Active members
Active discussions
Comments
Resources
With experts across the WILDLABS community working with every type of technology and in every imaginable environment, our platform is a great place to find advice and resources on choosing what tools are right for your conservation project. Whether you're in the market to try a new camera trap model, want to experiment with drones for the first time, or need help weighing the pros and cons of data management tools, there's someone in the WILDLABS community who can help you make a smart and informed choice!
The Community Base is our general gathering group. It's the place where we cover more general, big picture topics in conservation technology - ones that don't fit neatly into our other groups. If you don't know where to post something, just post it in this group. Our moderators will move it if needed!
At our Community Base, you'll find updates from the WILDLABS team on upcoming events and opportunities, and have the chance to shape our programs and platform with your opinions. And most importantly, the Community Base is also home to our Welcome to WILDLABS thread, the best place to introduce yourself to us and the community. Stop by and tell us what you're working on!
Whether you're new to WILDLABS and want to know where to begin, or you're a longtime member looking for a handy bank of resources, our Getting Started on WILDLABS thread will be your one-stop guide to getting the most out of our platform.
Want to find out more about WILDLABS? Check out our recent community call:
Header image: Ana Verahrami/Elephant Listening Project
Group curators
WILDLABS
I'm the Community Manager at WILDLABS
- 18 Resources
- 500 Discussions
- 28 Groups
WILDLABS
I'm the WILDLABS Research Lead at WWF-US
- 3 Resources
- 46 Discussions
- 22 Groups
WILDLABS Coordinator based in Southern California
- 5 Resources
- 100 Discussions
- 14 Groups
Octophin Digital
Application Developer at Octophin Digital and constant maker.
- 0 Resources
- 4 Discussions
- 4 Groups
BearID Project
Conservation biologist using camera traps to develop automated methods of photoID
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 6 Groups
PhD student from Brazil. Currently I am using satellite transmitters and biologgers to study the behavior of the sei whale
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 3 Groups
Marine conservationist turned tech guy turned biodiversity investor.
- 0 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 1 Groups
Wildlife Protection Solutions (WPS)
Technology Coordinator at Wildlife Protection Solutions
- 0 Resources
- 7 Discussions
- 8 Groups
A budding wildlife researcher focusing on giraffe.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 3 Groups
Conservation Newbie, Technologist, Applications Developer, Hardware Tinkerer
- 0 Resources
- 17 Discussions
- 9 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 3 Groups
WILDLABS Coordinator based in Southern California
- 5 Resources
- 100 Discussions
- 14 Groups
I study acoustic ecology, community ecology, and social justice in conservation
- 1 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 2 Groups
Data Scientist
- 0 Resources
- 6 Discussions
- 11 Groups
Fauna & Flora International (FFI)
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 2 Groups
The Pratt & Whitney E-STEM Awards applications will support new and existing programs that engage students in environmental problem solving through STEM with grants up to $15,000 USD and prizes up to $50,000. Open...
14 June 2022
Careers
Are you passionate about making a meaningful impact on our community? Seattle-based Vulcan is looking to hire a science leader to support its work advising the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
04 June 2022
Lacuna Fund seeks proposals from organizations interested in developing datasets for equitable climate outcomes in climate & energy and climate & health.
03 June 2022
Community Announcement
We're so pleased to introduce you to the new WILDLABS Platform. For the past year, we've been hard at work building a new home for our conservation technology community. Now that it's time to welcome members new and...
06 May 2022
Community Announcement
Welcome to WILDLABS! Our new platform is full of ways to engage with our global conservation technology community and connect you to members, resources, opportunities, events, and more. Read on to learn about how you...
06 May 2022
FFI is now accepting applications for The Conservation Leadership Programme's Executive Manager. The closing date for applications is Sunday, 24 April 2022. Download the Application Pack here.
07 April 2022
Careers
The FieldKit team is now seeking a freelance Graphic Designer with a passion for conservation technology! If you'd like to use your skills to connect with a conservation technology community, please send a cover letter...
08 March 2022
Ventana Wildlife Society is now seeking a Communications and Digital Media Coordinator to join their team and use digital media to tell the story of their work, including the conservation technology-heavy recovery...
16 February 2022
We're proud to introduce the first WILDLABS On the Edge Fellows for 2022, Loretta Schindlerova and Meredith Palmer! Working alongside expert Edge Impulse mentors, these two fellows will use embedded machine learning to...
10 February 2022
Following the release of our 2021 State of Conservation Technology research and report, the WILDLABS community has been featured in many articles, including two new features in The Hill and Mongabay. Header Image: ...
10 February 2022
Community Announcement
AI for Conservation Office Hours: 2021 Review
WILDLABS Admin
We've wrapped our first AI for Conservation Office Hours, a new programme where we set up 1:1 sessions with conservationists using or thinking about using AI so they could receive expert guidance from data scientists at...
14 December 2021
Community Announcement
The State of Conservation Technology 2021
WILDLABS Admin
Today is the launch of our first annual State of Conservation Technology Report! Explore insights from this first-ever global, community-sourced assessment of the state of the field.
13 December 2021
August 2022
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
---|---|---|---|---|
I mentioned this on the twitter thread as well, but I'd love to do a proper life-cycle carbon analysis on some key monitoring technologies and compare them to in-person monitoring... |
|
Community Base | 18 minutes 1 second ago | |
@gracieermi & I are happy to announce the latest update to the Conservation Tech Directory, bringing our total... |
|
Acoustic Monitoring, AI for Conservation, Biologging, Camera Traps, Community Base, Data management and processing tools , Drones, eDNA & Genomics, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 3 hours 27 minutes ago | |
I'd agree with other folks but I also think that the things that might be really useful might be more concrete, things like what sectors want R vs Python if you do... |
|
Community Base, Early Career | 3 hours 56 minutes ago | |
Hi everyone! After our big launch of messaging last time, this week has mostly been minor fixes and tidying stuff up but I decided we'd be transparent about all these... |
|
Community Base | 3 days 1 hour ago | |
Hi Carly, Thanks for digging up my previous thread (I couldn't find it). I guess I've been asking this question for a few years now!I had also heard of grants from car... |
|
Community Base | 5 days 4 hours ago | |
Hi Isobel, Great to hear from you! I would love to learn more and connect so that I can discuss with the team further. You can reach me here: [email protected] . Thank... |
|
Community Base | 6 days 17 hours ago | |
This is a great one! I will be attending virtually.Though did not receive any feedback to the emails I sent them about issues registrating. Had to call them from Italy to get a... |
+7
|
Community Base | 1 week ago | |
Hello Everyone!I am a research and development technologist at Margo Supplies. We specialize in providing wildlife management technology so that humans and animals can co-exist... |
+155
|
Community Base | 1 week 2 days ago | |
Hey all!I'm well into my journey into the field of conservation now, after volunteering and freelancing for a couple of different organisations over the past two years, and am... |
|
Biologging, Community Base, Open Source Solutions | 1 week 3 days ago | |
ha, I totally didn't expect you to jump into this thread Netty but I'm here for it! Your twitter takeover this week has been super fun to watch, definitely one of my highlights... |
|
Community Base | 1 week 3 days ago | |
Hi Courtney, Over on Twitter your question has had a useful reply from CodeforPDX:Steph |
|
Community Base | 2 weeks 5 days ago | |
Hats off to your hard work, Steph! The new platform looks amazing. I'm excited to start exploring. :) |
|
Community Base | 4 weeks 2 days ago |
New Conservation Tech Directory update
27th June 2022 at 04:45pm
What are your biggest sustainability challenges and issues in your work?
27th June 2022 at 04:18pm
Grants for vehicles
21st June 2022 at 05:10pm
21st June 2022 at 09:33pm
There was a previous Wildlabs thread on this - https://wildlabs.net/discussion/conservation-grants-field-vehicles but it didn't garner any comments unfortunately.
I'm not sure if IdeaWild allows for car repairs? The grants are for equipment specifically. That's a small grant anyways though ($1500) so you'd probably need something bigger it sounds like.
I don't know of any grants specifically funding this, but most people I know who have gotten vehicles have applied for bigger grants that they write a new vehicle into as a budget line item (e.g., WWF, WCS, CI, MBZ, national agencies like NSF).
22nd June 2022 at 03:58pm
Hi Carly,
Thanks for digging up my previous thread (I couldn't find it). I guess I've been asking this question for a few years now!
I had also heard of grants from car companies but it seems they stopped doing this (or limit their support to areas around their factories, like Toyota).
On the lookout for CAD/Microcontroller work!
17th June 2022 at 05:04pm
Conservation Tech Career Pathways - what do you want to know?
17th June 2022 at 01:30pm
18th June 2022 at 06:56pm
What do you think?
I think this is a great idea! Absolutely relevant. Thanks for considering.
Would you be interested in seeing this?
I sure would be.
What would be most useful?
A quick pathway to switch to conservation IT. I know at early career there is a lot of interest. For me personally I am trying to make this switch very late in career. So quick pathways are important to me. But excited about everyone's interest!
How do you think we should tackle it (i.e. format - events etc)?
Couple events lasting not more than 1 hour each that is recorded for later viewing. Focused on roadmap to switch.
Who would you love to hear from?
People who are already established in Conservation IT and making decent salary.
What questions do you want answered?
Quickest road map to switch to conservation IT and making decent living. Max 2-3 options on road maps so that it is not too overwhelming.
21st June 2022 at 09:52pm
I think this would be awesome!! I worked at my university’s graduate career center (focused on PhD/Master’s students) for 2 years and it really changed my whole perspective on non-academic careers particularly. I’ve done some non-academic careers workshops with my dept here and am happy to be involved/help plan if this is something you want to push forward. I’ve got lots of resources compiled too from said workshops that folks are welcome to take a look at here.
At the career center we would do alumni panels on different themes like “careers in ed tech” or “careers in science writing” etc etc and bring in people from that sector. I wonder if we could do a similar thing here. It could be organized by tech (careers w/ drones, careers w/ camera trapping, etc.) or by employer type (careers in government, careers in international nonprofits, careers in corporations, etc.). And then either way you do it, have the panel represented by the tother topic, i.e., for careers in government have people working with drones vs eDNA, etc. or for careers with drones have people from companies, academic centers, etc. It might also be worth bringing on hiring managers too for the panels, at least for some of the bigger entities e.g., Microsoft, Google, etc.
We would also do blogs and podcast episodes profiling people which we could do here too, potentially similar to the layout of WILDLABS' Technical Difficulties Series or From the Field series in compiling a book of examples/experiences featuring people in different areas.
Just some initial thoughts, but bottom line, very excited for any sort of professional/career development programming in conservation tech!
27th June 2022 at 04:15pm
I'd agree with other folks but I also think that the things that might be really useful might be more concrete, things like
- what sectors want R vs Python if you do programming/data science
- how to best represent all the weird random skills we end up picking up doing our work on a resume/CV
- comparison of private sector / public service / ngo / academia as workplaces
- how to identify sectors where there's going to be a lot of demand
Invitation to Silverstrand Capital's Biodiversity Accelerator+
17th June 2022 at 11:28am
18th June 2022 at 03:49am
Hi Stephanie,
Thanks for getting back! I have updated the link to our website, where we have our launch event recording and the application form for companies.
In short, we are looking for companies past ideation stage employing either nature tech and/or nature-based solutions. While this is a global call, we will prefer if the company is currently operating in or have intent to operate in South East Asia. We have more examples at our website but I will be happy to answer your questions if any.
Do follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/silverstrand-capital/ and feel free to share with your network as well! We do see biodiversity as a serious crisis to tackle and we want to empower founders that are mission-aligned with us.
Dean
20th June 2022 at 01:05pm
Hi Dean,
I love the sound of this accelerator, it's the sort of thing I'm looking to support through Cambridge Consultants' Tech for Good initiative. We're engineers, scientists and designers who could help with advice around building a first prototype of a new technology, or what it takes to get a technology to market quickly, just for example. Would you like to connect for an initial exploratory chat?
21st June 2022 at 02:49am
Hi Isobel,
Great to hear from you! I would love to learn more and connect so that I can discuss with the team further.
You can reach me here: [email protected] . Thank you so much for your interest!
Dean
Silverstrand Capital Biodiversity Accelerator+
17th June 2022 at 11:03am
Friday check in - what have you been working on this week?
17th June 2022 at 09:17am
17th June 2022 at 10:42am
Alrighty, since I may as well participate in my own thing and I have thoughts about the tech4wildlife world this week..
It's been a very welcome calm week over with our team. It's been a really crazy nine months so it feels like this week has been the first time we've had a chance to do a big inhale.
I'm still so happy the new wildlabs platform is live out in the world and you all seem to be enjoying it - we've had 250+ new members join in the last few weeks, users are up 70% compared to this time last year and pageviews are up 160%. And we're seeing heaps of activity!
That pageview figure is particularly important for us for right now, as it means we're hitting that big goal of making all the great information sharing by our community easier to find and explore. As activity keeps scaling up, the challenge we're going to face will be about curation and making sure it's not just overwhelming. We have some tools, ways of configuring the site, different roles and new programmes ready to respond and help with that, but for now we're just happy you're all finding and starting to use the platform.
We are doing deployments every week to fix bugs, improve performance & launch new features. This week was a big one- our DM system went live, which has been the most requested feature. If you're curious, @FilipNest is providing an amusing deployment log here.
This week we've also been doing a big feature about our East Africa Community - @Netty_Cheruto took over all our socials (@wildlabsnet and WILDLABS Community) to share updates from the first workshop of our Women In Conservation Tech Programme: Kenya.
Our East Africa Community is the first regional WILDLABS community. It is the first step in our plan to establish locally led regional communities to connect and support #tech4wildlife practitioners all over the globe.
And finally, this week I've also spent a lot of time poking around various parts of the #tech4wildlife ecosystem. A few highlights..
This week I'm seeing a lot of questions coming up about career paths in #tech4wildlife. More than usual - which makes me wonder if it's time for us to do a proper series sharing different career paths people have taken into the sector (shout out if you want us to do this?)
EDIT: I'm getting DMs about this, so have started a thread here if you have ideas about us doing a series about career paths. Tell us your ideas here!
If you have advice..
- @soumyabhatta ya is asking how to make the jump from a 30yr IT career into conservation over 3-6 months Conversation here
- If you're in the bioacoustic world, PhD student @esnyder is planning his next career steps and is curious to hear about realities of different #bioacoustic career paths. I like how he frames his questions quite specifically and I'm curious to see replies, so please jump in. Conversation here
- The final one is a bit different/interesting - @Joyeeta is looking for cofounders in a climate/conservation tech company, and brings a background in engineering and experience from raising $15m for his last company and 2 exits. Conversation here
My favourite ongoing convo this week is this discussion about solutions for tracking goats on a remote mountainous island. So much good advice and real experience being shared in it.
My favourite open question. We're seeing that most straight foward #tech4wildlife questions are being answered pretty quickly by our community, but if you're into #drones, @LindyClydeKnowlesasked one yesterday that still open but should be a simple answer if you have a moment. He's looking for advice about open source photogrammetry software options.
Finally, my fav article this week was from the team at Fieldkit about the impacts of the chip shortage on conservation tech - we've been hearing a lot of chat about this from our community, so the article and the subsquent comments on twitter etc have been interesting.
Right, I think that's a wrap from me. Our digest will hit inboxes in the next few hours so I'll drop a link to it as a final tweet to wrap this thread then. In the meantime - how's your week going? Would love to hear/see updates!
Steph
17th June 2022 at 12:30pm
This has been a really exciting week for me! A lot of cool stuff happening in the WILDLABS East Africa Community. Well, first of all we launched the community and I am happy to see all the interactions happening there. If you are based in East Africa- have you joined the Community? If not, then, head on over here; introduce yourself, take time to explore the resources we have and engage in the discussions- I am looking forward to your inputs on ongoing discussions e,g:
- If you are using EarthRanger, I'd love to hear all about your interactions with the tool here.
- What are some of the Conservation Technology gaps in East Africa? Share your insights here.
Then, I also had a hand in reporting on the first workshop of our Inaugural Women in Conservation Technology Programme; this was a great reminisce of the week we had with the cohort and I'm really excited for what lies ahead and to also witness the impacts of capacity building and mentorship on emerging conservation leaders. If you haven't already, you can catch up with all the updates in this article, and in our socials (Twitter and LinkedIn), as Steph has mentioned.
Aside from that, I came across a couple of interesting projects and work, that we will definitely highlight in the community. It was a great week and I'm looking forward to continue on with learning, interacting, exploring and highlighting more on conservation technology!
Netty.
17th June 2022 at 12:43pm
ha, I totally didn't expect you to jump into this thread Netty but I'm here for it! Your twitter takeover this week has been super fun to watch, definitely one of my highlights :)
Pratt & Whitney Global E-STEM Awards
14th June 2022 at 03:39pm
Science Director, Vulcan

4th June 2022 at 10:50am
Lacuna Fund: Datasets for Climate Applications grant open
3rd June 2022 at 08:33pm
NICFI Satellite Data Program & GEO Indigenous Alliance: Indigenous outreach
2nd June 2022 at 08:41am
What events/workshops are you looking forward to?
1st June 2022 at 12:12pm
6th June 2022 at 09:33am
Hi Steph,
Great to hear back. Yes, mostly working on forest conservation and fire in the West but also conservation finance (analog and automated platforms to leverage public/private funding) and remote sensing a fair bit. I need to get back to carnivores! How about you?
Best,
V
6th June 2022 at 03:49pm
Sounds great Stephanie, thanks! I think I'm going to go ahead and put a post in the main Acoustics group also, and then will use the instructions to link that post to the event calendar. Thanks again!
20th June 2022 at 11:25am
This is a great one! I will be attending virtually.
Though did not receive any feedback to the emails I sent them about issues registrating. Had to call them from Italy to get a response, was not fun -.-" ! But very excited about this event, hopefully everything runs smoothly for us attending virtually, although I'm a little discouraged.
Cheers :)
WILDLABS Platform Updates
31st May 2022 at 09:20am
7th June 2022 at 09:28pm
Hi everyone,
Another little update on changes and fixes we've been making to the WILDLABS Platform.
Mostly bug fixes this week. Most of these are responding directly to issues / feedback raised by members so please keep letting the WILDLABS team know if you come across something wrong. Thank you to everyone who reported these.
June 07, 2022:
- We fixed a compatibility issue with many interactive parts of the site and desktop Safari versions 13 and below. Users on these Safari versions should be able to edit your profile and other things now.
- Fixed an issue where people were not alerted that they hadn't filled in a required field on the user profile form if it was in a different tab so they couldn't know why the form was failing to submit.
- Fixed an issue with the layout of events on the events page when an event header image wasn't set.
- The default state for content was draft which was being set accidentally, so we've made content default to published. The actual draft functionality remains as before.
- Added careers and funding opportunities to the site-wide search as they weren't being picked up.
- Added back the 2021 State of Conservation Technology Report to its own dedicated page on the Platform.
16th June 2022 at 01:12pm
Hi everyone!
Another update on improvements we've made to the WILDLABS Platform. This week's deployment is a big one and has a single focus as we've launched the new (private, direct, instant, chat...) messaging system. You should see "message" buttons on community members across the site and a messaging button in the top of your toolbar when logged in. (You can exclude yourself from messages in your profile settings if you don't wish to be contacted).
This is a giant, tricky bit of functionality that needs to feel seamless and easy to use. We're really happy with what we've put together but there will no doubt be bugs to fix and improvements to make. There'll be some improvements coming in next week but we hope you can already jump in and start networking with other members of the community.
Please let the WILDLABS team know if you run across anything you feel needs fixing or have any suggestions.
June 16, 2022:
- Messaging system
- Fixed a bug where comments on articles were being trimmed to a fixed length. Thank you to @andse and @carlybatist for spotting this. One of those funny bugs which highlights that we must have been only testing comments with "test test test" and short sentences!
---
Shout out to @Cris in my team at Octophin for doing a huge chunk of the messaging work.
24th June 2022 at 07:04pm
Hi everyone!
After our big launch of messaging last time, this week has mostly been minor fixes and tidying stuff up but I decided we'd be transparent about all these Platform updates so here's what we've been up to.
June 24, 2022:
Functionality improvements
- Improved the search when mentioning someone so it can now cover all parts of a full name, not just the start of a username.
Styling and output changes
- Usernames were being duplicated on some card layouts when no header image was provided
- Removed some "message" buttons that were available to not logged in users (going to an access denied page)
- Removed "th/st/nd" from some dates to make dates easier to read for all audiences
- Improved the profile picture display when visiting a profile on mobile
- Changed the click area size on tabs on the about page
- Fixed some word wrapping on tables
- Centred usernames on comments as the alignment was off
- Fixed an issue with consistent group resource card sizing
- Improved table display inside articles to make long tables scroll horizontally
- Tidied up the like count display on articles
- On some browsers the discussion comment date was moving around when clicking the open replies box so fixed this.
- Funding opportunities and careers opportunties were showing a stray "introduction text" label in some displays.
---
Shout out to front end developer @valeria in my team at Octophin for doing loads of these.
And also a GIANT shout out to Ronan (@RHugtenburg) who after a year of being the greatest placement student ever has left Octophin to go back to University to finish their degree. They're the best level of budding conservation technologist so I'd hugely recommend anyone after a future programmer keeping an eye out for their future plans.
Passive Acoustic Monitoring - Malagasy Training Workshop
9th May 2022 at 04:10pm
27th June 2022 at 07:18pm
I mentioned this on the twitter thread as well, but I'd love to do a proper life-cycle carbon analysis on some key monitoring technologies and compare them to in-person monitoring. With all the carbon embodied in sourcing sensors, SD cards, batteries, etc how long do you have to run your sensors to make them better in carbon terms than in-person surveys?
A paper just came out on this that could provide an interesting starting point. https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.10333