You’re invited to the WILDLABS Variety Hour, our monthly community event connecting you to the exciting projects, research, and ideas that are happening in conservation tech right now.

You never know what you’ll find and who you’ll meet at our Variety Hour, and that’s part of the fun! You might catch speed talks from community members working around the world, learn from a leading conservation tech expert, discover a new tool, test your wildlife trivia skills, find a great opportunity - maybe you’ll even do all of the above.

The WILDLABS Variety Hour isn’t a show, or a lecture, or a workshop. It's an engaging, fun, and interactive gathering, giving you a welcoming space to share your own projects and resources, ask and answer questions, have insightful conversations, meet collaborators, make friends, and get to know the conservation tech community in a new way. 

Great ideas and discussions are sparked when people who share a passion for conservation tech unite. When you come along to the Variety Hour, you’re joining a space full of people who care about conservation tech just like you; when you leave the Variety Hour, we hope you’ll take away fresh inspiration and the knowledge that you belong to a global community who are making an impact in our field all around the world.

The Variety Hour: September 2024

That's right, September Variety Hour is happening in October! This month, we have three speed talks from Aamir Ahmad, Kirah Forman-Castillo, and Juan Sebastián Ulloa, followed by a longer talk from Emily Dorne. 

Aamir Ahmad will kick off this month's Variety Hour by sharing about WildCap, a project to develop autonomous drones to conduct behavioral research on Grévy's zebras in Kenya and Przewalski's horses in Hungary. Kirah Forman-Castillo will tell us about MarAlliance's sea turtle conservation efforts, including how they use GPS tags to track and monitor male sea turtles. Then,  Juan Sebastián Ulloa will introduce scikit-maad, an open-source Python package designed for the quantitative analysis of environmental audio recording. Finally, Emily Dorne will provide an update on a no-code custom AI for camera trap species classification, allowing conservationists to train custom species classification models that can then be used to label images, all without writing any code.

Sound fun? We'll see you there! 

Agenda

• Aamir Ahmad (@aamir) | WildCap: Autonomous Non-Invasive Monitoring of Animal Behavior and Motion
• Kirah Forman-Castillo | Sea turtle conservation and the significance of monitoring male sea turtles
• Juan Sebastián Ulloa (@jsulloa) | Using Python to Decode Nature’s Rhythms
• Intermission | The WILDLABS Quiz 
• Emily Dorne (@emilydorne) | No-code custom AI for camera trap species classification

Past Recordings

Can't wait for this Variety Hour? Why not check out our past events! You can find all of the on our YouTube Channel. 

• Variety Hour August | Featuring talks from Héloïse Frouin-Mouy about acoustic imaging sonar that reveals northern elephant seal behavior, Diego Balbuena on GPS tags that monitor the success of rehabilitated and reintroduced Andean condors, Lucie Laporte-Devylder on infrared cameras that detect thermal tracks left behind by humpback whales, and Kakani Katia about an underwater community science experience that improves AI algorithms. 
• Variety Hour July | Featuring talks from @NevilleCLS on Argos satellites for animal tracking, @DaveGaynor on using airborne synthetic aperture radar to detect snares, @saraolsson on using ChatGPT for wildlife monitoring, and @LuciKirkpatrick on recording movement behaviour in small animals with tiny equipment. 
• Variety Hour June | Hear about Move BON, a new initiative to mobilize animal tracking data in support of national and global scale conservation goals, a multi-sensor bee monitoring system, thermal imaging applications in conservation, and an effort to build an AI-assisted evidence synthesis pipeline using LLMs, with the ultimate goal of building a living evidence database that is able to keep up the the rapidly growing scientific literature. 
• Variety Hour April | Featuring talks from @Annacq on bridging biodiversity and business, @BrunaTeixeira on using acoustic indexes as an indicator of anthropogenic pressure, @kklibra on mitigating human-wildlife conflict & illegal trade through IT solutionsm, and (@capreolus on bridging classical biodiversity monitoring with emerging bioacoustics and AI
• Variety Hour March | This month we're talking about making AI more accessible with Pytorch, new developments from WildMe and TagRanger, and working with geospatial data with Fauna & Flora.