In July of 2025, we began work on an exciting new project to develop prototype smart traps for one of the planet’s most notorious invasive species, the brown treesnake (Boiga irregularis). This native of the Australia and New Guinea region was accidentally introduced to Guam in the 1940s and proceeded to decimate the island’s fauna.

We were awarded funding from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP). We’re working closely with the USDA’s National Wildlife Research Center to complete the work and will be traveling to Guam later this winter. More info on what this project entails can be found here.

Want to learn more about the history of the brown treesnake on Guam and its impacts? Check out this comprehensive presentation with Dr. Earl Campbell of the National Park Service for the Office of Insular Affairs.

In addition to Guam, one of the other places where we are active is in Florida, where we’ve worked closely with the University of Florida’s “Croc Docs”, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Wildlife Research Center’s Florida Field Station to test smart traps for invasive Argentine black and white tegus (large lizards introduced from South America via the pet trade).

Tegus are one of many invasive species impacting the native biodiversity of the sunshine state, and they are spreading rapidly in four Florida counties. As dietary generalists, tegus consume a variety of flora and fauna, including the eggs of reptiles and ground-nesting birds, and at-risk species such as hatchling gopher tortoises. University of Florida’s Dr. Melissa Miller recently gave a webinar for NAISMA highlighting the collaborative research we’ve done to develop and test smart traps with the Croc Docs and the USDA.

Wild Vision Systems’ prize winning tech is a landscape-scale solution to one of the biodiversity crisis’s most intractable problems, invasive species. Unlike the solutions employed up until this point in time, our system operates in a manner that is more sustained, strategic, and selective. Just how much better is our tech than the status quo? Our recent study with the University of Florida compared smart traps to the traditional traps that are the primary means of tegu control and found that use of smart traps resulted in a reduction of labor costs by 93% and bycatch by 94%. We fully expect that with further development, these numbers will only get better.

Our work in Florida with tegus is ongoing—stay tuned for updates.

🐢 Derek has been involved in freshwater turtle conservation for his entire career and continues this work today. He and colleagues at the University of Maine, the Center for Wildlife Studies, and the University of Arkansas just published their third paper in an ongoing effort to establish a new tool in the fight against the illegal wildlife trade, Combating the Illegal Turtle Trade Using Chemical Markers in the Journal of Wildlife Management.

Wild Vision Systems was founded by Derek Yorks and Ben Stookey. Derek’s wildlife conservation career spans more than 20 years, and includes applied conservation and research experience as a state agency reptile & amphibian specialist. Ben is a software engineer with more than 20 years of experience leading full-stack & mobile software development teams with a recent focus on AI, Edge ML, and computer vision. Derek and Ben’s friendship was established in 1998.

We’re a tech company, but maybe not a typical one. We fall into the emerging category known as “nature tech”. Want to learn more about the world of nature tech? The Nature Tech Collective made a nature tech sector map last year in collaboration with Conservation International (we’re proud to be on it!).

Please spread the word and share this newsletter with anyone you know who might also want to learn more about our work. And stay tuned for our next issue early this spring, where we’ll be sharing updates from our first trip to Guam and more.

Derek Yorks & Ben Stookey

Founders at Wild Vision Systems