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Group

Protected Area Management Tools / Feed

Protected area management systems empower essential frontline conservationists to monitor wildlife and ecosystems in real-time. With tools like SMART, EarthRanger, and Esri's Conservation Land Management toolkit, users can collect, integrate, and display data from across landscapes to ensure that key information from the field gets to decision-makers in time to make a difference. This group is the place for new and experienced users of these tools alike to ask questions, share experiences, and work together to improve their effectiveness in critical conservation landscapes around the world. 

discussion

Understanding the Application of SMART in Measuring Law Enforcement Performance in Protected Areas.

Sarah Mshanga

22 July 2024 2:25pm

Hi everyonePlease help me to understand the concept of using SMART tool in protected area management. While I know that, SMART as a comprehensive approach for protected area...

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Sarah Mshanga

24 July 2024 6:30pm

Thank you very much Carly Batist for the suggestion! I haven't reached out to the SMART folks yet, but I will. Getting contacts and case studies from them sounds very helpful to me.

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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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article

NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!

Consolata Gathoni Gitau

17 June 2024 11:33am

One of the most thrilling moments for any researcher is seeing their hard work published for the world to see. As part of the Women in Conservation Technology (WiCT) Kenya Cohort One, we not only learnt about the use of...

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Esther Githinji

17 June 2024 12:57pm

Congratulations Consolata!!! So exciting to read this :)
Sarah Maagi

17 June 2024 7:40pm

Many congratulation Consolata for such a milestone.
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discussion

Fauna & Flora: Bridging geospatial data and people together for enhanced conservation management

Stephanie O'Donnell

17 April 2024 11:31am

Hi folks!@Chelsea_Smith from Fauna & Flora joined last month's variety hour to share more about Fauna & Flora's work with geospatial data. I invited her along as I thought...

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Aaron Kennedy

13 June 2024 8:51pm

This is amazing! Thank you for sharing. I'm speaking on this topic at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in October. If you have any other resources on this topic, let me know! Closing the loop for "Science to Action" is a huge part of the work we do so I'm always looking to learn. 

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discussion

Conservation Technology for Human-Wildlife Conflict in Non-Protected Areas: Advice on Generating Evidence

Amit Kaushik

22 January 2024 11:36pm

Hello,I am interested in human-dominated landscapes around protected areas. In my case study, the local community does not get compensation because they are unable to provide...

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Chavoux Luyt

4 February 2024 8:16am

Hi Amit,

The most important thing is that the livestock owners contact you as soon as possible after finding the carcass. We commonly do two things if they contact us on the same day or just after the livestock was killed:

  1. Use CyberTracker (or similar software) on an Android smart phone to record all tracks, bite marks, feeding pattern and any other relevant signs of the reason for the loss with pictures and GPS coordinates. [BTW, Compensation is a big issue -- What do you do if the livestock was stolen? What do you do if a domestic animal killed the livestock? What if it died from disease or natural causes and was scavenged upon by carnivores afterwards?]
  2. In the case of most cats, they would hide the prey (or just mark it by covering it with grass or branches and urinating in the area). In this case you can put up a camera trap on the carcass to capture the animal when it returns to its kill (Reconyx is good if you can afford it - we use mostly Cuddeback with white flash). This will normally only work if the carcass is fresh (so other predators would not be able to smell it and not know where it is yet), so the camera only has to be up for 3-5 days max.

This is not really high-tech, but can be very useful to not only establish which predator was responsible (or if a predator was responsible), but also to record all the evidence for that.

Aaron Kennedy

13 June 2024 8:58pm

Hey Amit, 

This is a great question; from our work, we've seen people do a couple of things. We've even seen people using Ring doorbell footage in urban areas as evidence. 

The best thing we've seen is matching the community needs with existing infrastructure: 

  • Are there existing cameras you can leverage, like the doorbell cameras? 
  • Can public participation monitoring service this, i.e. public submitted photos and videos? 

It also totally depends on the wildlife species you're working with, the interaction, damages, etc. If you've found any good solutions, let me know. I'd love to share that information with our clients here who have constant bear problems. 

 

Kim Hendrikse

14 June 2024 9:09am

In that case, you might want to keep an eye on the project from @Lars_Holst_Hansen 



 

Read "I have been working hard on this camera based polar bear alarm with Kim Hendrikse and other collaborators including Zoologisk Have in Copenhagen - where the system is now beeing tested. | Lars Holst Hansen | 17 comments" on

I have been working hard on this camera based polar bear alarm with Kim Hendrikse and other collaborators including Zoologisk Have in Copenhagen - where the system is now beeing tested. | Lars Holst Hansen | 17 comments

I have been working hard on this camera based polar bear alarm with Kim Hendrikse and other collaborators including Zoologisk Have in Copenhagen - where the system is now beeing tested. I hope to field test it at Zackenberg Research Station next year. | 17 comments on LinkedIn

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discussion

Are you attending SMART Global Congress 2024?

Adrien Pajot

22 February 2024 11:13am

Hi everybody!Are you attending SMART Global Congress 2024 in early March?I will be in Namibia for the entire duration of the congress, representing WILDLABS, and would be very...

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Paloma

8 June 2024 7:43am

Hey @antoineede ,

I am not sure about that yet video recordings are available or not but you can visit this: SMART Global Congress 2024 | BluePrism

May be here you will get some of the recorded videos to watch.

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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

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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article

Introducing The Inventory!

Jake Burton

1 May 2024 12:46pm

The Inventory is your one-stop shop for conservation technology tools, organisations, and R&D projects. Start contributing to it now!

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Jake Burton

22 July 2024 10:55am

Hi @hjayanto ! I've given your account the ability to edit without earning the badge just to save time while we figure out why you aren't getting your Sprout Badge, so you should...
Herdhanu Jayanto

23 July 2024 2:05pm

Thank you @JakeBurton . Looks like I wasn't in community base group, instead misunderstood it was the same as thematic group. I have added our organization. Appreciate your help!
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article

The Variety Hour: 2024 Lineup

Alex Rood

22 March 2024 4:30pm

You’re invited to the WILDLABS Variety Hour, a monthly event that connects you to conservation tech's most exciting projects, research, and ideas. We can't wait to bring you a whole new season of speakers and...

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discussion

A Sensor-Based Approach to Studying Animal Behavior in Light Pollution Research

Sebastián Andrés Bustos Vásquez

24 February 2024 9:33pm

Greetings, I'm Sebastian!I am share with you a project that I will need help on some aspects: "Development of a system for recording animal activity and behavior based on sensors...

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Sebastián Andrés Bustos Vásquez

27 February 2024 12:38pm

Thanks for helping me!

For now, I'll be testing with mains power (220V). The final prototype needs to be functional using solar panel. 

The main system will be a Raspberry Pi, as the Brain of this project, receiving and storage all the measurements from the other devices, controlling the system. The measurement devices will be a microcontroller (still searching for which one to use) with differents sensor, such Lux sensor like TSL2561 or 2591, AudioMoth to record animals sounds, temperature and some other measurements.

For synchronization, must be effective, because the measurements must be or have the same time, so the storage data from differents devices can be grouped by it's timestamp and have full control for animals and fauna. So, probably it will be a lot of data per day.

 

The distance between each devices I haven't study yet, consider 20 meters within each device.

Kim Hendrikse

27 February 2024 3:11pm

Unless you are planning on making a mesh network between nodes then the total distance spanning the location of all the nodes is important to know, not just the intra node distance.

If you have a Raspberry Pi as a main master node then you could install my sbts-aru project as a base project and you would get a sub-microsecond master time base by default as well as the GPS synchronizes the main system time with typically less than 0.1 microsecond, and SD card corruption resilience due to the in-memory overlayFS architecture.

If the total distance was 20m across all nodes, then the approach above could also combined the audio gathering capability as the sbts-aru project does audio logging as it would be within 20m of an audiomoth anyway, then you also have time-synchonized audio. If the distance is spanning 100m for example and it's just the intranode distance that is 20m then everything is somewhat different with respect to synchronization.

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event

SMART Global Congress 2024

Adrien Pajot

22 February 2024 11:00am

Join WILDLABS at the first SMART World Congress, a global gathering of conservation professionals using SMART, the world's most widely used protected area management solution. 

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