just wanted to bring our game to your attention, Serengeti: A Race For Life

https://serengeti.store/serengeti-hal001

The game is a joint venture between myself and my partner, who is responsible for the art direction.

If your article is still pending, we would be more than happy to provide a review copy for you, and make ourselves available for any questions you may have.

Thank you for providing a much-needed space to discuss games that aim to educate and raise awareness to the challenges of conservation.

Congratulations on the release of your app, @SueOrloff . Crowd-sourcing reporting of suspected illegal ivory in retail by members of the public, is a great concept (keeping verification and security considerations in mind). Given that there are many elephant ivory look-alikes on the market, including in online trade, it's important to ensure proper identification when users submit reports. TRAFFIC and WWF put together a visual ID guide many years ago, which can be downloaded here: http://www.traffic.org/publications/identification-guide-for-ivory-substitutes.html and the US Fish & Wildlife Service has an online guide to visual identification here: https://www.fws.gov/lab/ivory_natural.php. 

Hi Rosemary,

Great idea!

Just thinking outloud here, but is it wise to tell people where to find unsafe souvenirs?  Wouldn't this be helping people who want to find ivory, fur, medicinal animal products, etc. more easily find sources? You might want to create a "blacklist" without being overly specific as to the types of procucts they are selling, and give a "seal of approval" for souvenir stores that are not selling illegal wildlife products and use this as a "carrot" to attract consciencious customers to the better stores.

Regards,

Drue

Hi Liz - Steph encouraged me to have a play for our project in South Sudan. I was surprised the reference area allowed when setting up the app was fairly small but presume this is because it encourages local snapshots rather than a large scale overview. However I don't think there should be a problem with covering a larger reference area that can be zoomed into unless it makes the usability worse. For any sizeable PAs you'd have to create multiple 'areas' and this is quite tricky to do as the PAs didn't show up automatically on the reference map. Great innovative app though and I am happy to be a guinea pig. Rob

Hello John

This is a very generous offer, thank you.

Camera trapping as a tool for researching animal behaviour and ecology is rapidly spreading and growing, but with the exception of the specialist Pantheracams which only take full colour still shots, the cameras are designed for a recreational market, mainly of deer hunters in cold and temperate areas. Consequently, in research applications, the performance of the cameras is often disappointing, and hugely elaborate statistical modelling is used to overcome their deficiencies.

A research grade camera trap at an affordable price, that can do more than a Pantheracam, would be a great tool.

If you want to focus on one component then the passive infrared triggers need a complete re-work.

Peter Apps

I recomended cybertracker. Is easy and flexible app for android and works without cellphone coverage.

It might be worth looking at this NZ based participatory bird count - https://www.greatkererucount.nz/

I believe they based it on iNaturalist - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.inaturalist.android

Have you already tried the Merlin Bird ID App (http://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/)? The photo ID works pretty well. You just need to take a picture of the the whole bird. For offline mode, you can download a regional "Bird Pack", such as "US: Southeast".

Regards, Ed

Hi Fleur,

I see now that the Merlin App bird packs are limited to North America. You could certainly contact the Cornell University Lab of Ornitology (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/) who develop the app. They may be interested in helping with such a problem.

Another option may be iNaturalist (http://www.inaturalist.org/). They have an app for logging nature observations. It is not limited to bird, but includes plants, animals, etc. They are currently adding a deep learning system to help automatically identify species from photos (currently around 10,000 species can be identified). I believe they give a top 10 possibilities. They use GPS location data from the proto or phone to provide localized suggestions. There's a demo web page here: 

https://www.inaturalist.org/computer_vision_demo

According to their blog (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/computer_vision_demo), they have integrated the computer vision module with their iPhone app. I don't think they have added it to their Android app yet. I have Android, so I have not tried the computer vision component from my app.

They may also have limited species for your area, however, the great thing about iNaturalist is that anyone can upload observations. I believe for the computer vision to be effective, they want to have at least 20 verified observations of a species by 20 different people before they add it to their model. The app is from the California Academy of Science. You may want to contact them to see if you can accelerate the process.

Best of luck!

Ed

Thanks for sharing this, Drew! We have a number of SMART focused case studies and articles in our Resources area that might also be worth checking out if you're considering using SMART in your work: 

• The Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) - Alexa Montefiore gave a nice introduction to SMART in this first overview article 
• Video: Discover the SMART Approach - recorded in June 2016, this talk was presented by Barney Long (@Barney_Long ), Emma Stokes (@estokes ) , Jonathan Palmer (@jpalmer ) and Alexa Montefiore, this talk explains the origins of SMART, offers case studies of successful applications and outlines future development plans for the methodology. The session concludes with an interactive Q&A session, which offered the opportunity to delve deeper into the practicalities of implementing SMART. 
• Getting SMART in Cambodia - In this talk, Kate West (@katewest ), Manager of our Marine Conservation Group, shares her key lessons learnt from implementing SMART in a marine context and dives deep into the limitations and considerations that need to be taken into account when implementing the SMART approach. This is a valuable talk for any team considering deploying SMART in a marine context. 

Hi Kate try www.ushahidi.com based in Kenya.

I have no affiliation with them I have seen the work they do.

Hello Baker,

What kind of website you are trying to create? Like do you just want to share research data to those organizations or is it just to share reports (as in complete report based on the data but the actual data are not shared) or is it something else? I think Vizzuality is a good option since they have background working with big data, I am not really sure about other firms that offered data science in their development works since not many firms offer that type of development.

Ting Wai