Stephanie O'Donnell
- @stephodonnell
- She / Her
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: Join us this month 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. Registration now open
Save the date, last Wednesday of the month is reserved for Variety Hour:
- May 24
- June 21
- July 26
- August 30
- September 27
- October 25
- November 29
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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