An international team of scientists has developed a method to assess the detection area of acoustic monitoring devices. These instruments, which can record the calls and other sounds of animals…
When Osa Conservation project coordinator Juan Carlos Cruz met a local landowner angered by the presence of a pair of camera traps on his land in this southwestern section of…
The iNaturalist species data- and image-sharing platform reached a milestone earlier this month with its one millionth observer. The platform consists of a mobile app and corresponding website that help…
Chief Antonio Manquid Jiménez, an elder and shaman of the Matsés tribe of northeastern Peru, hasn’t always used a smartphone to document what he finds during his hunting and gathering…
The non-profit Conservation X Labs (CXL) recently announced twenty finalists for the Con X Tech Prize – subtitled “Hacking Extinction.” The finalists will receive $3,500 to continue developing their projects,…
South American bats speak dialects different from those of their North American counterparts. In response, a group of scientists has developed the first artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm for acoustic identification…
The survey looked easy on paper. All they had to do was to go the Babai Valley in western Nepal and fly a drone (or unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV) along…
Every year, millions of baby birds leave the security of their nests, flying off into the uncertainty of the outside world. A single chick’s fledging takes just a moment, and…
Working under cover of night in parks as large as US states, poachers are skilled in avoiding detection. If they kill with silencers on their rifles, the animal’s death is…
The shrieking rip of a chainsaw and the muffled roar of fire: both of these sounds are associated with extensive destruction of Amazon rainforest. But is logging or human-caused fire…
The Great Elephant Census, conducted in 2014 and 2015, counted more than 350,000* elephants across 18 African countries. Human observers in small planes flew some 294,000 kilometers during more than 1,500…
It took Gage roughly six seconds to find the tiny piece of ivory hidden on the underside of our vehicle. Gage, a Labrador retriever, specializes in finding ivory and firearms,…
Online mapping platform MapHubs has recently launched a new service, MapHubs Forest, which combines automated forest change visualization and alerts with tools for making maps online, analyzing spatial data, producing reports…
Nearly 2 million animals, mostly wildebeest and zebra, migrate roughly 800 kilometers (500 miles) each year between Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and Maasai Mara National Reserve across the border…
Cameras add monitoring power Field data collection is challenging in the best of conditions, and in an environment as harsh as Antarctica, large-scale, long-term field monitoring studies are rare. To…
It’s June, and migratory songbirds in the northern hemisphere are at their summer breeding grounds, having traveled thousands of miles from their warm-weather overwintering areas. Birds migrate as far north…
A team of scientists and remote-sensing specialists have combined their years of experience monitoring changes in forest cover into a new publication meant to help fellow conservation practitioners better integrate…
People love camera traps. Placed in the middle of a forest or savanna, their motion sensors trigger a photo when an animal or person passes by. They allow us to…
If it wasn’t for the hidden camera, the poachers might have escaped undetected. A few minutes past midnight on Jan. 19, a camera positioned at an obscure location inside the…
The well-known trumpeting call of an elephant indicates anger or alarm. The more common but less familiar rumbles are a range of low-frequency sounds that elephants use to communicate different…
An unlikely group of experts have teamed up to apply software developed to find distant stars to help solve problems in conservation ecology. The “astro-ecology” project at Liverpool Johns Moores…
Satellite imagery has transformed how we assess changes in forest cover. The standard optical sensors carried by Earth-orbiting satellites capture the energy from sunlight reflected off objects on the Earth’s…
Tens of thousands of indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon have been fighting decades of contamination of their natural resources by foreign and domestic oil companies. Oil spills, leaky pipelines,…
Why are scientists turning to aerial images to monitor the health of ecosystems found beneath the ocean’s surface? Coral reefs support millions of species ranging from single-celled algae to sharks…
Jarrod Hodgson is one of very few scientists who have used rubber ducks as part of their Ph.D. research. Hodgson and colleagues at the University of Adelaide compared the accuracy…
Keeping equipment running in harsh field conditions can challenge any tech project, as can working successfully with volunteers. Some projects have to manage both. A recent Wildtech post describes wpsWatch,…
For the last two years, a U.S. non-profit and local partners in South Africa have quietly been catching wildlife poachers using remote cameras connected to a unique cross-continent volunteer monitoring…
Technology is changing how we investigate and protect planet Earth. The increased portability and reduced cost of data collection and synthesis tools, for instance — from visual and acoustic sensors…
A conservation technology team at WWF-UK has produced a series of best-practice guidelines for three key data collection techniques—camera trapping, passive acoustic monitoring, and remote sensing through Light Detection and…
When you picture (ahem) a photo taken by a camera trap—a remote camera triggered by movement—you might think first of a tiger or some other stealthy forest cat. Recent Wildtech…
