A more economical way to crowdsource camera trap image classifications?

Pen-Yuan Hsing and Philip Stephens, Conservation Ecology Group, Department of Biosciences, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom DH1 3LE (@MammalWeb) This blog post is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. You can read the full research paper here. To conserve biodiversity effectively, we need to know where and in what abundance it occurs. Breeding bird…

An evaluation of camera trap performance – What are we missing and does deployment height matter?

Caitlin Jacobs Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA   Camera traps are a powerful research tool that is becoming increasingly important in the field of wildlife biology. Researchers all over the world use camera traps to assess a wide range of ecological questions, such as wildlife distribution, composition, abundance, density, population trends…

Using remote sensing to map the Earth’s last frontier – a recap of the 2018 GeoHab conference

From 7–11 May, the GeoHab community met in Santa Barbara, California, for its annual conference. GeoHab, which stands for Marine Geological and Biological Habitat Mapping, is an international and multidisciplinary community of marine scientists that includes acousticians, biologists, ecologists, geologists, oceanographers, and spatial scientists, to name a few. One of the objectives of GeoHab is…

International Day of Women and Girls in Science

Over the past 15 years, there has been great effort to inspire and engage women and girls in science. However, according to a study conducted in 14 countries, the probability of women graduating with a Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree and PhD in science-related field are 18%, 8% and 2% respectively, while those percentages for male…

Satellite data fusion: what it is, and what it could do for ecology and conservation science

Henrike Schulte to Bühne Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, UK   In the 21st century, ecologists and conservation scientists have embraced satellite imagery as a valuable tool for mapping and monitoring ecosystems, species and threats to biodiversity. Multispectral and radar satellite data in particular have become mainstream sources of ecological data. These two…

Remote sensing for coastal ecosystem monitoring and management

Call for content for Special Issue Coastal ecosystems, such as mangroves, salt marshes, corals and seagrasses, provide substantial benefits to humanity, yet are under ever-increasing threat of degradation and disappearance from a combination of land use and climate change (such as sea level rise, drought and storm intensity). With about 10% of the global human population living in…