Field Notes: A Week Testing Data Collection Apps in the Cederberg
Four phones, four apps, seven days in the Cederberg Wilderness Area. What actually works when the signal drops, the heat hits 38°C, and the baboons raid your camp.
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How to Contribute to Open Source Conservation Technology — No PhD Required
If you can code, design, write, translate, or test software, there is a conservation project that needs you. Here is exactly where to start.
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The Amazon Is Approaching a Savanna Tipping Point
Between 17 and 20% of the Amazon is already gone. At 20–25%, the forest can no longer generate enough rain to sustain itself. It flips to savanna — and it doesn't come back.
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How Much Does a Camera Trap Survey Cost?
Real camera trap survey budgets at every scale. Hardware prices, labor rates in Africa, hidden costs like batteries and image processing time. What you actually get for your money.
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The 32 Companies Driving Half of Global Emissions
Just 32 companies produced over 50% of global fossil CO2 in 2024. The number is shrinking. The production is growing. Every figure is cited.
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AlphaEarth Foundations: Google DeepMind's Universal Model for Mapping the Earth
A practical guide to AlphaEarth Foundations, Google DeepMind's geospatial foundation model, and the Google Satellite Embedding dataset in Earth Engine: what it is, what it means for science, and how to use it for conservation, land cover, change detection, and similarity search.
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Wildlife Conservation in Cape Town: A Field Guide to the City's Living Systems
A Cape Town-specific guide to the conservation work protecting fynbos, wetlands, penguins, baboons, caracals, seabirds, turtles, sharks, amphibians, and urban biodiversity
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Conservation X Labs and Wildbook
How Conservation X Labs, Wild Me, and the Wildbook open-source platform use AI, citizen science, and photo-identification to monitor wildlife populations at conservation scale.
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GBIF: The Global Biodiversity Information Facility
How GBIF turns museum specimens, field surveys, citizen science, DNA-derived records, and institutional datasets into open biodiversity infrastructure for research, policy, and conservation.
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Google Earth Engine: What It Is, Why It Matters for Science, and How to Use It
A practical, source-backed guide to Google Earth Engine as a planetary-scale geospatial computing platform: its data and programming model, why it changed environmental science, and how to start using it with JavaScript, Python, datasets, exports, apps, and machine learning.
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Offline Communications for Wildlife Field Teams: LoRa, Radio, Satcom, Mesh, Starlink and Long-Range Connectivity
A practical field guide to resilient communications for remote conservation work: VHF/UHF radio, LoRa, Meshtastic, satellite messengers, satellite phones, Starlink, point-to-point Wi‑Fi, cellular routers, and field data platforms.
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Planetary Boundaries Explained
Seven of nine planetary boundaries are now breached. A sourced guide to every boundary, what changed in 2025, and how to read the numbers without mixing datasets.
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PyTorch-Wildlife
How Microsoft's PyTorch-Wildlife framework brings MegaDetector, species classifiers, bioacoustics, aerial detection, and conservation AI workflows into one open-source model zoo.
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SA-FARI — 11,609 Videos, 99 Species Categories, and a New Open Benchmark for Wildlife AI
Conservation X Labs and Meta released SA-FARI, a large open-source multi-animal tracking dataset for wildlife video: 11,609 camera-trap clips, 16,224 masklets, 942,702 boxes and masks, and 741 independent locations.
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Wildlife Volunteering in South Africa: Comparison Guide for International Students
A practical, ethics-first comparison of South African wildlife, marine, reserve, sanctuary, and conservation volunteer programmes for students planning a study, gap-year, or career-building trip.
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The State of AI in Wildlife: A Global Field Guide to the Smartest Things Happening in Conservation Tech
A global overview of how artificial intelligence is changing wildlife conservation: camera traps, bioacoustics, individual animal ID, drones, satellites, anti-poaching, fisheries monitoring, animal communication, foundation models, and the limits that still matter.
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Technology in the Field: A Practical Guide to the Tools, Platforms, and Infrastructure That Power Modern Conservation
From GPS collars and camera traps to offline data apps, radio networks, satcom, and operations platforms like EarthRanger and SMART — a practical map of the technology that keeps conservation teams working in the world's wildest places.
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How to Process Wildlife Images: A Practical Guide for Junior Field Rangers
A plain-language field guide for turning raw camera-trap and wildlife images into clean, useful conservation records using safe file handling, metadata, AI-assisted review, human verification, and responsible reporting.
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Ingwe Research Program — 200 Leopards, One Full-Time Person, and a Model Worth Watching
Operating across 31 reserves in the Greater Kruger, Ingwe has individually identified over 200 leopards. They run five research projects on one salary. This is how they do it.
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What to Use When You Find Something in the Field
A field scientist's honest comparison of CyberTracker, ODK, SMART, Survey123, Fulcrum, iNaturalist, and Field Log — the apps that turn observations into data.
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What We Learned Building Offline-First Software for the Field
"Works offline" are the hardest three words in software. What broke, what held up, and what we'd do differently.
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How to Set Up a Biodiversity Monitoring Protocol
A no-nonsense field guide to designing biodiversity monitoring that actually works. From indicator species to occupancy models, camera traps to eDNA, and the five mistakes most programmes get wrong.
Read more → Camera Trap Software Compared
An honest, no-hype comparison of camera trap tools: Wildlife Insights, MegaDetector, Timelapse, Camelot, AddaxAI, TrapTagger, and SpeciesNet. What each does well, where each falls short.
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A Field Guide to GPS Accuracy
Why your phone says 3 meters but your points are 40 meters off. How GPS actually works, what goes wrong in the field, and how to get better accuracy without a survey crew.
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A Letter to Humanity
A data-driven open letter documenting the state of our planet. Every number is real. Every source is cited. Every trend is accelerating.
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