Stephanie O'Donnell
- @StephODonnell
- | She / Her
WILDLABS
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.
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.
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 Schedule 2023
Keep the last Wednesday of the month free for The Variety Hour! We'll keep this list updated as registration goes live. You'll also find all upcoming events in our Events Calendar.
- Feburary 22: Catch up on the disussion about Google Earth Engine vs Microsoft's Planetary Computer, Moveapps, building a sensor to track turtles in India, and ChatGPT for conservation. Recording now available
- March 29: Catch up and learn about building autonomous camera traps for insects, updates about the arbimon tool for bioacoustics, the Biodiversity Accelerator+ which is now open for applications, and FruitPunchAI. Recording now available
- April 26: Catch up to learn more about new spin off BiodAIverse, research from GSMA and REDAA into the role digital solutions can play in improving natural resource management, focusing particularly on the power dynamics of using such technologies among local communities, work coming out of UCSB about using tags and traps to provide a new view of our impact on wildlife, and how the Sentinel AI project is looking to make wildlife monitoring as easy as possible. Recording now available
- May 24: Catch up to learn about the new Luminous tracking collar from Margo, the $11M XPRIZE Wildfire, a 4-year competition to innovate firefighting technologies that will end destructive wildfires, a community project about developing a system for monitoring snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan, and take away some top tips from the WILDLAB editor about showcasing your work for conservation tech readers. Recording now available
- June 21: Join us this month where we will explore a project from Australia that's using drones, underwater cameras and AI to monitor tropic freshwater fish in Kakadu NP, introduce NBM: the Nocturnal Bird Migration project tracking birds with bioacoustics and AI, get a report from the World Oceans Passive Acoustic Monitoring Day, and learn about using autonomous recording units to monitor a mainland African penguin colony. Recording now available
- July - we're all at ICCB! See you next month!
- August 30: 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. Recording now available
- September 27: 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. Recording now available
- October 25: 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. Recording now available
- November 22: Join us this month to hear about a new toolkit from Save the Elephants, a tool to help you to host, visualize, and share massive orthomosaics and 3D models, Earth Species Projects' work to apply ML to biologging data, and explore the emerging trends from our new 3-year report into the State of Conservation Technology. Registration now open!
Do you want to speak at an upcoming Variety Hour Show? We want to hear from you! Email [email protected] a short outline of what you'd like to present and we'll see if it's a fit for one of our upcoming events.
Catch up with past Episodes:
All episodes are available on our youtube channel!
Follow these links for specific episodes:
- Variety Hour August 2022 | Learn about challenges tracking sharks & rays from Sammy Andrzejaczek, hear an update from the AudioXD workshop from Justin Kitzes, have an introduction to Firetail data tool from Tobias Petri, & learn about The Nature Conservancy's mesh camera network project from Nathaniel Rindlaub.
- Variety Hour September 2022 | Featuring Adrià López-Baucells talking about technologies to monitor bats in Kenya, Felipe Vallejo shares his work monitoring hawksbill turtles in Equador, Laura Kloepper shares how she's building custom electronics for a hawk to carry through bat communities, and David Johnston talks about his incredible work with drones & whale tags in Antarctica.
- Variety Hour October 2022 | Featuring talks from David Rolnick introducing the Climate Change AI Community, Melanie Smith walking through the Bird Migration Explorer Platform, Christian Rossi shares the upcoming Earth Observation 101 Virtual Series, and Adrian Dellecker asks 'Is there a future for conservation NFTs?'
- Variety Hour November 2022 | Featuring Alasdair Davies sharing Club Arribada, an after-school conservation tech training programme in Principe, Andrew Schulz and Suzanne Stathatos introduce how you can use our new Conservation Tech Training and Education Group, and Phyllis Sherril and Janet Kavutha talk about building tech capacity among female conservationists in Kenya.
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