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Data management and processing tools / Feed

Conservation tech work doesn't stop after data is collected in the field. Equally as important to success is navigating data management and processing tools. For the many community members who deal with enormous datasets, this group will be an invaluable resource to trade advice, discuss workflows and tools, and share what works for you.

discussion

Camera Trap Data Normalization Help

Hi all! I am working on a project studying pinniped habitat use in the Eastern US. We set up camera traps across the haul-out areas, set to take 4 images per hour. If a seal...

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Hi @mguins 

This might be a good case for occupancy models. I am not overly familiar with the modelling procedures, but there are some good summaries out there if this is something you haven't already considered, starting with the famous MacKenzie et al. (2002) paper: 

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discussion

Using Average speed trapping to mitigate Wildlife Vehicle Collisions

Help needed to manage average speed trapping data with a view to  mitigating Wildlife Vehicle CollisionsWith a view to mitigating WildlifeVehicle collisions...

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We are at a PROOF OF CONCEPT with raspberry pi and python and are hoping this can be taken forward.  See link below.

Can you elaborate as to the ethical concerns with using license plate information?  License plate information doesn't need to be stored for long durations with Gregory's proposed system - only for as long as it takes the vehicle to reach the second camera.

I think it's best to look at it as analogous to the GDPR. One of the main reasons for the existence of GDPR is to protect individuals' fundamental rights and freedoms, particularly their right to protection of their personal data. Capturing personal, identifying information online without consent would be a violation of GDPR. I think the right to protect personal data extends to the physical world as well, which is where capturing identifying information like license plates without consent would fall. 

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careers

Field Surveyor

We are a team of ecologists and technologists who believe good business must be good for nature. We’re building an economy that puts nature and business in balance by incentivising the restoration of nature at scale.  

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discussion

Camera Trap Data Management Survey

The Wildlife Insights team is running a survey to learn more about camera trap data management practices, and in particular to understand potential barriers to data sharing...

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careers

Data Engineer (Remote)

We are a team of ecologists and technologists who believe good business must be good for nature. We’re building an economy that puts nature and business in balance by incentivising the restoration of nature at scale.

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event

EarthRanger User Conference

Back for its 8th year, don't miss this year's premier global annual event where conservation practitioners from around the world convene to discuss important challenges and solutions

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Link

Feathered forecast: Tech tools comb weather data for bird migrations

Since its launch in 1999, the BirdCast project has used weather radar data to track and forecast bird migrations across the U.S. In recent years, technology such as cloud computing and machine learning have helped make the work of researchers in the project easier and more automated. The BirdCast project is now working on integrating radar data with human observations and bioacoustics to help identify the bird species traversing the skies.

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Anti-poaching tech vulnerable to cyber attacks, study finds | ITWeb

While tech deployment has often been hailed for playing a critical role in the fight against poaching, these technologies bring with them the risk of cyber attacks. This is based on a study conducted by Orange Cyberdefense Academy’s Christelle Steyn, as part of her thesis titled: “Towards a Critical Review of Cybersecurity Risks in Anti-Poaching Systems in South Africa”.

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careers

Data Scientist (Geospatial), Global Fishing Watch

Global Fishing Watch
Global Fishing Watch are looking for a data scientist to join the Research and Innovation team. Help us tackle geospatial data fusion problems to produce the most complete picture of human activity at sea.

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discussion

Accessible acoustic analysis tech for blind scientist - ideas?

Hi all - I'm mentoring a student who is blind on a bioacoustics project to classify killer whale calls. Anyone out there have any experience with or ideas about making...

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Hey Kate I don't have any explicit ideas at the moment but will think on it - such a cool concept! I wonder if there's some form of tactile spectrogram that you could develop, or a way that you could have them try to draw a representation (so assign some shape) of what they are hearing as a means of classification a call and then clustering those shapes? There's a way of creating an image using foam and paper I believe so they could have a tactile record of those shapes. Guess it depends what you want to the quantitative results to be. Super cool that you are looking for greater accessibility in acoustics!!!

Hi Kate, 

We've developed a screen-reader workflow for a classification problem on our "Ocean Voices" Zooniverse project, which simply asks folks to label sounds based on what they hear and omits the spectrogram altogether. There are lots of screen-reader users who are active in the Zooniverse Talk forums, so they may have valuable input for you as well. 

Once a person has labeled data, I wonder if they could run automated detectors over the data in Pamguard, calculate features (using something like the R package PAMpal), and then use the BrailleR package to explore the statistics in R. This article has a pretty interesting summary about statistical software for visually impaired folks - might not be news to your student, but I thought it was pretty cool. 

I'm very curious what our friends who are visually impaired might notice in the acoustic data. Best of luck to you and your student! 

Cheers, 

Anne 

 

Hi Kate- ARISTA Lab (Advanced Research in Inclusion & STEAM Accessibility) is actively working on this through their eclispse soundscape project. I recommend reaching out to MaryKay to get the latest on their project.  

Megan

 

 

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discussion

Exploring storage options for mass data collection

Hi all. I'm currently exploring options for data storage en masse. With our project we will be collecting 24hr hydrophone data, drone video 6hr per day, photography &...

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Hi Adam!

I mostly live within the ecoacoustics space so I'll just speak on the hydrophone part of your request; Arbimon is a free web/cloud-based platform with unlimited storage for audio files. We've got an uploader app as well for mass-uploading lots of files. There's also a bunch of spectrogram visualization/annotation tools and analysis workflows available. It's AWS running under the hood.

I have some experience working directly with AWS & Microsoft Azure, and I've found personally that AWS was more user-friendly and intuitive for the (fairly simplistic) kinds of tasks I've done.  

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discussion

Moveapps: EMAC23 Coding Challenge

Motivated by having been named a Conservation Tech Award grantee in 2022, we are launching...

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Super initiative! I hope you get a lot of entries to this coding challenge!

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Link

The WILDLABS Variety Hour: February 2023 - YouTube

Last week's Variety Hour is now up on youtube. It was a great session - we covered Moveapps, an awesome community project building marine biologgers, chatgpt and google earth engine vs microsoft's planetary computer. Thanks everyone who came along!

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discussion

Underwater Fish Datasets from the Mediterranean

Hi Wildlabs,I am Sebastian the project manager for FishID. We are currently in the last stretch of...

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Not sure if audio data would be of any use to you, but if so FishSounds has some - I just tried their search function and there is a location tag for 'Mediterranean & Black Sea'. 

You might try reaching out to the folks at Name that Fish, Innovasea, or perhaps an entity on the Fisheries Tech list would have Mediterranean stuff? 

Hi,

If this is still relevant, you can try reaching out to the Belmaker lab, they do BRUV surveys in the eastern Mediterranean and have hours of video, some of it I believe is annotated. Particularly, Shahar might be helpful, he's the PhD student running point on the project.

We have made available our underwater videos on YouTube as a playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnhVZKKy8WkZKriCIV6r7upWhHNVrU_7L 

It's about 1.113 short video clips with annotation and each is linked to the corresponding www.iNaturalist.org observations. The iNaturalist.org observations are research quality and have been uploaded to GBIF.org. The observations have been made between 2014 and 2022 around the Ionian Islands (Greece).

If you would need the original videos please contact me.

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article

The Arbimon newsletter is back! 

Rainforest Connection (RFCx) is bringing back the Arbimon newsletter for 2023! We're excited to share new features and tools of the platform, what's coming up, and some insights into our projects on bioacoustic...

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