Tedious lecture? No thanks. Dull workshop? Absolutely not. The WILDLABS Variety Hour is an opportunity to share projects, ask questions, get answers, meet collaborators, make friends, have enlightening conversations, and engage with the conservation tech community in a new way.
The best part? With every Variety Hour having a different panel of guest speakers, you can never predict what you'll learn or who you'll meet! You might catch a speed talk from a community member working halfway around the world, learn from a leading conservation tech expert, discover a new tool, test your wildlife trivia skills, or find a new opportunity. Maybe you'll even do all of the above!
Joining Variety Hour means coming together with other folks passionate about conservation tech. The energy and excitement of sharing this space create the perfect conditions for great ideas and discussions to ignite.
By the time you leave, you'll not only have learned something new but also feel empowered knowing you're part of a global community making an impact worldwide.
The 2025 Variety Hour schedule
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.
- February 26: Featuring talks from Grace Melone on using computer vision for bumblebee monitoring, Esteban Rodofili on studying whale migration from space, Stephanie Mitchell on enhancing epidemic intelligence for wildlife disease, and Stefano Puliti on 3D forest vision. Recording available!
- March 26: Featuring talks from Janey Fugate on the Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration, Santiago Martinez Balvanera on using Whombat to build a citizen science platform for annotating bat recordings, Samantha King on Marine Monitor (M2), and Akos Ledeczi on an animal-borne acoustic gunshot detector. Recording available!
- April 30: Featuring talks from Julia Wiel on a standard for acoustic data sharing, Jeremy Vuillermet on how to visualize spatio-temporal data sets like camera traps and audio recordings, Tom Denton on BirdCLEF+ 2025, a competition to apply machine-learning expertise to identify under-studied species based on their acoustic signatures in Colombia, and Niki Amini-Naieni on CountGD. Recording available!
- May 28: Featuring talks from Amir Patel on measuring 3D motion of cheetahs, Kelsey Prediger on combining Indigenous knowledge with technology like camera traps, Earth Ranger, and satellite tracking for pangolin conservation, Luke Browne on Chocó Forest Watch, a free, open-source web application designed to lower the technical barriers to high-resolution deforestation and land use monitoring for conservationists, and, Ben Weinstein on DeepForest, a python package for airborne object detection focused on biodiversity monitoring. Recording available!
- June 25: Featuring talks from Seema Lokhandwala on monitoring elephant presence and communication, Mercedes Quintana on landmarking x-ray anole images, Alexander Merdian-Tarko on pathways to open source conservation, and a long talk from Shauna Mahajan on ElinorData.org. Recording available!
- July 30: Featuring talks from Kevin Darras on Worldwide Soundscapes: A Synthesis of Passive Acoustic Monitoring Across Realms, Vanessa Prema: Audio Analysis of Hume’s Leaf Warbler Project, Timothy Keitt on Do-it-Yourself Sensing with the BioSense Platform, and Roxanne Beltran and Allison Payne on Novel Acoustic Recorders for Eavesdropping on the Ocean Soundscape. Recording available!
- August 27: Featuring talks from Courtney Shuert on Beluga Bits, Tomi Piriyev on Loko offline GPS tracker, Riley Knoedler on BatCopter, a custom made drone for bat surveys with novel AI workflows to process thermal and acoustic data, and Breanna Shi on The Human-Augmented Analytics Group. Recording available!
- September 24: Featuring talks from Luke Ditria on "high power" devices in remote locations, Tim Fallon on EVERYWHERE Communications, Ismael Brack on drone mosaic images, and Jared Marley on financing a healthier wildlife tech ecosystem.
- October 29: Featuring talks from Parker DePond on Near Infrared Spectrometry (NIR), Carolina Ugarte on acoustic risk cues, Lindsey Higgins on Pivotal, and Pen-Yuan Hsing on the importance (and misconceptions around) open source tech for conservation.
- November 26: Featuring talks from Laura Boffi on a participatory project with Finnish reindeer herders, Andrew Cook on a national hedgehog monitoring platform, Sarah Radford on autonomous insect traps, and Ștefan Istrate on the SpeciesNet global classifier.
Do you want to speak at an upcoming Variety Hour Show? Email [email protected] with 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 on past episodes:
All episodes are available on our YouTube channel!
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