Hi David.

We're interacting with a lot of conservation organizations, more in the area of environmental monitoring/restoration than wildlife. However in regards to you're questions, this is what we're seeing. Also please remember, it's more from a commercial point of a view than academic.

• what sectors want R vs Python if you do programming/data science

It's probably best to know both. A lot of conservation organizations internally use R, but a lot of the tools that are coming out are python-focused. This is especially true with the machine learning tools.

• how to best represent all the weird random skills we end up picking up doing our work on a resume/CV

I think it's better to keep a focused CV that clearly expresses what you're looking for or your specialty. Rather than listing all the random skills that you've picked up, I recommend setting up either a portfolio or website where you can talk about all those additional details. For field researchers deploying technology, you have to be extremely resourceful so it's best to highlight that in a blog/portfolio website where you can explain more about what led you to come up with that solution, how you came about it, and the outcome. This would be extremely interesting to someone doing further research on you in anticipation of hiring.

• comparison of private sector / public service / ngo / academia as workplaces

I can't speak much for academia. From the NGO's we're talking to, the largest ones are kind of early in their conservation technology adoption. Nature Conservancy has a relatively mature conservation technology group that's well funded. Same for WWF. Other orgs we've talked to are more like dipping their toes in the water and often bring outside people to implement specific projects rather than maintaining their own internal resources. Smaller orgs either have no conservation tech departments or fledgling ones. I think many orgs are trying to determine if they need dedicated conservation tech resources and trying to define what that means to them. 

In private sector, if you have programming skills, you'd probably end up being a programmer. This is because software customization and improvement is a never ending task in commercial software. In most orgs, they'd likely expect python since it's more general purpose unless they explicitly ask for R. 

• how to identify sectors where there's going to be a lot of demand

In terms of wildlife conservation and wildlife conservation technology, the major data collection tools seem to be camera traps, bioacoustic recorders, trackers, GIS, and increasingly drones. The data processing tools seem to be R, python, and familiar with emerging ML tools for data processing. 

The common thread in all of this is that ecologists are drowning in a deluge of data. So being proficient in managing, analyzing, and processing data, especially in building tools to increase efficiency and productivity is probably one of the more desirable skills. Of course expertise in a specific field is important, but ecology is looking more like it also requires general purpose IT/programming skills. 

Akiba

I have had two this week. Is there a way to report/ block them?

Messages have started with "Hello Darling" so do not think they are conservation orientated 

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?

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!

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 :)