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Wildlife Insights

https://www.wildlifeinsights.org/

WHAT

Wildlife is important to all of us. Aside from its intrinsic value, wildlife provides critical benefits to support nature and people. Unfortunately, wildlife is slowly but surely disappearing from our planet and we lack reliable and up-to-date information to understand and prevent this loss.

Camera traps are being used all around the world to better understand how wildlife populations are changing. Camera traps have already taken millions of photos and are collecting more information every day. Yet most of these photos and data are not effectively shared or analyzed, leaving valuable insights just out of our grasp.

We need an innovative solution to overcome these roadblocks and catalyze data-driven wildlife conservation. By harnessing the power of technology and science, we can unite millions of photos from camera trap projects around the world and reveal how wildlife is faring, in near real-time. With better information, we can make better decisions to help wildlife thrive.

WHAT

Wildlife Insights is combining field and sensor expertise, cutting edge technology and advanced analytics to enable people everywhere to share wildlife data and better manage wildlife populations. Anyone can upload their images to the Wildlife Insights platform so that species can be automatically identified using artificial intelligence. This will save thousands of hours, freeing up more time to analyze and apply insights to conservation.

By aggregating images from around the world, Wildlife Insights is providing access to the timely data we need to effectively monitor wildlife. We are creating a community where anyone can explore data from projects around the world and leverage data at scale to influence policy.

Wildlife Insights provides the tools and technology to connect wildlife “big data” to decision makers. This full circle solution can help advance data-driven conservation action to reach our ultimate goal: recovering global wildlife populations. Learn more about Wildlife Insights AI.

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Euro Bird Portal

https://eurobirdportal.org

During the last ten years, the number and diversity of web portals dedicated to the collection of bird observations has increased rapidly and most of Europe is now covered by at least one of them. Some portals are based on very specific systems and cover a limited geographical area (e.g. a region or country) while others function across several countries using the same basic package. While there is substantial variation in the scope and volumes of data gathered by different portals, the advent of online data collection has produced a vast amount of data that would previously have been impossible to amass.

Unlike more traditional monitoring projects, which focus on structured data collection, these portals aim mainly to obtain year-round data from the relatively unstructured but intensive and widespread activities of birdwatchers. However, despite the fact that data are gathered following simple standardised protocols (e.g. complete lists), or in some cases even no protocol (casual observations), the vast amount of data contained in these portals and the sheer amplitude of their combined geographical and taxonomic coverage offer great potential for research on the temporal and spatial distribution of birds across large geographical areas. This is particularly the case where at least some basic information on recording effort is available. Such knowledge is urgently needed in order to increase understanding of bird distributions and movements and to address issues concerned with conservation and management (e.g. wind farms, avian borne diseases, flight safety).

In order to make best use of the data gathered by online portals across Europe, there is a need to establish and maintain a common database. Data sources are very scattered, and several portals have limited access or are available only in the native languages of their host countries. Given the diversity of initiatives and the well established nature of some of them, any attempt to favour only one of the systems or to create a new common one would be both undesirable and impractical. We therefore aim to create a common data repository that will hold data from each of the existing systems. This will contain the minimum aggregated information required to realise the full potential for large scale spatiotemporal analyses of such data and for other research and applied uses that are appropriately undertaken at a European scale.

This initiative will be the perfect companion to the work developed by the other two main projects undertaken by the EBCC: the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) and the new European Breeding Bird Atlas (EBBA2). PECBMS, a joint initiative with BirdLife International, monitors breeding population trends across Europe, using large-scale and long-term common breeding bird surveys and developing indicators of the general state of nature, while EBBA2 will produce a precise snapshot of the breeding distribution of all European bird species for the whole continent and for a specific time window (2013–2017). The EBP project will complement PECBMS and EBBA2 by focussing on the study of continental-wide seasonal changes in bird distribution as well as those temporal changes taking place too fast as to be properly tracked by more traditional monitoring projects. EPB will promote the use of simple, standardized bird recording protocols so as to improve the quality of the results that can be produced using these data.

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Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre

http://accdc.com/

The Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre (AC CDC) compiles and provides objective data about biological diversity in Atlantic Canada, and we undertake fieldwork to further knowledge of the distribution and status of species and ecological communities of conservation concern. All our efforts are in support of conservation-related decision making, research and education.

We serve the Atlantic Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador and have offices in Sackville, New Brunswick and Corner Brook, Newfoundland. We receive direction from a Board of Directors that includes managers of biological diversity from the four provincial governments, several federal departments, and the non-governmental conservation sector. Our funding comes from partner agencies, competitive government and foundation funds, cost recovery fees on data requests and fee for service contracts. If you would like to support the AC CDC’s conservation science efforts financially, please contact us.

The AC CDC’s expertise and data represent the single most comprehensive and current source of information about Atlantic Canada’s biodiversity. Our database includes almost 2 million geo-located records of species occurrences, approximately 20% of which represent species of conservation concern. Our data is widely consulted by federal and provincial government departments, NGOs, industry, researchers, students, and many other organizations throughout Atlantic Canada. Our outstanding staff expertise in botany, zoology, landscape ecology and GIS enable us to conduct accurate field inventories and status assessments, and to make significant contributions to conservation planning and decision making.

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Movebank

https://www.movebank.org

Movebank is a free online platform that helps researchers manage, share, analyze and archive animal movement data. Movebank is hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (formerly the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology) in coordination with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the Ohio State University and the University of Konstanz. Movebank works with many partners including government agencies, universities and conservation organizations and is intended to serve as a global archive for animal movement and bio-logging data. Movebank has long-term (>20 years) funding through the Max Planck Society and the University of Konstanz and has been developed with support from the National Science Foundation, the German Aerospace Center, the German Science Foundation and NASA.

Movebank has over 20,000 users including thousands of data owners from universities, government agencies, and other research and conservation groups around the world. It is open to all researchers and organizations regardless of species, study area or source of funding. Movebank users retain ownership of their data and can choose whether and when to make their data available to the public. We encourage collaborations to re-use animal tracking data and give it a second life.

Movebank’s database is designed for locations of individual animals over time, commonly referred to as tracking data, and of measurements collected by other bio-logging sensors attached to animals, as well as information about animals, tags and deployments. Movebank has grown dramatically since its inception, due to the increasing number of users as well as advances in technology that allow the collection of increasingly high-resolution data.