WEBINAR: Using Technology for Wildlife Applications

um so hi I'm Iona from conservation optimism and here at conservation optimism we try to have a different take on conservation and the world at the moment and try and inspire people and um promote action by um by um talking about the positives and taking away the story from the Doom and Gloom um so feel free to look us up on our website there's lots of options to get involved if you're part of a conservation organization you can become part of conservation now which is a network for a conservation organizations I'll be posting the link in the comments later um and just as one last reminder before we actually start please make sure that you're muted if you're not the speaker just to make sure that um we can't there's no interference during the talk um so today we're really really delighted to be welcoming Dr Kelly Williams from Wildlife Tech who's going to be talking to us about technology for wildlife applications so I'm gonna let Kaylee take it away but um I'm really glad to see so many people here and thank you for joining so yeah Kaylee go ahead thank you so much Iona and everyone at conservation optimism for inviting me and thank you everyone for being here I can see a few familiar faces and names in the uh in the audience today so that's awesome and lots and lots of people that I don't know so I'm super excited to share some of my work with you all um so today as Ayanna said I'll be talking about using technology for wildlife applications which is something I spent 19 years now I think doing um and looking forward to sharing that with you so um what I'll do is I'll just tell you a little bit about what we're actually going to talk about today so you're prepared um I'll do a little just a little bit of an introduction to myself and what I do um and then we're going to talk a little bit about why we might want to use uh technology for wildlife applications um then we'll move on to what we can actually do with it um and what what different what different things we can do you with technology either to better understand Wildlife or to protect Wildlife or often both um and then I'd like to take you on a little Adventure so um I'm not traveling quite so much these days I don't know about you um but um and I'd like to take you on a little adventure to see some of this technology in action and to take you to some different places to show you how we can use this technology and then at the end we'll have some time for questions and answers which I think is often the best part um to be able to actually uh see uh see what it is that you are interested in for me at least um and to have a bit of a conversation around this topic for those of you who are interested so that's a little bit about what I'm going to talk about today so first of all I know a few of you know me um but for those of you who don't I'm Kaylee I'm Dr Kelly Williams and my slides are loading very slowly so I do apologize um but I'm a wildlife ecologist and I'm also a filmographer which which means I'm technically trained in the use of thermal imaging technology um and that's allowed me to do lots of uh pretty interesting work um throughout the years that I've been using it particularly for wildlife so but I'll tell you more about that a little bit later so my mission and the mission of wildlife Tech which is a company that I I run is to help humans to better understand and protect Wildlife so we can all Thrive together and I'm sure that all of you here will completely understand that mission but I'd like to like to share that with people Esther and why it is that I'm doing this work um and my Wildlife Tech we're working particularly with technology so usually with technology is the way that we actually do this um in our in our everyday work so we're often helping people to learn about this technology or we're helping people to actually Implement using this technology either to better understand Wildlife so they might be studying Wildlife um or they might be they might be counting Wildlife for various different regions or they might be directly protecting wildlife and need to use technology to to do that so that's just a quick um quick heads up on sort of the background of uh what what we're doing and our our mission so then again my slides are loading very slowly so I do apologize there should be some very beautiful pictures here but they're not loading up right now so in the absence of them I'll tell you what should be here and see if we can get get these ah here we go now they're following me now so that's good so there are lots of different technologies that we can use um I'd love it if you would pop in the comments either some of the technologies that you might have used for wildlife or you might have seen on the television on the internet um being used for wildlife applications it'd be good to see what you're familiar with so particularly a lot of people I know are familiar with trail cameras they're super affordable now um and can be put out in lots of different places to be able to capture images and even video of wildlife um drones have taken off for wants of using a terrible poem over the past since sort of 2018 2019 have really massively taken a Rise um in being used particularly for Wildlife Research and applications so that's another massive one um things like radio tracking as well you might be familiar with um and the use of Optics and here you'll see underwater Vehicles Iona says camera traps and bat recorders yeah absolutely so do keep those coming list says acoustic detectors both static and portable yeah um and then um recently actually we were talking with some other friends over at nature metrics about their work with Edna or environmental DNA where they're taking water samples or even soil samples actually um to find DNA within the environment to be able to detect what species um might be around which is a really exciting and um interesting area I think of technology and using technology to help with lots of different Wildlife situations which is really interesting and that technology has come on massively um in the past decade um so lots of exciting Technologies I'm just going to have another quick look um in the chat to see um on Melissa good to see you and she said she's just brought herself an echo knitted touch Pro so that's a little bat detector which I'll actually be showing you a little bit um a little bit and she says for hobby of course yeah I know um tomorrow says camera traps yeah yeah and so camera trap's super popular and again something that's relatively easy to use usually um and also something that is um is now becoming quite a low-cost thing to be able to use as well so quite accessible um for people to be able to to use um Lauren's got one as well I know you've been finding some exciting bits with uh with those as well and um so yeah I think there are lots of different Technologies and there there are so many that I could talk about today um but I am going to narrow it down to to a few but before I do that I want to think a little bit about why we might want to use technology um for um for any Wildlife application really um and I just saw a really interesting uh comment comes through in the chat so apuva I think says a field spectrophotometer to record bird feather colors now that's a new one that is a fantastic one I absolutely love that so uh yeah I must make a note of that that's a beautiful beautiful piece of technology to be able to use but it's very important I think to be thinking about why we might want to use technology and there are lots of reasons why um so mainly those are to do with the the wildlife challenges that we might have so this depends on what kind of animal um that we might want to study or we might want to know more about we might want to protect or any other sort of any of those together really um so different animals come with different challenges um so for me I work as many of you as some of you I know will know is I will work a lot with bats um that's a very challenging creatures because of course they are nocturnal usually I'm looking for a dark thing in a dark thing um they're pretty secretive little creatures and also incredibly fascinating um but they also um you know are in need of our help and protection as well so it's really important that we study those species and have a good idea of what's going on with them and to do that we really need to overcome some of those really tricky challenges um of looking for a dark thing in a dark thing um and that also transfers of course not just to nocturnal animals but also to species that are very cryptic so we've got something here like the night jar which is also nocturnal but also cryptic so it has this beautiful camouflage that it uses and to make it really difficult to be able to find um and detect and there are of course a whole range of different animals out that have developed beautiful camouflage um for their survival but that also makes it really really tricky for those of us who want to study those species and ultimately learn more and or protect them so we have to think about ways we can use technology to overcome some of those challenges there are also species of course um like we've got the monarch butterflies here that travel long long distances and there are of course a whole load more of migratory species um that are challenging to study by the nature of their movements um and so we might want to use technology to help us to be able to track them to be able to help understand their their movements and things like that and that can be logistically challenging so we might want to bring technology in for that reason likewise we might have animals that uh propose challenges of living in water so marine mammals are one that I think of a lot um because uh my my colleague Lena works with marine mammals and of course has to deal with all of the challenges of those and also some of my colleagues that work with aquatic species like this uh this Newt here um that can also be tricky to find so um these Associated challenges of working with animals and water are another difficulty that that we might struggle to find or to be able to find out more information about without the use or the help of Technology now traditionally we would use to study animals uh back in the day pre-technology or at least low technology um the the method of direct observation so we would be out in the field using our eyes and our ears to be able to look out um for for the creatures that we were studying and that's a very valuable skill to have um but it's also something that is very limited because of course our eyes and ears don't always tell us quite the truth um but and they're also very limited as well likewise we have very limited attention spans um we can't only concentrate for for very limited um periods of time and in actual fact when our nervous systems put all of this information together it doesn't always tell us the truth so depending on what we're expecting um the field of psychology has has determined that in actual fact our brains will register things depending on whether we we are um pre um sort of pre-informed one way or another as to whether to expect something so if we expect that say there will be a tiger present in a particular area of uh of um habitat that we're looking at we might be more likely to report that animal using just our own senses um than if we were told that it absolutely was not there that it was extinct in that area now that's one example but I'm sure that you can think of similar examples as well where you know your human senses might let you down um and not always because you're consciously aware of it sometimes it can be completely subconscious but of course we'll limit it as to what we can do our human senses even if they were perfect in terms of telling us the truth or are limited in terms of um how far we can see or hear um and also what frequencies um of um of sound or or light that we can see or hearing as well so that's one of the reasons and many of the reasons of course um why we might want to use technology so what can we actually use it for and I'd love you to feel free to add to this because I'm particularly interested now in the spectrophotometer and any other interesting Technologies you want to throw into this mix but um what can we use it for well at the very simplest level we can use it to extend our human senses or to help improve our human senses um so at a very simplest level we can use things like Optics to help improve an image so to be able to see things more clearly so this is a red kite and which is luckily very common now around flying over our garden this is actually my little girl with her binoculars um and at the very simplest level just looking out for things and either being able to to um expand on that image help us to be able to see things more clearly um and that's very very simple but that's one of the ways that we can use technology to help us and of course that's uh you know hands up or at least just um drop me a little uh a little eyes emoji in the uh in the chat if you've got your if you've got some binoculars or you would use binoculars or even a scope now to be able to just see things more clearly um whether that's just when you're going out for fun and to go out in the countryside or whether it's for work um yeah I own it yeah um I actually really struggle with binoculars it's one of those weird facts um I think it's because of my my eyesight but um I um I actually use a single scope a monocular scope which you can see there in in the middle of that left-hand image and because I really struggle with with binoculars and always having with binocular microscopes at universities well really struggled with them um but my little scope is super handy and I really like it because I can just pop it in my bag it's really tiny but if I'm just out and about it's really really handy just for looking at things and for me I might use it like just when we're looking out if even if I'm just taking my little girl out to one of our local nature reserves or or when I'm out of work it's brilliant to be able to just look at things more closely and if we see a bird or we see something and we just like we just want to get a closer look at that and it sounds really simple than it is but it's incredibly powerful incredibly useful tool to have however simple it might be it's also been great for me um for looking at things like holes in trees when I might want to look at things that are above my height to be able to have a look at as well but that's really the simplest way of using technology in so many ways and probably one of the most common I would say so yeah getting lots of lots of eyes in the chat of people um I love I love Katie's one I'm sorry Katie I'm totally gonna mention this when I remember to put contacts instead of glasses yes me too I suffer this problem too definitely contact lenses for the field are an absolute Lifesaver in my opinion nowadays um especially if we get a rainy day oh my goodness I am completely useless otherwise so another way that we can use technology is we can use it to help us see things we wouldn't otherwise be able to see with our eyes now that's not necessarily because it's a particular distance away like we might with the Optics so looking for that red kite super high up in the sky this might be because we're looking for something that's quite cryptic and it might be because we are looking for something that's nocturnal or something that's in the dark something that we would struggle to otherwise see so my example for this um here is bats but it can be used for lots and lots of other different things I use thermal imaging to be able to see things in the dark often but also to be able to see animals that would otherwise be quite difficult to detect without the use of thermal imaging so here what we've got is a thermal imaging camera setup with a laptop on the left hand side and on the right hand side we've got the top bit which I realize is black but that's what I could see um with my eyes in this particular environment and then using the thermal camera this is an image that we generated um from from the thermal camera and in this situation we're actually looking at what we call swarming which is a phenomenon um that's um that's due in the Autumn they gather together and it's believed to be a related to mating and going and preparing going into hibernation and um they often are around in very very high numbers um in the early hours of the morning so it's it's completely dark and that's obviously very challenging so um to be able to see what's going on is almost impossible um if you don't have um any of this kind of technology or some kind of technology to help you so that's another thing where we might be wanting to use a visual technology to help us see things we wouldn't otherwise be able to see and then we've got things like tracking so this might be where we actually want some different kinds of data so we're not just necessarily looking for that animal we might actually have to put some kind of device onto an animal to be able to gain more information about it so this is an example of radio tracking it's used for lots of different animals from in fact from tiny tiny bats all the way up to huge uh rhinos and things like that so there's a whole range of different animals that radio tracking is useful now this is unlike the other Technologies we've just been talking about yes Jack says the Bison in Kent yes lots of different animals it can be used for now unlike the previous Technologies this is an invasive Technologies as in we do have to put a tag or a collar with a tag on it like you can see here in the picture um and it's only done under specific license with trained individuals that can do that kind of work and it's done when there's a really clear reason for doing it so we we need to be very mindful about doing this in terms of disturbance to the animals and do do it in in a way that makes sense so this is often because we want to be able to track the movements want to look at behaviors of those of animals and and often to protect them as well so it can be much more involved but that's another way that that technology is used more commonly now um than previously and the Technologies of course are improving dramatically as well and tags are getting much smaller along with a lot of things one of the big things with the performance of this has been battery life um and in actual fact it's just improved an awful lot since I first got involved with radio tracking so then we've got things uh like changing our perspective um so in actual fact to be able to study or count particular species it can be really really useful to be able to get up in the air and get an aerial perspective on what's going on with those animals so um things like d accounts where biologists have to cover huge amounts of area to be able to cover um cover enough Habitat to be able to get census or as close to census counts as they can this has traditionally been done using aircraft and in fact it's um it's a pretty dangerous occupation and also quite an expensive one but there's traditionally been the way the way that's been done but now um we've been able to of course use drones and I mentioned drones have really become a big thing um in uh yeah in in studies of animals over the past sort of four or five years and these is improving dramatically in terms of its use drones were seen as a little bit of a gimmick to begin with but I think when they're applied appropriately can be super super useful to help us to to really answer some specific questions and particularly with things like counts and finding animals that you might really struggle to otherwise um one of the limitations um with with drones is actually often the paperwork involved to be able to use them um and and having the right qualifications to be able to actually use them in terms of actually collecting the data once once you're set up and you have the right equipment and and Personnel to be able to do them actually can make life an awful lot easier in terms of of data collection so that can be a fantastic a fantastic tool um in terms of conservation and Wildlife studies so of course all of these Technologies um we have the potential to be accumulating large amounts of data and as the years go by the volumes of data that we're collecting um as as ecologists Wildlife biologists and researchers in in Wildlife related studies the data volumes are getting immensely bigger year on year and that's a real challenge um it's a real challenge in terms of storing that data but it's also a real challenge in terms of handling that data and turning that danger into meaningful information that we can use to help understand and protect the species that we are we are wanting to do that with so there are lots of ways now that we're using technology to help us with that so that's a fantastic thing and also something that was absolutely necessary for the use um in the long term of a lot of the technology so the more Advanced Technologies that we're using so um using things like automation so algorithms or artificial intelligence is one way that we can be really using the getting the best out of our data without having humans to absolutely image by image process some of this information or sound file by sound file and those algorithms and processes are becoming much much more effective and efficient which is a fantastic thing and I'll tell you a little bit more about some of the work that I'm doing with that International level um so that's just a few of the main ways sort of we use technology but there are so many more and I'm not going to go into all of them today because we we have a limited amount of time but what I wanted to do was take you on a little journey I would like to take you on a little adventure to show you some of the ways that technology can be used for wildlife so let me know in the chat if you're ready to go give me an airplane energy or or something of that ilk in in the chat and let me know if you're ready to go on a little Wildlife technology Adventure I would uh love to have you on board haha Jack brilliant I love that emoji that's beautiful thank you you are absolutely ready to go that's fantastic great stuff great stuff Okay so yes I like the bicycle that's fantastic I love it which is appropriate actually because we're going to start the journey actually in Cambridgeshire um where I spent an awful lot of time on my bike um going back and forwards to University departments with bits of equipment like this in my basket um and the reason I was doing that was actually because when I was doing my undergraduate degree my focus of my research both as part of my degree but also sort of personally um was researching was actually a behavior in in ecwids so I was interested in our Katie that's fantastic I'm loving the adventures there that's brilliant um when I was doing my undergraduate degree I was very interested in wild and feral horse Behavior so I was looking um particularly at what herds were doing in terms of behavior what um animals were doing um into animal interactions and behavior of feral uh or re-released uh horses and also of wild horses as well which I'll talk to you a little bit more um but this sort of started out with some studies in Cambridgeshire I don't know if anyone's familiar with WIC and Fenn and I was very lucky to be given permission by The National Trust to go out and conduct my my undergraduate thesis work and research work out on the fence which was quite a challenge um to go and follow their herds that had been released onto the fence um for management of the vegetation and to look at how those herds were interacting and and their individual behaviors but what I wanted to do was get not just their behavior in the daytime I wanted to get a complete 24 hour around the clock account of what they were doing and of course that was challenging because I found myself following these herds or trying to follow these herds around on foot in the fence in some pretty difficult conditions for those of you who might have been trudging around fence um particularly those ones out there um to follow these hurts it would be relatively easy you know towards the middle of the day when they were relatively quiet and calm and not doing an awful lot but then all of a sudden they would disappear off um and uh it would be tricky to to track them down and I was very very lucky that I talked this through um with some incredible staff um at the University in the lab and just through conversation with people um around some of the challenges that I was having and they said ah you you need some night vision gear um and the the then head of the loud um tech there went off into a cupboard somewhere and came back with um some night vision binoculars and a night vision scope and handed them to me and said here you go take take those bring them back when you finished with them and go off and uh and and use them for your night work and I was a little bit um taken aback by this um and super grateful I had no idea how incredibly expensive this equipment was at the time um so I was incredibly lucky to have been allowed to use this um and what those night vision um equipment allowed me to do was to be able to see those animals um throughout the night to be able to document their behaviors and oh my goodness did it make my life easier now night vision Equipment Works on the basis that there has to be some low level of light so Moonlight um usually um or they'll have some kind of um sort of they'll be giving out some kind of light themselves but most of the night vision is is either Illuminating or it's um it's I've lost my words now um it's using the the bare minimum of the light to to amplify it for us to be able to see so that was a fantastic piece of technology to use as part um sorry as uh connected to that at least I wanted to go out and learn more from the truly Wild Horses um Equus przowski um which uh przaski's Wild Horses which had been re-released so um but they were um they were reintroduced into Stone National Park in Mongolia and I managed to get out there um for a summer to go and and study them as well and study some of their behaviors and as part of that it was also helping to collect some GPS data using a device a little bit more simple than this one to be fair um to be able to attract the movements of the different herds and input that into their system so that they could better understand the movements of those herds and that's another piece of technology we're very used to now of course pretty much all of our phones have GPS in some way um and but at the time having a handheld GPS back then in 2000 and three yeah you know 2002 2003 um was uh not quite so common so I was very lucky to be able to use this but that's another way we can use technology um to be able to help better understand Wildlife as well so after my studies um I became a consultant I started working with bats I found out about these incredible creatures um in fact after I finished my degree I went off and uh went to do various bits of volunteer work alongside my many part-time jobs to allow me to do that um and I came across our local back group up in Lincolnshire and went on a bat walk which was just fantastic and was handed a little box not dissimilar to the one that you can see on the bottom right of this slide a batch detector a very basic one um and headed off out into the woods with a group of people I didn't know and and went off to find bats and I heard over the the speaker of this little box in my hand these incredible clicks almost like shotgun clicks or um crackles on on this machine and I was completely hooked I found that bats were just fascinating and it was fascinating to me for two reasons one was that these creatures were flying in the dark and giving out these signals to navigate their environment and communicate with one another that we could not hear with our own ears or see with our eyes but we could eavesdrop on them with this piece of technology and the technology was part of the hook for me because it was like this is amazing we can use this incredible little box to be able to find these creatures and I just thought that was amazing um and I trained for my bat license and as part of that learned to use various other bits of technology and on the left hand side you'll see something called an endoscope now an endoscope um this one at least has a has a long um sort of flexi tube on it um with a cable inside and a camera on the end and a little light and that allowed me to be able to um to find things in trees and buildings now we're supposed to be looking for bats but you'll see we've got a millipede here um but it's another piece of technology that of course we can use to find things in difficult places so that's another way that we can use technology um and it's really interesting I think sometimes to think about some of the different Technologies we can use because it you never know it I might use it for bats but you might have a use for this for some completely different creature so I'd love to know if you do uh if you do uh find use for any of these Technologies for different species so technology has changed a lot um over the years that I've been working with it and I've been working particularly a lot with bats and we mentioned earlier um the little gadgets that we can get now to put onto our iPhone this is an echo meter touch um but there are other ones available um Lauren has one of these I think uh I think I think it was Katie oh no it was Melissa that mentioned any used um you've got one of these so these just plug into your phone and this is phenomenal now and so they use the processing power of your phone and an app that's free to download you plug this little microphone into your phone and you have a really amazing back detector um now these are I think they're a couple of hundred pounds at the moment but an equivalent back detector would be around 1600 pounds so it's made that technology much much more affordable not necessarily affordable for everybody but much much more affordable than it ever had been before so if you already have a smartphone um you could potentially turn that into a into a battery sector and should I say also a detector for lots of other animals because um you can also find lots of other creatures that make sounds that we cannot hear with these things so uh we were actually talking yesterday um with our summer school students um Dr Stewart Newson came to talk to us and he was telling us all about um different animals that that use different uh frequencies that we can't hear that you can of course pick up with some of these uh shrews were among them that was a fantastic one rats were also an interesting one as well um lots and lots of different animals making some very weird wonderful sounds out there insects of course um things like Bush crickets lots of different animals making sounds that of course we can't hear and we can use these kinds of Technologies to be able to eavesdrop on those conversations some animals might be making those sounds because they're using them to navigate your environment so the bats are giving out signals that bounce off their environment and come back to them and they use that to be able to um and you use that to be able to navigate in their environment um but and also to locate their prey um but also can use social calls to be able to communicate with other individuals and other animals might be using um these frequencies to be able to communicate or they might be using them to be able to navigate as well so it's a really interesting field bioacoustics for those of you who might not have necessarily come across it um well worth investigating if you find that an interesting area um yeah at least that's right Stuart is the acoustic scientist analyzing all the data for the baloric Pastor Stephen he certainly is and what an incredible uh piece of work that is oh my goodness we were absolutely fascinated yeah brilliant Liz has just put a link in there to the the video so you can learn a little bit more about that it's absolutely fascinating so if you're interested in the bio acoustic side of things well worth um definitely well worth thanks to that Liz so hopefully my slides are now following me again brilliant so after I'd been working with bats for a little while I'd learned as much as I could about the technology over here in the UK I'd learned as much as I could about the bats over here in the UK as well I'd put myself on every course I possibly could I picked the brains of every bad person I could possibly speak to um and and learned so much but I knew I wanted to go back and learn more I wanted to go back to University to do my PhD research and really learn learn more and develop my own knowledge of both the technology and the species that I was working with so I went over to the University of Southern Denmark um those of you who know on the island of fun Denmark and I was able to their work with the bioacoustics um bat lab there and I got to use some incredible technology so you'll see me here on the right hand side with what looks like a crucifix and yes it does um this is called a multi microphone array it has 12 to 16 microphones on it possibly more looking at that which are very specialist pieces of equipment and also very expensive pieces of equipment that are all hooked up via that little inkaya was muted there can you all hear me again now somebody let me know if you can hear me right now I think I accidentally muted myself hooray I'm back um so um I went off to do my PhD and was um doing my PhD in back bio Acoustics so what I was investigating was looking at how bats change their echolocation calls when they're flying together and I looked at um particularly do Benton's bat um in Denmark and also in the UK and also horseshoe bats in the UK and in South Africa and I was using these weird looking crucifixes um which as I was trying to say I'm not sure how much I was muted for so I'll just explain um lots of microphones on this array very specialist um microphones that register in the ultrasonic range so above the range of our human hearing and they're very very sensitive microphones so I was able to be able to get some incredibly high quality recordings of these bats and also to reconstruct their flight paths in 3D so we could look in detail as to how they might change their calls as they were flying together um so that's one of the ways of course that we can use this technology is quite a specialist way of using that technology um but it allowed me to really learn an awful lot about bioacoustics um and we talked a little bit about that obviously but from Denmark I then went off on lots of travels um throughout my PhD where I was able to conduct research with different species um and different human beings as well so this is Lena Faber who I owe a lot of thanks to for helping me with lots of my research um over the years um Lena and I spent um a couple of Summers out in Canada working with little brown bats and Nina also worked a lot with moths out there and using technology to to help us study them so you'll see here on the bottom left in the in the black and white photos there's a picture of me with yet another of those crucifixes um and also another Gadget which is a high-speed thermal imaging camera and I was using that in combination so using two technologies together but you know another really important and Powerful uh way to to do things um outside some caves in Canada um where I learned an awful lot now this was at the time when um white nose syndrome was becoming a massive issue and I remember standing outside a cave with this technology and we were studying these bats and I remember just thinking these could be the last of their kind these bats were dying in their thousands they hadn't reached the particular area that we were in um and we were particularly cautious about um being using non-invasive methods um for at the time once we the sort of the white no syndrome was coming in and so using things like Acoustics and the thermal imaging cameras was really powerful with being able to see what was going on in terms of perhaps and their behavior without touching them um and also was just an amazing experience but at the time it was really quite nerve-wracking because we really did think you know these could be the last of the last of their kind now look police eyes has been working diligently I'm studying um that and have um yeah luckily things have been bad but not as bad as they might have uh have been so um I've also been um using Technologies like thermal imaging and bioacoustics around the world with some really interesting species lots of different bat species so I'm very lucky um to be able to travel to South Africa as part of my PhD research where we were working with Ryan loafers so the Horseshoe bats out there using multi microphone arrays and thermal imaging technology to study them also out in Belize studying about called ring connectress naso which is a bat that has a very beautiful nose it's well worth looking that up I will send a picture out to those of you anyone who's interested um and also once I came back to the UK I also started um working with bats again um and was sent out to New Zealand to train a team of uh of that better colleges out there to use thermal imaging technology which was incredible and my most recent trip um outside of the UK um was back in 2019 um to um to Thailand uh to both share some of my research with thermal imaging with biologists from around the world um but also to learn more about some of the technologies that were developing and particularly from the bioacoustics technologies that were developing as well so um technology has taken me all over the place um but as many of you of course may have also experienced um a lot of my research stopped um I actually made uh yeah I I I made a New Year's resolution uh for the 2020 New Year uh to to not travel that year anywhere and to to reduce my carbon footprint and and all of that and uh it was much much easier than I thought it would be in a natural fact it grounded an awful lot of my my research and my conservation work but that said it did allow me to do something different and it meant that I actually started doing things differently in my work so it not only allowed me to learn my carbon footprint very uh very quickly um but also allowed me to work with lots of different students and researchers around the world one of which I want to give a mention to is Dr Priscilla mayard who here she came to a wildlife Tech as a teaching assistant and since I've been in contact a lot about her research with thermal imaging um and bioacoustics and her students work on this incredible creature called the kaligo if you haven't heard of the kalugo please go and have a look at them and these are very tricky creatures to find they are beautifully camouflaged this image doesn't necessarily do justice to how difficult they might be to find also quite tricky creatures to work with and Priscilla has been now working with them limitings that say bio Acoustics as well to study these uh very very very different creatures so definitely one for you to have a look at if you get a chance uh Lauren's Twitter put a link in there for anyone who wants to learn more about collugos I apologize you may go down a rabbit worm of learning about collugos today but I think that will be positive for everybody um so I've also been doing a lot more local research so I have also now got my research permit at Oxford University's white and woods which is just an incredible place if ever you are in Oxfordshire in the UK let me know um I'd love to go and show you the bats in white and woods I've been conducting research there with thermal imaging and to help change the way that we do that survey work um making it more efficient more carbon efficient and more cost efficient and what's best is better for the bats much more accurate and helping us to protect them in a much more efficient way one of the ways we're doing that is using um using algorithms to be able to automatically or semi-automatically analyze the data because while thermal imaging is an incredible technology to help us detect animal schools in difficult situations like in the dark or when they're very camouflaged we can end up with Reams and reams of data and I can end up in front of a computer and Lauren can also attest to this has spent many many days in front of computers um analyzing this footage and with a project that I'm working on with a student Nick actually I'm not sure if Nick's here his thesis Master's thesis project has been working on this uh using automated Technologies to help to analyze this in a much more efficient way which in the long run will be fantastic for back conservation and also the conservation of lots of different species as well um going on from this so that's one of the one of the big positives of being grounded here but we're also helping from the UK with some International projects as well so I've managed to get hold of some uh some equipment that we are in the preparations of getting out to some exciting places to be able to help researchers to be able to help other species out and about and by doing tests here in the UK this is actually Lauren on the right hand side apologies Laura and I've had to feature you um Lauren's been doing some fantastic work with us um particularly with our primate work with um wapka the West African primate Conservation Association and um we've been testing how thermal imaging might be useful for primate monitoring for potential future schemes of re-releasing primates into the wild so we're using thermal imaging Technologies for this and again some of those automated systems are going to really help us in future projects like that to be able to make these make this work really efficient um and effective conservation so this is one of those beautiful primates in an entry um from one of the thermal imaging uh one of thermal images that we've we've been taking in our test images so to be able to make these automated systems work we have to have a library of test images and to be able to either teach um the the different algorithms or to be able to inform um those uh those bits and pieces um I can't tell you where that photo was taken unfortunately because I'm not allowed to release all of the details of the project yet but as soon as we do we will be putting it out in our newsletter so if you want to learn more um Laurel hopefully send you a link to our website and when we're allowed to release um the full details of the research project we'll we'll let you know is it a really exciting stage and also a really frustrating stage at the moment because I can't wait to share it with everybody but um we we haven't uh we haven't got to that point but hopefully we will so I'm gonna just about end there because um I'm excited for the road ahead um and I think the future is very exciting for the use of these Technologies but there's a lot of work to be done um so watch this space do um do you keep in touch if you're interested do follow us and uh we'll keep you posted with some of the research and some of the developments with these Technologies I hope that that's been been useful for you so just to sort of recap in case that's been a little bit of a a journey um so I've obviously introduced myself and and Wildlife Tech we talked a little bit about why we might want to use technology for wildlife we talked about some of the the what's some of the things that we could actually use Wildlife technology for and I hope you've enjoyed that little journey around the world with me on some of the ways that we can use technology some of the ways I've used technology and some of my colleagues have been using technology um for wildlife to better understand and or protect wildlife in the long run so hopefully we have a few minutes uh for some questions but I want to say a big thank you to those of you who have stuck with me um on on that journey and I hope that you um you've enjoyed that and I've learned a little bit along the way so if you do want to learn um about any any of these Technologies we've talked about do head on over to wildlifetech.com we've got some resources over there some free resources over there that you can have a look at if you want to learn a little bit more and of course we're either might want to follow myself uh connect me on LinkedIn and always sharing bits of information so feel free to to find out more over there um so let me just double check and see the chat how we're doing thanks so much okay feel free I'm very welcome add questions into the chat or say them out loud but I think there's one from Bilal already there's are there any algorithms developed to analyze camera Trap Photos especially of big cats issues yeah that yes so there's been quite a lot a lot more work actually with artificial intelligence um and algorithms to automate the process of camera trap data I'm trying to think off the top of my head we have um it's completely gone from my brain now the there's a fantastic online resource and it's free online resource about it and now it's just completely gone from my brain but if I remember I'll send it over to your owner um unless Lauren Lauren remembers what it is we yeah we spoke to some fantastic people about it last year um but yes there are lots of there's lots of that out there in fact there's a lot more for visual data like camera trap data than for the thermal which is why it's been a bit challenging for us because there are certain challenges with that kind of data so yeah yeah Feel Free People to put up your hands or put more questions in the comments but um if the algorithms are being adapted for things like acoustic or or camera trap footage how is that translating to say thermal imaging is it is it translating well in terms of being able to use these algorithms but for thermal imaging cameras so in actual facts that they've had been some quite custom Uh custom algorithms set up um one of the ones we're working with is called through tracker which is a fantastic one um and it's completely open source which is brilliant as well um so Dr Aaron Corcoran and his colleagues over uh the other side of the pond um have created this incredible resource so it's well worth looking up a friend of you are interested in that um it's been used for bats and Birds um but that's very custom because in actual fact the thermal data has a lot of challenges in it that are unique to thermals so they've had to really do an awful lot of specific work on those algorithms for that kind of data if that makes sense yeah absolutely um we've got some more thanks from Jan in the chat as well um again if there are any more questions please add them in what is your favorite piece of technology for World applications oh my goodness that's really tricky because I'm addicted to technology as you can probably tell um I think on the whole it's my my big thermal imaging camera um it's usually a t1030sc which is a like it's the highest sort of spec you can get for like if you're not in the military it's a really amazing camera but that's like for my big professional work personally as a piece of kit that I take all over the place with me is my little Echo meter the little bat detector that you saw that attaches to my phone because I just have it in my bag wherever I go and I just know that even if we go to a friend's house or something and you know maybe go for dinner or something is getting dark and be like do you want to see if you've got any bats let's go see if we've got some baths you know and it's just really interesting you know what you can pick up so that's uh that's my personal favorite yeah I have one and I love it it's it's amazing and also just you can go all over the world and yeah yeah and the different things that you pick up when you go traveling the different things that you pick up it's really really interesting even within the UK when I've gone to different regions of the UK it's just really interesting what you what you what you've got with it oh no absolutely it's incredible my favorite at the moment is the Merlin Bird ID app because that's the same you can it's incredible there's some fantastic apps now and they're the development of the apps has really come on as well I think and that's another really accessible one for people as well yeah absolutely should I go with one last question yeah one last question I'm gonna I'm gonna say what do you think the next big development in technology for wildlife applications is going to be so I think there's two things there's there's one is the software and one's the hardware so I think the biggest thing now is getting over the hurdle of testing some of the software for the thermal side of things because we're at a point now where we've got this massive growing data and a massive inability to keep up with it and I think we're almost there um and in terms of the UK use of it we're almost there with with the numbers on it and once those numbers are out there we can start using it properly and really expand the use of it so I think that's a big thing um the other thing with Hardware I think is battery life is a big thing like the Battery Tech and also the Battery tech becoming more eco-friendly quite honestly um so but you know there are developments The Battery tech hasn't changed it hasn't come on as much as the tech world has promised it would and so I'm I'm eagerly waiting for that because that will impact lots of different devices and also it really impact the way that we can use them so it's a big thing really interesting Insight on that note it's just turned 2PM so we're gonna end the call now um feel free to check out conservation optimism where I put the links in the chat and also we'd really appreciate it if you filled in our post webinar survey so that we can have insight into what people want to hear and so that we know what to do in the future as well and also look out for future webinars the next one is on the 6th of September um by Mike Cunningham from nine trees he's going to talk to us about um reforesting um uh Britain essentially um yeah we'll be sending out lots of uh all the resources that have been mentioned today in an email to everyone who's attended today um as well as a bunch of links so if you missed anything we'll be sending them out as well um so thank you so much for joining today uh thanks so much Kaylee that was a really awesome as well um you're welcome thank you everyone amazing and on that note um hopefully see you at the next talk so bye bye have a really nice day whatever time it is where you are um bye-bye thanks so much bye everyone thank you

2022-09-24 02:57

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