The first week of March we had the kick-off meeting of our new project WildINTEL “Building a scalable WILDlife monitoring system by integrating remote camera sampling and artificial INTELligence with Essential Biodiversity Variables”.
The meeting took place in Huelva, South Spain, and gathered an interdisciplinary group of 13 experts in ecology, conservation biology, wildlife monitoring, mathematics and computer science. The project aims to develop an automated monitoring system for European wildlife by integrating efficient sampling, data management, analysis tools, citizen science, and artificial intelligence to produce Essential Biodiversity Variables.
The project is exciting, and ambitious but also challenging. We will work closely with our partners from Huelva University, the University of South-Eastern Norway, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, GBIF Spain Coordination Unit CSIC and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as with stakeholders from the pilot study areas. We will work to create a platform where stakeholders involved in monitoring mammal communities can upload camera trap media and obtain species and community estimates periodically and in a semiautomated way.
Our automated monitoring platform will help to track changes in the abundance of multiple species over time and across space. Also, it will allow to sharing of the data and variables through GBIF, EuropaBON and GEO BON contributing to the public use of biodiversity data for research and upscaling the possibilities for wildlife monitoring and conservation.
The key message of the meeting is that time is running and we have to cross important milestones to achieve very ambitious goals. Challenge accepted! No time to lose.
Please stay tuned for upcoming news about this project and possible ways to contribute to it.