Stephanie O’Donnell is the Community Manager of WILDLABS.NET, the conservation technology network. Stephanie guides the WILDLABS.NET community of conservationists, technologists, engineers and entrepreneurs, supporting them to find, create and deploy effective technology-based solutions to protect threatened wildlife and habitats.
Founded through United for Wildlife (a collaboration between leading international conservation organisations, including Fauna & Flora International), WILDLABS is the first-of-its-kind online community with a mission to support technology applications that conserve species. WILDLABS’ 2017 Annual Report, released today, offers a look back at two years of activity and impact.
WILDLABS has evolved into a thriving platform for roughly 2,300 global members who are building community, sharing ideas and information, and collaboratively developing solutions.
“WILDLABS has proved to be an extremely successful catalyst and conduit for technological innovation in conservation,” said Joanna Elliott, FFI’s Senior Director – Conservation Partnerships. “It is enabling us to mine a rich seam of ingenious new ideas that help overcome some of the many challenges we encounter in the field.”
Since WILDLABS’ launch in late 2015 it has become a platform for 2,300 experts around the world to openly share information and collaborate on technology solutions to pressing conservation challenges. Wildlife conservationists and tech geeks alike are using over 460 discussion threads in tech and conservation challenge groups. These threads have been viewed over 38,000 times, helping to democratise access to lessons learned and to crowd-source advice from engineers and scientists.
Last year WILDLABS helped to connect a group of researchers to pool limited conservation resources to bring down the cost of open-source acoustic monitoring devices from the unaffordable $700 per unit, to $50 via an Audiomoth group buy. Each year, researchers and conservationists share images of their technology in action around the world through WILDLABS’ #tech4wildlife Photo Challenge.
In 2017, WILDLABS helped two bear researchers—Ed Miller and Melanie Clapman—to find each other and leverage machine learning to identify individual bears from citizen photographs and camera trap images. Developing this recognition technology will help to assess and monitor bear populations, providing wildlife researchers with a new, non-invasive methodology to survey bears in the wild. “Through WILDLABS, I’ve found new collaborators,” said Clapham. “We have formed a non-profit together and are working towards our tech solutions more efficiently than we would have done before, separately.”
WILDLABS helped two bear researchers to leverage machine learning to identify individual bears from citizen photographs and camera trap images. Credit: Bear ID project
As an open community, anyone can visit WILDLABS to learn about how conservationists and technology experts are using the online platform to:
The Annual Report shares highlights of how the community is doing exactly this.
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