Wolf monitoring

Description

Belgium contains two wolf packs. One in Limburg and one in the Antwerp area. Wildlife Security Innovations was founded out of a desire to use technology developed out of a personal security sphere and it’s rich set of features make it ideally suited to help people co-exist with wildlife. How does that work? Well.. people are the most dangerous animals on the planet. But people also want to feel safe for their family and animals. If people are unable to feel safe then this never ends well. For densely populated areas like the Netherlands and Belgium this results in conflict.

As with both human and large carnivore threats, early enough detection can avoid conflict. Wolves are just trying to survive and have a right to share the planet. A right which is increasingly difficult due to the success in dispersal of the human race. Wildlife Security Innovations has mature technology that can very rapidly detect threats, provide for live validation of the threat (Very important) and if required illicit almost any technilogical response you can imagine.

A fair compromise in sharing our space with wolves is to allow wolves to freely roam so long as they are not posing an active threat.

Knowing how dangerous humans are, wolves mostly restrict their hunting to night. In the case of this Belgian site, this monitoring facility has shown that the wolves are merely using the paths they need to to get about. The electric fence around the fields and the very protective horses within the field seems to be working well in keeping the threat at bay. This also seems logical because wolves are very intelligent animals as an intelligent animal would not damage a critical route close to it’s den. Which means that we can sit back and enjoy observing the life style of the wolf pack. A very interesting venture indeed.

What we did

• Designed a solar charge and power solution
• Deployed into a field with a large solar panel
• Setup alerting and video recording for both thermal and visible cameras
• Adapted and implemented various power saving mechanisms to prolong the life throughout the winter time

Solar powered and self sufficient

We are using a very large solar panel here. It’s a 600W bi-facial panel. Though it only costs around 100 euros inc vat. The AI in this system not a tiny model as is only possible in microcontrollers, but is a 20 million parameter yolov9 model. This requires some grunt. We are using low-cost Raspberry Pi 5’s for our low cost platform.

This is in a field of horses in an area frequented by wolves.

The Wildlife Security Innovations smart wildlife camera is multi-camera by design.

In this case, we have an ultra low-light Sony imx585 based module with a high-resolution (640x512) thermal imaging module below it.

To see some videos, check out our YouTube channel.

We have many great videos made with the system, such as this one.

Results (sample)

• A very rapid response, highly reliable self sustaining wolf monitoring site
• Collected easily enough high resolution thermal images to build a very nice thermal trained model
• Experience some amazing observations. Thermal imaging offers amazing insights at night, with a view far into the distance