Hi Krasi! Greetings from Brazil!



That's a cool journey you've started! Congratulations. And I felt like theSearchLife resonates with the work I'm involved round here. In a nutshell, I live at the heart of the largest remaining of Atlantic forest in the planet - one of the most biodiverse biomes that exist. The subregion where I live is named after and bathed by the "Rio Sagrado" (Sacred River), a magnificent water body with a very rich cultural significance to the region (it has served as a safe zone for fleeing slaves). Well, the river and the entire bioregion is currently under the threat of a truly devastating railroad project which, to say the least is planned to cut through over 100 water springs! 



In face of that the local community (myself included) has been mobilizing to raise awareness of the issue and hopefully stop this madness (fueled by strong international forces). One of the ways we've been fighting this is through the seeking of the recognition of the sacred river as an entity of legal rights, who can manifest itself in court, against such threats. And to illustrate what this would look like, I've been developing this AI (LLM) powered avatar for the river, which could maybe serve as its human-relatable voice. An existing prototype of such avatar is available here. It has been fine-tuned with over 20 scientific papers on the Sacred River watershed.



And right now myself and other are mobilizing to manifest the conditions/resources to develop a next version of the avatar, which would include remote sensing capacities so the avatar is directly connected to the river and can possibly write full scientific reports on its physical properties (i.e. water quality) and the surrounding biodiversity. In fact, myself and 3 other members of the WildLabs community have just applied to the WildLabs Grant program in order to accomplish that. Hopefully the results are positive.



Finally, it's worth mentioning that our mobilization around providing an expression medium for the river has been multimodal, including the creation of a shortfilm based on theatrical mobilizations we did during a fest dedicated to the river and its surrounding more-than-human communities. You can check that out here:



 

Let's chat if any of that catches your interest!

Cheers!

Maybe this is obvious, but maybe it's so obvious that you could easily forget to include this in your list of recommendations: encourage them to hang out here on WILDLABS!  I say that in all seriousness: if you get some great responses here and compile them into a list, it would be easy to forget the fact that you came to WILDLABS to get those responses.

I get questions like this frequently, and my recommended entry points are always (1) attend the WILDLABS Variety Hour series, (2) lurk on WILDLABS.net, and (3) if they express a specific interest in AI, lurk on the AI for Conservation Slack.

I usually also recommend that folks visit the Work on Climate Slack and - if they live in a major city - to attend one of the in-person Work on Climate events.  You'll see relatively little conservation talk there, but conservation tech is just a small subset of sustainability tech, and for a new person in the field, if they're interested in environmental sustainability, even if they're a bit more interested in conservation than in other aspects of sustainability, the sheer number of opportunities in non-conservation-related climate tech may help them get their hands dirty more quickly than in conservation specifically, especially if they're looking to make a full-time career transition.  But of course, I'd rather have everyone working on conservation!

Some good overview papers I'd recommend include: 

• Besson, M., Alison, J., Bjerge, K., Gorochowski, T. E., Høye, T. T., Jucker, T., ... & Clements, C. F. (2022). Towards the fully automated monitoring of ecological communities. Ecology Letters, 25(12), 2753-2775. 
• Speaker, T., O'Donnell, S., Wittemyer, G., Bruyere, B., Loucks, C., Dancer, A., ... & Solomon, J. (2022). A global community‐sourced assessment of the state of conservation technology. Conservation Biology, 36(3), e13871.
  • WILDLABS-led research! Led by @TaliaSpeaker and @StephODonnell 
• Lahoz-Monfort, J. J., & Magrath, M. J. (2021). A comprehensive overview of technologies for species and habitat monitoring and conservation. BioScience, 71(10), 1038-1062.
• Tuia, D., Kellenberger, B., Beery, S., Costelloe, B. R., Zuffi, S., Risse, B., ... & Berger-Wolf, T. (2022). Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation. Nature communications, 13(1), 792.
• Stowell, D. (2022). Computational bioacoustics with deep learning: a review and roadmap. PeerJ, 10, e13152.
  • I'm biased towards bioacoustics because that's what I focus on, but this regardless this is an excellent horizon scan of AI/ML for conservation and acoustics!
• Borowiec, M. L., Dikow, R. B., Frandsen, P. B., McKeeken, A., Valentini, G., & White, A. E. (2022). Deep learning as a tool for ecology and evolution. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 13(8), 1640-1660.

I'd also encourage you to follow the #tech4wildlife hashtags on social media! 

I'm also here for this. This is my first comment... I've been lurking for a while.

I have 20 years of professional knowledge in design, with the bulk of that being software design. I also have a keen interest in wildlife. I've never really combined the two; and I'm starting to feel like that is a waste. I have a lot to contribute. The loss of biodiversity is terrifying me. So I’m making a plan that in 2024 I’m going to combine both.

However, if I’m honest with you – I struggle with where to start. There are such vast amounts of information out there I find myself jumping all over the place. A lot of it is highly scientific, which is great – but I do not have a science background.

As suggested by the post title.. a “Wildlife Conservation for Dummies” would be exactly what I am looking for. Because in this case I’m happy to admit I am a complete dummy.