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The conservation tech community has the power to help us understand and overcome the enormous challenges posed by climate change. Join our Climate Change group to meet others who are passionate about using their expertise to innovate new solutions and find reasons to be optimistic about tech's potential in the fight against climate disasters.

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Sustained Effort: The Environmentalist’s Dilemma

Jacinta Plucinski
In this article from Jacinta Plucinski & Akiba of Freaklabs, they share advice on organising your thoughts around building short-term and long-term sustainability considerations into your conservation technology...

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Improving battery life in tech tools

Hi all,As you hopefully know, we're continuing our discussion of sustainability issues here on WILDLABS to celebrate our Sustained Effort series and open up...

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Here's another article I came across about tracking gear powered by animal movement, which would drastically reduce the need for batteries and increase the lifespan of biologging tools. Obviously an incredible innovation that ties into the discussions we've had in the Tracking Progress program about catapulting animal movement ecology tech forward, but also great to think about from a sustainability perspective!

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Sofar increases battery life of montioring buoys with sleep setting

This article covers how Sofar's Spotter monitoring buoys can collect data for longer periods of time by improving battery life. According to this article, "GPS Sleep turns off Spotter’s GPS sensor during sampling dwell periods, increasing its battery life by at least 25% and significantly extending the duration of its deployment at high latitudes."

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discussion

Current and future steps toward sustainability in conservation tech?

We’re exploring big questions in conservation tech sustainability as we build our next editorial series focusing on that very subject. As a global community focusing on creating...

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At Ceres Tag, it is important that we are sustainable and have little to no impact on the environment. 

  • The battery life of the tag is 10 years and is recharged via solar panels. One battery for the life of the tag.
    • No off-animal re-charging required
    • No additional batteries 
  • The only commercial, direct to satellite, animal monitoring ear tag 
    • No onsite infrastructure to set up or take down
    • No towers or other infrastructure such as receiving stations, radios or large power systems required
  • Biosecurity and pandemic safe. 
    • Ceres Tag staff do not need to visit sites where the tags will be applied
  • Our packaging is recyclable. 
  • Our e-commerce platform,  allows for direct purchase from cerestag.com.  
    • Which means, direct to manufacture order with little or no paperwork for ordering.  

By Ceres Tag designing the systems and tags in this manner, It will also allow for your carbon footprint to be minimal on the ground once you apply the tags. You can be anywhere in the world and view animals, without being in the same location

Most of what I have done has been in a couple areas: 

* Sensor re-use and repair, to the extent possible. This is an area where, especially with acoustic sensors, replaceable microphones have been a godsend that have really enabled us to extend the lifespan of older units

* Rechargeable batteries for some deployments. These don't travel well and don't have quite the life of alkalines, but for our sensors that are easily serviced (local to us) we use rechargeables to minimize waste. This was originally a long-term cost-cutting measure but has also let us minimize e-waste as a convenient side effect.

More generally, in my thinking about climate, it's worth it to emphasize that the carbon budget isn't zero, it's just finite. There are carbon-intensive activities that are sometimes worth it, it's mostly a question of how do we evaluate that. In the case of conservation tech work, if we can use our knowledge and skills to, for example, minimize bird or bat take from renewable energy in ways that improve generation uptime or reduce community backlash, that can more than offset (in conceptual, if not concrete terms--I haven't done the math on this yet) a few higher-emissions research or conservation activities. Of course, we should work to minimize our impact however we can, but our sector is such a very small portion of the global economy and so our contribution to the broader decarbonization push is likely a better use of our collective time and resources.

Nearly the year anniversary - Just 29 days away from when I first wrote this reply! We have made some major updates and also we are bringing forward new products

All of Ceres Tags products are still direct to satellite with no towers

Update

New Product!

We listened to our customers and brought out Ceres Ranch. The tag has all the same features as Ceres Trace yet, it is redeployable. It is as simple removing it from the current animals, and applying it to the next animal.  

  • Reusable where you can use in multiple projects. This means over 3 years, you could have over 1000 days of insights.
  • Transfer ownership to the next owner

We would love to see researches getting out as much information and insights as possible. These tags are made for deployment and not to sit in a draw. If you do have tags and want to run through on how to transfer ownership to another researcher, please reach out.

 

Activity Monitoring

Ceres Wild activity monitoring is an algorithm that has been developed by sampling the pattern of behaviour of cattle, this is then expressed on a scale of 1-63 with 1 meaning low activity and 63 meaning extremely high. With each data point you receive you will receive a value of 1 – 63 which represents the activity of that animal. Fast moving animals will have results that are expressed on the higher end of the scale while slower animals will sit on the lower end. 

 

New Algorithm

Recently we have added the algorithm to Ceres Trace and Ceres Ranch tags. What algorithm you ask. Well one that Australia's CSIRO and NSW DPI has been working on for the past 15 years! The algorithm is called Pasture Feed Intake (hit the link to find out more)

  • Following 15 years of research and development and thousands of hours of testings, Ceres Tag's Pasture Feed Intake (PFI) is available on Ceres Trace and Ceres Ranch tags now. Along with up to 4 standard data packets, Ceres Trace & Ceres Ranch tags will now receive and additional daily summary packet with Pasture Feed Intake information.

 

Wildlife and rural crime researches

With a lot of projects and researching now impacting wildlife, livestock and human interactions, I wanted to bring to your attention the recent program on rural crime - VIDEO: Satellite Stock Squad: A new weapon helping to combat livestock theft

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Climasens: Using technology to understand and respond to climate change

Climasens’ platform is now being used by Australian Councils to support disaster resilience efforts. It’s inaugural product, HeatSens, is being used to bridge the gap between emergency management and climate change preparedness to better inform efforts and investment towards climate change adaptation, especially in areas where vulnerable populations exist.

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discussion

Congo Basin activity?

greetings - I am helping coordinate a visit by the incoming director of national parks for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in mid-late June. He is very interested to...

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greetings!

 

i sent you a PM regarding this, feel free to contact me however is most convenient for you -

 

regards,

chris 

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careers

Climate Change Manager, Arm

Arm
We are looking for a dedicated and knowledgeable Climate Change Manager to support the delivery of Arm’s carbon reduction commitments, including reporting and compliance. The ideal candidate will love details and...

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Climate crisis drives a rise in human-wildlife conflicts

New article about how climate change and human-wildlife conflict go hand-in-hand. Would be interesting to hear from our climate change and HWC groups about how climate scientists and community members who are innovating HWC tech solutions could work together collaboratively to understand and address this growing problem.

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funding

Amazon Sustainability Accelerator

Are you building a sustainability start-up and want to maximise your impact? We want to support you! We are looking for startups developing sustainability-focused products or recycling technologies that help keeping...

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