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: March 2024

This month, we'll have three speed talks from Zhongqi Miao, Chelsea Smith, and Craig Rackstraw, followed by a longer talk from Jason Holmberg and Lasha Otarashvili. 

Microsoft's Zhongqi Miao will open this month's Variety Hour with Pytorch-Wildlife, an open-source deep learning platform evolved from its predecessor MegaDetector, designed for creating, modifying, and sharing powerful AI models while emphasizing usability and accessibility, making it suitable for individuals with limited or no engineering background. Chelsea Smith will share her work with Fauna & Flora, where she collaborates closely with local teams and partners to pull together and analyse multiple datasets to map land cover use and landscape connectivity to inform continued community engagement and land use practices. Craig Rackstraw is joining us from the Icoteq team to talk about their TagRanger tech and how this is redefining animal tracking and finding, with ad hoc wireless networks and software-defined technology. And finally, Jason Holmberg and Lasha Otarashvili from the WildMe team at ConservationX Labs will share their recent breakthroughs with multi-species re-id models and share what this means for your potential use of machine learning in conservation. 

Sound fun? We'll see you there!

Agenda

• @zhongqimiao | Pytorch-Wildlife: A Collaborative Deep Learning Framework for Conservation
• @Chelsea_Smith  | Fauna & Flora: Bringing geospatial data and people together for enhanced conservation management
• @craig  | TagRanger: Redefining animal tracking with ad hoc wireless networks and software-defined technology
• Intermission | The WILDLABS Quiz with Henry Rees
• @holmbergius  and @LashaO | Faces, Flukes, Fins, and Flanks: How Multispecies Re-ID Models are Transforming Wild Me's Work

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 October | Join us this month to hear about a low-cost design for an aquatic stereo  camera, a cost-effective design for nocturnal, infrared video recording, The Inventory, the dynamic, wiki-inspired platform we've been building for conservation tech, and a whirlwind update of google's work on AI for nature.
• Variety Hour September | Join us this month to hear about developing a Polar Bear satellite ear tag transmitter, how 3D tech is being used in forest ecology, Digital Earth Africa's work to make Earth Observation data open and accessible for the African contient, and using an open-source accelerometer to track a cryptic turtle species.
• Variety Hour August | Join us this month to hear more about the new £3.6m funding call from UKRI supporting innovation in AI for biodiversity monitoring, discover Gundi, a technology platform that allows conservationists to seamlessly integrate any hardware with any conservation software, learn how Collabora works to support open source projects, and meet the founder of ConTech Africa and hear about her work to bridge conservation issues to tech solutions.