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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.

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Correspondence among multiple methods provides confidence when measuring marine protected area effects for species and assemblages

Stephanie O'Donnell

20 October 2023 12:28pm

When considering MPA groundfish monitoring methods: the more, the merrier! New paper out in Journal of Applied Ecology compared three MPA monitoring techniques commonly utilised to survey groundfish populations. They found that using multiple methods was the best approach.

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https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.14515
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Marine Flyways - Seabird Tracking Database

Stephanie O'Donnell

20 October 2023 12:23pm

To celebrate #WMBD, BirdLife is excited to share the newly identified Marine Flyways!! Seabird tracking data were shared by over 60 researchers from 48 long-distance migratory species and have revealed SIX MarineFlyways. They've created an awesome animation to go along with it!

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discussion

What Biologgers are you using?

Holly Cormack

30 August 2023 10:44am

Hello biologging community!My name is Holly Cormack and I’m the new Conservation Technology Intern in the WILDLABS team. We are researching what different...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

7 September 2023 10:57am

Interesting. interesting. I'm probably jumping the gun here but I'm curious - are you getting any trends on types of biologgers or specific manufacturers people are talking about? Or is everyone using different tags/manufacturers? 

Stephanie O'Donnell

7 September 2023 11:00am

Ah! It's great to find out about your tags - great video, thanks for sharing. We'd love to hear from some of your users about their experiences with your tags! Would you be able to share the poll with your user community? 

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Mapping seagrass with drones and AI

Ellie Warren

4 August 2023 2:00am

GeoNadir shared how drones and AI can help assess seagrass habitats at the Great Barrier Reef, as well as how satellite imagery can monitor seagrass on a wider scale.

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discussion

360 Camera for Marine Monitoring

Sol Milne

25 July 2023 8:54am

Hi all, I'm trying to set up a low-cost, 360 camera for underwater use. The main criteria are:1. It needs to run for 1 week, with 3* 2 hour intervals of recording per day,...

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Xavier Mouy

28 July 2023 7:43pm

Hi Sol,

For my research on fish, I had to put together a low-cost camera that could record video for several weeks. Here is the design I came up with

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468067220300195

At the time of the paper, I was able to record video for ~12 hours a day at 10 fps and for up to 14 days. With new SD cards now, it is pushed to 21 days. It costs about 600 USD if you build it yourself. If you don't want to make it yourself, there is a company selling it now, but it is much more expensive. The FOV is 110 degrees, so not the 360 that you need, but I think there are ways to make it work (e.g. with the servo motor). 

Happy to chat if you decide to go this route and/or want to brainstorm ideas.

Cheers,

Xavier 

Sol Milne

3 August 2023 2:32am

Hi Xavier, this is fantastic! Thanks for sharing, the time frame is really impressive and really in line with what we're looking for. I'll send you a message.

Cheers,

Sol

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discussion

Project Spotlight: Monitoring tropical freshwater fish in Kakadu National Park with drones, underwater cameras and AI

Stephanie O'Donnell

12 July 2023 3:40pm

This was such a fantastic presentation in our June Variety Hour show. Andrew and his team are exploring applications of a whole range of technologies, anda are looking to share...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

12 July 2023 3:58pm

During Andrew's talk, @dmorris put out a call in the chat that might be relevant to folks catching up on the video, so I'll drop it here too: 

Re: Andrew's fish work... part of the reason I got in touch with Andrew a few weeks ago is that I'm trying to keep track of public datasets and public models for marine video that have basically this gestalt (video where fish look fishy-ish). I think we're getting close to enough public data to train a general-purpose model that will work well across ecosystems. My running list of datasets is here:

https://lila.science/otherdatasets#images-marine-fish

Let me know if folks know of others!

There are also a grand total of two public models that I'm aware of that sort of fall into this category... one is Andrew's:

https://github.com/ajansenn/KakaduFishAI

The other is:

https://github.com/warplab/megafishdetector

If folks know of other publicly-available models, let me know about those too!

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discussion

Need for statisticians in conservation?

Lev Birman

6 July 2023 8:23pm

Hello, WildLabs community!I'm currently a Ph.D. student in statistical physics at Virginia Tech, but I am contemplating a shift to a pure and applied statistics Master's program...

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Carly Batist

12 July 2023 2:59pm

Hi Lev,

We always need more hands in conservation, from whichever field! Engineering, computer science, AI/ML, ecology, environmental science, communications, statisticians, etc. 

I would say that conservation tech is moving heavily towards deep learning for data processing/analysis just because of the sheer amount of data being generated now, so it's always helpful if you have experience in that. But we still need ecological modeling (species distribution models, occupancy models, accumulation curves, etc.) to translate processed data into actionable conservation insights! So experience here too is a plus. 

If you'd like to get a better idea of the diversity of programs, people, and orgs in conservation tech as you navigate your journey, the Conservation Tech Directory may also be a helpful resource for you.

All the best,

Carly   

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