Camilo Sierra F.

27 August 2022 4:57pm

Hello everyone, I am currently working on the restoration of mangroves in an area of Colombia. I want to do an acoustic monitoring inside the mangrove. I want to record...

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Carly Batist

29 August 2022 2:47pm

You might check out the devices listed in the Conservation Tech Directory - you can search for 'acoustic recorder' or 'ARU' or something like that.

The most common off-the-shelf models (other than Frontier Labs' BARLTs mentioned above😊) are Open Acoustic Devices Audiomoths & Hydromoths (which may be particularly useful for you since they come in completely watertight cases that can be stuck underwater for deployments), Wildlife Acoustics' SongMeter series, and Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Swift units.  

 

David Savage

30 August 2022 10:10pm

Camilo--

Are you interested only in airborne sounds or do you want to deploy hydrophones? That decision would inform a lot of other decisions about your purchase of equipment, as would having a clearer picture of your budget.

Liz Ferguson

23 September 2022 5:39pm

Hi there Camilo, 

What an interesting project! If you are looking for a lower cost, but effective tools for acoustic monitoring you might want to look into two options: 

SoundTraps - are very commonly used and perform quite well: 

SonarPoints - these are also a great instrument option: 

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