FIT in JMP: Monitoring giant panda populations
Sky Alibhai, Director and Co-Founder, WildTrack
Zoe Jewell, President and Co-Founder, WildTrack
Binbin Li, Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences of the Environmental Research Center, Duke Kunshan University
Arguably the world’s most iconic species, the giant panda needs help. And to help this endangered species, conservationists need reliable data on numbers and distribution. That's where WildTrack and Duke Kunshan University scientists come into play. Together with researchers from the Chinese government, these scientists employ a cost-effective, non-invasive and community-friendly footprint identification technique to collect footprint data from giant pandas. Then WildTrack builds highly accurate algorithms to classify individuals and determine their sex, which is the most successful giant panda data collection and analysis method to date. Yet the conservation methods continue to evolve, deploying high-resolution drones to capture footprints in previously inaccessible areas, and exploring the application of deep learning to help filter increasing volumes of data as they come in. This work helps provide a promising future for wild panda populations and the protection of the other species that share this habitat that hosts some of the richest biodiversity on earth.
Zoe Jewell
President and co-founder of WildTrack, Zoe Jewell has a B.Sc. in Zoology/Physiology, an M.Sc in Medical Parasitology from the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (London University) and a veterinary medical degree from Cambridge University. A consultant for Animal Consultants International on matters relating to wild animal monitoring and welfare, Jewell is also a member of the Society for Conservation Biology. She has published on wild animal monitoring using noninvasive approaches and animal monitoring ethics. She is currently an adjunct professor at the Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University, an adjunct associate professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, and an associate academic at the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology in Sydney.
Sky Alibhai
Director and co-founder of WildTrack, Sky Alibhai has a B.Sc. in Zoology from Makerere University, Uganda, and a D.Phil in small mammal population dynamics from the University of Oxford. He is a fellow of the Zoological Society of London and a member of the Society of Conservation Biology. Alibhai has published widely on wild animal monitoring using noninvasive approaches. He is currently an adjunct professor at the Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University, an adjunct associate professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, and an associate academic at the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology in Sydney.
photo from this page: http://wildtrack.org/about-us/who-we-are/
Binbin Li
Binbin Li is the Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences of the Environmental Research Center at Duke Kunshan University. She holds a secondary appointment with Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Her research focuses on loss of biodiversity, endangered and endemic species conservation such as giant pandas, priority setting and management of protected areas, and promotion of innovative technology, markets and policies to solve conservation problems and local community development. Li got her PhD in Environment from Duke University (2017), M.S in Natural Resources and Environment from University of Michigan (2012), and B.S in Life Sciences with a dual degree in Economics from Peking University (2010). As a science communicator and nature educator, Li is a nature photographer with Swild in China and served on the advisory board for the Disney nature documentary “Born in China.”
Projections and Encapsulations
John Sall, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, SAS
As our tables get more numerous, our data gets bigger and our models have more features to encapsulate, we are looking for improvements to organize, contain and model. With the release of JMP 14, there are new ways to do all this.
