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WILDLABS logoWildlabs.net : The conservation technology network

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Marine Conservation / Feed

Bringing together many of our community's tech types like bioacoustics, biologging, drones, remote sensing, machine learning, and more, the Marine Conservation group is a meeting point to begin innovative collaborations and answer difficult questions.

discussion

WILDLABS AWARDS 2024 - FinDrop: Accessible Acoustic Monitoring for Mesophotic Marine Environments

Matthew Duggan

5 April 2024 10:22pm

Hello everyone! I am honored to introduce our interdisciplinary team, which has experienced exponential growth over the past year, comprising individuals such as @...

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Matthew Duggan

10 August 2024 6:47am

This opportunity is what got me started in deep reef fishes! The grant is for predoctoral students and is due September 30, 2024!! Happy to help or collaborate with anyone interested :)



Eligibility: STRI seeks a diversity of applicants and encourages students from institutions throughout the neotropics to apply. Awards are based upon merit, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship, age or condition of handicap of the applicant.

Xavier Mouy

23 August 2024 1:58pm

Really great project @MattyD797 and team. Looking forward to seeing your progress. What is the target price of the FinDrop?

Matthew Duggan

27 August 2024 5:40am

Hey Xavier! 

Thank you for your interest and question!! 

The overarching goal of the FinDrop v1 for the WildLabs award is to characterize an instrument and make it as, if not more, sensitive than a ST600 Ocean acoustic instrument at a fraction of the price. While I can’t at this stage provide an accurate estimate of final price, it will be a substantial price decrease over an ST600 while providing the same duration and depth expectations. That decrease in price does exponentially decrease with the number we can expect to sell/interest and may increase with additional features the beta testers suggest. 

This award only gets us to the actual building of the prototype v1 by December, but we are already scheduled to have a completed product v2 built by March/April through additional collaborations that will be manufactured and sold through Sexton Underwater Housing Co. 

Please let me know if you have any other questions!  

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event

Catch up with The Variety Hour: August 2024

Alex Rood

20 August 2024 12:58pm

This month, we hear about acoustic imaging sonar that reveals northern elephant seal behaviour, GPS tags that monitor the success of rehabilitated and reintroduced Andean condors, infrared cameras that detect thermal...

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discussion

Shark BRUV annotated data needed! ML for automatic BRUV postprocessing

Filippo

4 December 2023 11:55am

Dear community,For my MEng thesis at Imperial College London, I am building deep learning model that automatically postprocesses shark BRUVs by detecting species, behaviours and...

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Cassandre Vandamme

20 August 2024 3:37am

Hi Filipo,

It has been a while since you created this post. I just joined the community, looking for AI tools that would speed up BRUV data processing. I am currently working as a marine scientist for an NGO based in the Philippines, Indonesia and Zanzibar. Our current project with BRUV aims to assess sharks presence in our MPAs. If you're still looking for scientists, we might be interested in collaborating. 

If so, you can reach out to me here: cassandrev@bluealliance.earth. Otherwise, I wish you the best in your career and shark research!

Best,

Cassandre

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discussion

Drones for IUU (illegal fishing activities & vessel monitoring)

Adam Roberts

20 March 2023 6:00am

Hi, new to Wildlabs and happy to have found itI am currently working on drone design (fixed wing), for the purpose of monitoring illegal fishing vessels. This will be done via...

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Adam Roberts

11 April 2023 5:48am

Hi Frank! Thanks so much for your reply. Yes I have been looking into the same sort of workflow as with camera traps etc and seem to be getting somewhere (although am yet to have my own data set with which to check!). 

Yes, with the transponder issue, actually NONE of the boats here have them! There has been a push to get boats to install them further down the coast, but it was marred by the usual corruption and forceless enforcement. So everything will be visual, rather than working on any signal given out by the boats themselves. I am looking into ai programs that can analyse footage and as you say, it can be done with species so I see no reason it cannot be done with vessels given the parameters to look for

 

Frank van der Most

14 April 2023 12:57am

Seeing the pictures that @lmccaskill uploaded got my brain storming, so to say. Are you working with similar small boats? I was assuming bigger fishing ships that are registered somewhere. If the boats are not registered and there are no existing photos of them, and you want to identify the individual boats, you'll need to build your own catalogue to train an AI.

However / in addition, if the boats have written text on them with a name or a code or number, like in the pictures, then it should be ridiculously easy to identify boats. No AI needed. I discovered recently that my laptop has started showing find results based on text in photos. If different boats are of the same model, again like in the pictures, then there is nothing else left than what is written on them ... well, perhaps the color scheme.

... or perhaps face recognition if the image quality allows it. But then you'll be at square 1 again with training an AI.

Steffen Döring

9 August 2024 12:48pm

Hi all,

maybe it helps 😉 My free manual 'Drones in Biomonitoring' - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8077113 can help 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

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discussion

Volunteering in Bioacoustics

Cesar Rouer

10 July 2024 9:46am

Hi everyone! I have just joined Wildlabs and I am deeply passionate about bioacoustics and biodiversity conservation. I have been following various impactful work in the field...

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discussion

Move BON Development: Follow up discussion

Lacey Hughey

19 June 2024 12:02pm

Hey Biologging Community! We just launched a new initiative to mobilize animal tracking data in support of national and global scale conservation goals (learn more here!). If you...

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Akiba

12 July 2024 5:38am

Hi Talia! 

I feel like the topic is so broad that it might help to put some constraints around things, see what works, and then broaden those out. I have a lot of ideas regarding the data monitoring and collection side based on the other sensor and observation networks we've set up in the past. 

There may also be some potential scope to incorporate things like data collection and integrated monitoring to the Build Your Own Datalogger series where the system is updated to feed data into the observation network. 

It'd probably take a bit of discussion and coordination. Let me know if interested. I'm fine to jump on a call or discuss via email too.

CathyNj

22 July 2024 9:24pm

@cmwainaina please take a look

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Link

One simple way ships can protect endangered whales and tackle climate change

Vanesa Reyes

8 July 2024 7:19pm

Discover the challenges marine animals face in busy shipping lanes—from the constant noise disrupting their habitats to the threat of ship collisions. Slowing down ships could offer a simple yet effective solution to protect these vulnerable species.

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discussion

VIHAR-2024 deadline extension, June 30th (Interspeech satellite event) 

Marius Miron

5 June 2024 10:30am

Dear Wildlabs community,The submission deadline for VIHAR-2024 has been extended to June 30th, 2024. VIHAR-2024 (https://vihar-2024.vihar.org) is the fourth international...

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Alex Rood

5 June 2024 3:05pm

Thanks for sharing this @nkundiushuti ! I think this post would be better suited as an event, that way it will show up on the WILDLABS event calendar page. Let me know if you have any questions on how to make an event post! You just click the +Post button in the top right corner, then click "event."

Marius Miron

7 June 2024 8:29am

hi Alex!! I already posted the event, I just wanted to posted an update: the deadline was extended. 

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article

New WILDLABS Funding & Finance group

Frank van der Most

5 June 2024 3:24pm

WildLabs will soon launch a 'Funding and Finance' group. What would be your wish list for such a group? Would you be interested in co-managing or otherwise helping out?

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Alex Rood

5 June 2024 4:14pm

This is great, Frank! @StephODonnell, maybe we can try to bring someone from #Superorganism (@tomquigley ?) or another venture company (#XPRIZE) into the fold!
Paul Edonga

6 June 2024 1:38am

I find the group to be dope, fundraising in the realm of conservation has been tough especially for emerging conservation leaders. There are no centralized grants tracking common...
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discussion

Fully-retrievable Satellite Tags for Seals?

Courtney Shuert

10 April 2024 4:49pm

Hello WILDLABS biologgers! I am wondering if anyone knows of any satellite telemetry devices for use in the marine realm (specifically for pinnipeds - seals/sea lions) that...

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Stuart Halewood

3 May 2024 8:08pm

Hi Courtney,

I haven't read through all the Wildlife computer options but I have heard of people using Zinc Anode disks as a type of slowly degrading attachment point for tags. We use these also as a backup for other types of releases on Oceanographic moorings etc. It would take some testing to see how the zinc could be attached or be small enough to degrade completely away from the pinniped but still be strong enough to hold a tag.....just some thoughts!

Cheers,

Stuart

Thomas Gray

7 May 2024 4:04pm

Honestly, no (at least not for wildlife applications).

I suspect for the manufacturing community it's a balancing act, and I am not confident that the manufacturing community has invested a lot of resources or effort to integrate sustainability in their tag designs specifically related to the materials. Reasons that come to mind are material durability and cost (both materials costs and cost to for R&D). 

With that said, I think Stuart (below) makes a good suggestion...

Virginie DELEPOULLE

14 May 2024 11:26am

We are ready to make efforts on materials, but today there are few solutions available. Today, our partners' R&D efforts are focused on renewable energies and the energy source's capacity. In the absence others solutions, and to take action, we have chosen to develop solutions to recover these tags, some of which are reusable (thanks to Gonio RXG-234 @ThomasGray). To date, thousands of tags have been recovered and some reused. This is the "upcycling" of science! It's a small step, but a great leap forward!

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