How the Raspberry Pi became key to the Arribada wildlife monitoring project
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A frame captured by Raspberry Pi Zero and camera module
For conservationists, the high cost of camera equipment is a huge barrier to their work monitoring species populations and behavior. Arribada 's affordable and rugged Raspberry Pi-based kit is undoubtedly a turning point.
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Today, time-lapse photography and remotely accessible monitoring tools are often used in conservation, but back in 2017, when Davies founded his nonprofit, Arribada, these were still cutting-edge technologies. Passionate about bringing attention to threats to wildlife in different habitats and regions, he set out to develop low-cost monitoring tools, believing that the cost of equipment should not be a barrier to saving endangered animals. He has built and designed a variety of conservation observation tools, from a camera trap that detects an animal passing by and wakes up, to a device that sends an alert when a specific animal appears.
Davies founded the environmental organization Arribada (the name means "arrival," a reference to the migration and birth cycles of sea turtles) to use technology to make a positive contribution to the environment. The Raspberry Pi is essential to Arribada's wildlife monitoring projects.
challenge
Arribada needed a rugged, low-cost kit that could be used in remote areas, often without human intervention. Their first project was a tag to monitor green sea turtles: the tool would show the impact of fishing and human activity on this endangered species and open up discussions about what protections might need to be introduced for endangered species.
To track sea turtles, Arribada’s solution needed to be waterproof at the depths the creatures swim and be able to operate reliably without human intervention. It also needed to be both affordable and easily accessible to local research teams.
Raspberry Pi hardware powers remote monitoring unit for penguin population
solution
A Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi Camera module are housed in a lightweight waterproof housing. The device can be attached harmlessly to a turtle's shell to track its progress through the sea. The device can capture photos, videos, and location data.
"Once the video was recorded, the tag was released from the turtle's shell and retrieved from the water two weeks later. This allowed us to capture video footage of the behaviour of both male and female turtles," Davies explained.
One challenge with monitoring sea turtles is that GPS location tags are only effective when the creatures surface, which is usually less than two seconds. Waking up monitoring equipment to get a triangulated fix isn't quite instant, so Arribada developed its own Horizon Assisted-GPS tag as a key part of the Raspberry Pi Zero-based kit.
The kit means it’s not just possible to tell where the turtles are, but also what they’re doing. The first turtle tags were developed when AI and machine learning were still in their infancy, but Davies says we’re in a completely different space now. “You can imagine the benefits of running AI models for turtles on a Raspberry Pi device: we can wake the device up, capture a scene, process that scene, and we can even have the device make some intelligent decisions like: is this worth recording? Should it go back to sleep, or should it stay awake?”
In addition to deciding whether to continue monitoring a location, perhaps going into a sleep cycle and waking up again an hour later to see what has changed, using a Raspberry Pi also provides machine learning benefits. We can take these models, sit down and train them more, fine-tune them, and review video content. Because the Raspberry Pi is very affordable, we can do all of this at a very low cost.
This approach is the beginning of Arribada becoming a sophisticated research partner, and the conservation group is "really looking at what Edge ML is going to do. We still use it on the Raspberry Pi. We're not just using it for monitoring turtles."
Raspberry Pi-powered camera unit monitors penguins in Antarctica
Others require custom solutions. This was the case in Cyprus, where the Society for the Protection of Sea Turtles (SPoT), one of the country’s oldest conservation charities, was keen to explore the use of LoRa radio communications to monitor fishing activity.
Arribada’s boat-based LoRaWAN gateway provides a detailed overview of local fishing activity and reports on anything that could impact five key sea turtle breeding sites along the country’s coast. The requirement to register a SIM card after four months made using it for cellular communications cumbersome, so a LoRaWAN setup using a Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi Power-over-Ethernet HAT was adopted. This setup also means that the boat owner does not need to pay for any tracking system. An antenna on an eight-meter pole can clearly see any fishing boats within a 15-kilometer radius, providing a powerful and visible monitoring system.
Why Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi has become a cornerstone of almost all of Arribada's projects. It's always been one of the tools he uses "because it's so accessible and affordable for anyone to use," Davies explains. "You're always working with researchers or local community members who are working with an NGO and have a specific challenge. We're called in to solve that problem with technology. They always say it has to be affordable, repairable, and easily accessible while being repairable."
Davies has used various Raspberry Pi HATs to create the tools he needs, but after the launch of the Raspberry Pi Pico in 2021, he found that this low-cost microcontroller board often provides a solution.
result
Low-cost Raspberry Pi hardware has also had a big impact. Previously, many of the camera tools conservationists needed were so expensive that research projects were either unrealizable or ended up being severely limited in scope and impact. Often, the number of kits a project really needed was unfunded or expensive to repair and replace, meaning monitoring could only be done once, not repeatedly, and without the ability to track changes over time.
The turtle images collected by Arribada's Raspberry Pi tags help quantify turtle populations while also revealing where they lay their eggs, strengthening the argument for closing off certain beaches and coastal areas during certain times of the year — a crucial conservation measure for this endangered species.
A waterproof or weatherproof enclosure is usually the most expensive element of a kit.
Using off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi hardware (widely available and easily replaced or upgraded) to reduce costs was a turning point. In most cases, the 3D printed waterproof enclosure was the most expensive element of each kit. Instead of a 500 camera, a Raspberry Pi Camera Module costing less than 50 and a Raspberry Pi Zero or Zero W was enough. With the introduction of the new Raspberry Pi Camera hardware, Arribada was able to significantly increase its image and video capture capabilities. Being able to deploy more of the more affordable kits means that a wider area can be covered and more accurate population estimates can be provided.
Arribada also won the Penguin Watch project, an extensive research project to monitor penguin populations in different parts of the world. Arribada's Python-controlled Raspberry Pi camera setup was at least three times cheaper than the commercial cameras previously used by penguinologists. The reduction in cost meant the team had far fewer qualms about where to place the monitoring kit and were more relaxed about leaving equipment in place for remote monitoring, as some equipment would inevitably get damaged.
The hardware proved impressively resilient to temperature: the Penguin Watch camera unit survived three winters in Antarctica before a maintenance visit from Arribada's team. They were able to retrieve three years' worth of photos and found that the Raspberry Pi device had reliably woken up, snapped a photo once a day, and saved every image. These photo diaries documenting environmental changes and their impact on penguin populations contribute directly to discussions about climate change and habitat loss.
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