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
- @StephODonnell
- | She / Her
WILDLABS & Fauna & Flora
I'm the Executive Manager at WILDLABS.
- 152 Resources
- 665 Discussions
- 30 Groups
- @TaliaSpeaker
- | She/her
WILDLABS & World Wide Fund for Nature/ World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
I'm the WILDLABS Research Specialist at WWF-US
- 12 Resources
- 56 Discussions
- 24 Groups
- @EllieW
- | She/Her
- 64 Resources
- 124 Discussions
- 14 Groups
Noé
Hi! I am Aurélie, a dedicated French ornithologist and engineer specialized in conservation technologies. I am currently Program manager for the biodiversity of natural habitats' program in a French NGO called Noé.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 5 Groups
WILDLABS & Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)
I hold a PhD in Biological Sciences and specialize in bioacoustics and passive acoustic monitoring of cetaceans in the Argentine Sea and Antarctica. Recently, I've also embraced computing to leverage technology in enhancing our conservation efforts.
- 0 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 14 Groups
- @Adrien_Pajot
- | He/His
WILDLABS & Fauna & Flora
Hi! I am Adrien, a dedicated French ornithologist and engineer committed to biodiversity conservation. I joined the WILDLABS team as a project manager in October 2023!
- 13 Resources
- 55 Discussions
- 3 Groups
FruitPunch AI
CTO and Founder of FruitPunch AI
- 0 Resources
- 4 Discussions
- 11 Groups
Apasionado por la vida en el campo y la electronica aplicada a proyectos de conservacion
- 0 Resources
- 37 Discussions
- 3 Groups
Freaklabs
I'm an engineer and product designer working on wildlife conservation technology.
- 0 Resources
- 272 Discussions
- 14 Groups
Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Behavioural ecologist @CNRS in France - working mostly on ungulates in Europe and Africa
- 0 Resources
- 5 Discussions
- 6 Groups
Aarhus University
Biologist and Research Technician working with ecosystem monitoring and research at Zackenberg Research Station in Greenland
- 12 Resources
- 216 Discussions
- 7 Groups
DIY electronics for behavioral field biology
- 1 Resources
- 50 Discussions
- 4 Groups
- @tkswanson
- | she/her
San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
Research Coordinator II for the Conservation Technology Lab at SDZWA
- 2 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 7 Groups
San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
Wildlife ecologist with a passtion for conseration technology.
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 4 Groups
Saint Louis Zoo
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 13 Groups
Apply to the inaugural GOSH Ambassador Program by June 15!
18 April 2024
Article
Are you interested in getting more involved in the WILDLABS community? Do you want an opportunity to build your network and get more connected to other conservation tech folks in your field? Apply to be a group manager!
17 April 2024
We’ve received lots of interest in opening new groups on WILDLABS, so we’re rolling out a formalized process to get them off the ground.
15 April 2024
Careers
The Fonseca Leadership Program is open to nationals of eligible countries within WWF-US and GEF priority areas who are already enrolled/are interested in enrolling in a master’s or PhD program. Eligible countries...
3 April 2024
What can soundscapes tell us about ecosystem functioning and health? We are looking to hire a postdoctoral researcher in ecoacoustics for Nature Recovery at Oxford
2 April 2024
A grant of $150,000 will be awarded to one successful applicant with a proposal that's strongly linked to biodiversity and conservation. The grant will support a research project or programme for up to three years (...
2 April 2024
18 month postdoc research position, Netherlands, EU-funded
28 March 2024
After a long application review and finalisation process, we are thrilled to finally announce the winners of the WILDLABS Awards 2024!
26 March 2024
Article
You’re invited to the WILDLABS Variety Hour, a monthly event that connects you to conservation tech's most exciting projects, research, and ideas. We can't wait to bring you a whole new season of speakers and...
22 March 2024
As we launch the search for our third Women in Conservation Technology cohort, let’s take a moment to reflect on the highlights of our 2023 journey and shine a spotlight on the incredible women of our inaugural...
22 March 2024
SMART Global Congress, the first global gathering of conservation professionals using SMART, was held in Windhoek, Namibia from March 10-13. Here is a snapshot of what we learned!
19 March 2024
The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (SNZCBI) is seeking two postdoctoral fellows to engage more directly with identifying conservation metrics for vertebrate communities and populations.
14 March 2024
May 2024
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June 2024
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October 2024
February 2024
December 2023
November 2023
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Hey David, Awesome, that sounds perfect! I'll email you some of the guidelines and a basic outline to get started with next week! Thanks again, excited to have you... |
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Community Base | 2 years 11 months ago | |
Read more: The G.AI.A series: Artificial Intelligence and Planetary-Scale Environmental Management, @davethau: https://medium.com/g-ai-a Dave Thau... |
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Community Base | 2 years 11 months ago | |
Check out this update for a sneak peek at early results and more info about why this research matters. Do you agree with the trends so far? Let us know on the survey. |
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Community Base | 3 years ago | |
https://www.goodtechfest.com/agenda The Good Tech Fest focuses on nonprofits, philanthropy, and some civil society projects. It's... |
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Community Base | 3 years 1 month ago | |
Hey All, We recently funded a number of Conservation Tech projects on Experiment (more than $40k was raised by all the teams/projects... |
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Community Base | 3 years 2 months ago | |
Hi everyone! Just dropping in to say we've seen more than 150 photos shared in this year's #tech4wildlife photo challenge already! We often hear it's really... |
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Community Base | 3 years 2 months ago | |
@StephODonnell perhaps tweeting this out from the Wildlabs account to increase coverage? Froilán and Edgardo - what do you mean by 'experienced'? That can... |
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Community Base | 3 years 2 months ago | |
Hello Everyone! UC Berkeley's Fung Fellowship is looking to increase its lecturer pool for its Conservation + Tech course. ... |
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Community Base | 3 years 2 months ago | |
Dear Wildlabs members I work for Effervescence, a French independent movie production company. We create fictions and documentaries for... |
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Community Base | 3 years 3 months ago | |
Awesome! I'll spread the word! |
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Community Base | 3 years 4 months ago | |
Hi Ryan, this sounds great! |
+21
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Community Base | 3 years 4 months ago | |
Hi Wildlabbers, After a holiday break, Tech Tutors Season 2 continues with our forth episode, featuring Doug Clark, Joseph... |
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Camera Traps, Ethics of Conservation Tech, Community Base | 3 years 4 months ago |
Senior Software Engineer, Skylight
21 February 2024 3:44pm
Technical Field Officer
21 February 2024 3:40pm
Data Scientist at United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
15 February 2024 5:22pm
Gender Representation in the WILDLABS Awards 2024 Submissions
13 February 2024 5:37pm
21 March 2024 9:59am
1 April 2024 4:30pm
Funded PhD Opportunity: Moose Acoustics at the University of New Hampshire
13 February 2024 1:21pm
Post-doc possition - Field spanning movement ecology, ecology of fear, bio-logging science, behavioral ecology, and ecological statistics
10 February 2024 7:20am
WILDLABS Awards 2024: Meet the judges
9 February 2024 9:52am
Conservation Technology Intern - The Wildlife Restoration Foundation
8 February 2024 7:52pm
World Wildlife Day 2024 UN Celebration & Networking Event
6 February 2024 2:37pm
6 February 2024 9:08pm
Southern African Wildlife Management Association Conference 2024
6 February 2024 12:20pm
Passionate engineer offering funding and tech solutions pro-bono.
23 January 2024 12:06pm
26 January 2024 3:18pm
Hi Krasi! Greetings from Brazil!
That's a cool journey you've started! Congratulations. And I felt like theSearchLife resonates with the work I'm involved round here. In a nutshell, I live at the heart of the largest remaining of Atlantic forest in the planet - one of the most biodiverse biomes that exist. The subregion where I live is named after and bathed by the "Rio Sagrado" (Sacred River), a magnificent water body with a very rich cultural significance to the region (it has served as a safe zone for fleeing slaves). Well, the river and the entire bioregion is currently under the threat of a truly devastating railroad project which, to say the least is planned to cut through over 100 water springs!
In face of that the local community (myself included) has been mobilizing to raise awareness of the issue and hopefully stop this madness (fueled by strong international forces). One of the ways we've been fighting this is through the seeking of the recognition of the sacred river as an entity of legal rights, who can manifest itself in court, against such threats. And to illustrate what this would look like, I've been developing this AI (LLM) powered avatar for the river, which could maybe serve as its human-relatable voice. An existing prototype of such avatar is available here. It has been fine-tuned with over 20 scientific papers on the Sacred River watershed.
And right now myself and other are mobilizing to manifest the conditions/resources to develop a next version of the avatar, which would include remote sensing capacities so the avatar is directly connected to the river and can possibly write full scientific reports on its physical properties (i.e. water quality) and the surrounding biodiversity. In fact, myself and 3 other members of the WildLabs community have just applied to the WildLabs Grant program in order to accomplish that. Hopefully the results are positive.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that our mobilization around providing an expression medium for the river has been multimodal, including the creation of a shortfilm based on theatrical mobilizations we did during a fest dedicated to the river and its surrounding more-than-human communities. You can check that out here:
Let's chat if any of that catches your interest!
Cheers!
2 February 2024 1:22pm
Hi Danilo. you seem very passionate about this initiative which is a good start.
It is an interesting coincidence that I am starting another project for the coral reefs in the Philipines which also requires water analytics so I can probably work on both projects at the same time.
Let's that have a call and discuss, will send you a pm with my contact details
There is a tech glitch and I don't get email notifications from here.
Let's save our environment
31 January 2024 12:52pm
Remote Sensing and Research group at Dedan Kimathi University have come up with this ebook after a project observing the deterioration of part of the aberdare.
I always welcome efforts that involve young learners so that they benefit and participate. Thank you RSRG Team.
Power managment/Recharging System and Communication System
2 January 2024 4:06pm
26 January 2024 8:49am
"Seychelles and South Africa did not allow Starlink to operate"
This is not good, has implications for anti-poaching measures.
26 January 2024 9:03am
Power usage for microcontrollers with solar is much more manageable. For Raspberry Pi's and higher it gets expensive and big.
I'm quite impressed by the specs from the Goal Zero Yeti devices. This can have high capacity and be charged with Solar. Not small though. And the price is not in proportion to the Pi's.
So this 200x model for example, would be close to 16 days running the audio recorder. Let's say 10. without solar. Add solar? Depends on the size of the panels I guess. Power usage for mobile networking? Depends on how much you transmit.
Probably some well documented experiments would be really nice for people here. Sounds like something nice for the next set of grants :)
26 January 2024 2:11pm
Real nice video. I'll have another look in the weekend in detail.
Need advice - image management and tagging
12 January 2024 7:55pm
15 January 2024 8:47pm
Interesting, Iʻll give it a shot. Looks like this could save me some time.
Thanks for the explanation @wade!
24 January 2024 5:16pm
I have no familiarity with Lightroom, but the problem you describe seems like a pretty typical data storage and look up issue. This is the kind of problem that many software engineers deal with on a daily bases. In almost every circumstance this class of problem is solved using a database.
In fact, a potentially useful analysis is that the Lightroom database is not providing the feature set you need.
It seems likely that you are not looking for a software development project, and setting up you own DB would certainly require some effort, but if this is a serious issue for your work, you hope to scale your work up, or bring many other participants into your project, it might make sense to have an information system that better fits your needs.
There are many different databases out there optimized for different sorts of things. For this I might suggest taking a look at MongoDB with GridFS for a couple of reasons.
- It looks like you meta data is in JSON format. Many DBs are JSON compatible, but Mongo is JSON native. It is especially good at storing and retrieving JSON data. Its JSON search capabilities are excellent and easy to use. It looks like you could export your data directly from Lightroom into Mongo, so it might be pretty easy actually.
- Mongo with the GridFS package is an excellent repository for arbitrarily large image files.
- It is straightforward to make a Mongo database accessible via a website.
- They are open source (in a manner of speaking) and you can run it for free.
Disclaimer: I used to work for MongoDB. I don't anymore and I have no vested interest at all, but they make a great product that would really crush this whole class of problem.
25 January 2024 8:32am
Hi!
I would take a look at
Although developed for camera trap imagery, it is by no means restricted to such.
Cheers,
Lars
How are Outdoor Fire Detection Systems Adapted for Small Forest Areas, Considering the Predominance of Indoor Fire Detectors?
8 January 2024 4:27pm
22 January 2024 6:35pm
Fire detection is a sort of broad idea. Usually people detect the products of fire, and most often this is smoke.
Many home fire detectors in the US use a radioactive source and measure the absorption of the radiation by the air. More smoke means more absorption.
For outdoor fire detection, PM2.5 can be a very good smoke proxy, and outdoor PM2.5 sensing is pretty accessible.
This one is very popular in my area.
Kenya Forest Club, Central Region – Kenya Forest Club
20 January 2024 2:53pm
It has been an exciting challenge as a member of Kenya Forest Club whose main aim is solving climate change challenges through early childhood education and training, with a particular interest in forestry.
The club hopes to have members in all schools and setup of tree nurseries
SDZWA Conservation Tech Summer Fellowship
9 January 2024 7:04pm
Happy New Year WILDLabbers! What are you looking forward to in 2024?
2 January 2024 11:31am
2 January 2024 4:01pm
Excited for COP16 later this year in Colombia!
Other events of potential interest -
- World Biodiversity Forum
- European Congress on Conservation Biology
- North American Congress for Conservation Biology
- World Ecoacoustics Congress
- African Bioacoustics Conference
- (virtual) World Species Congress
- UNFCCC COP29
3 January 2024 8:48am
Some really great events to look forward to, thanks so much @carlybatist for sharing these!
Anyone going/presenting/talking at SICB?
1 January 2024 9:11pm
Apply to Beta test Instant Detect 2.0
11 May 2023 10:55am
21 December 2023 3:48am
Will you accept personal/hobbyist focused on conservation on their small plots of land (10-100 acres)?
I would, and know others, who would happily pay more than the official conservationists rate for the service, which could help to further subsidize the project. (Referring to your statement here: https://wildlabs.net/discussion/instant-detect-20-and-related-cost)
Seeking Host Organisations for Travel Scholarship Application
19 December 2023 12:54am
20 December 2023 3:07am
Hi Eva,
Me and my colleagues run a small NGO based on Yogyakarta in Indonesia, although our projects are spread around the country. One of our active project is working with the movement ecology of Sunda gharials in Berbak-Sembilang National Park. One of the other is for Malayan Giant Turtle conservation using one-plan approach, which we are planning to start in situ phase. We can't give you promise about anything, but are able to be the host organization and would love to talk the opportunity!
Cheers,
Dhanu
WILDLABS Colorado Conservation Tech Meetup
19 December 2023 12:04am
WILDLABS Platform Updates
31 May 2022 9:20am
13 January 2023 3:16pm
Hi everyone!
Happy 2023 and a slightly unusual bug fix to mark the first WILDLABS Platform update post of the year.
Our emoji / reaction system broke due to the library it relies on, Twitter's Twemoji, going down (for reasons discussed in the tweet link below). We have had to fall back to native browser emoji while a replacement / mirror of these is slotted in. This may mean emoji display slightly differently for you in the picker, more resembling your current device / browser.
Thank you to @Alasdair for sending me the below tweet which helped work out what was wrong:
If you use Twemoji for anything, it stopped working this morning with the deprecation of MaxCDN.
— Mike Coutermarsh (@mscccc) January 9, 2023
Twitter engineers had been working on a transition plan, but were laid off before it happened. Quite the thread!https://t.co/FiKF3gkpfu
13 December 2023 11:15pm
Hi everyone!
It's been a very busy year of development on the WILDLABS Platform but one with not many of these updates from me. This is mostly due to much of it being behind-the-scenes work that's hard to write about (I'll try below!), or huge, exciting projects and features that are launching in 2024. But I felt an update on some of the major changes we have implemented this year was due so here that is.
Before we go on to the main Platform, it's no longer a secret that we've been working with the WILDLABS Team on building The Inventory: a collaborative conservation technology wiki you'll soon see a lot of if you haven't already joined as a beta tester.
I thought, pretty sensibly given its scope, that the WILDLABS Platform itself was the most feature-full web project you could build, and then The Inventory came along and it's taken things to a whole other level. I'm so proud of what we've built for it and I'm so excited to see it launch and grow; with the entire sector benefiting from a place to find and collaborate on the tools needed to protect the world's life.
I'm looking forward to writing more about The Inventory next year, but there's a great overview of it and how you can get involved by the WILDLABS Team over at https://wildlabs.net/discussion/introducing-inventory-rise-conservation-tech-wiki
We've also got another major WILDLABS Platform feature launching very soon that will have a big impact on the community and its members' contributions. And it's fun. But more of that another time... 🦡
Onto those core platform updates:
Performance
With thousands of database queries, media and more pulled into every part of the site, tuning performance on the WILDLABS Platform has been one of the hardest challenges. I was going to run through an example of just how much information there is aggregated on a page (group statistics, user info, bookmarks, reactions, comments...) but it's a lot and I gave up. So I'll instead just mention some of the things we've done to speed things up over the year.
- Images have been compressed and automatically resized to a far better level than before throughout the system to reduce loading times
- We've cut down the amount of pings back and forth to the server to check for notifications and other live updates (an amusing major change was only checking for these things if the browser tab was active which meant those 100 WILDLABS tab users among you are no longer tiring out the CPU!)
- We've moved our caching system (not making a database query twice if the data hasn't changed basically) to the Redis in memory database system (this had a big impact)
- We've put even more things into that cache so they aren't re-loaded unnecessarily
- We've moved our servers (this week, hence the scheduled maintenance) to some new infrastructure which allowed us to speed things up even further by allocating more memory.
If there's anything in particular that seems slow for you (especially if it's regularly slow), please let the WILDLABS Team know so we can know where to focus on making the next set of performance improvements.
Notifications
Email notifications were something that took a good three total rewrites and a lot of thought to get right. They have been one of the hardest things to work out the best approach and technical structure for but we've got there I hope, and I hope you've liked receiving them (or opted out if you don't want them).
The new activity email notification system works by a user profile setting (you can edit this yourself) of after how many days of inactivity (not visiting the Platform at all) you would like to be notified of what happened while you were away. This comes in the form of:
- Direct messages you've received
- Mentions
- Comments / replies on posts you've made
- Reactions to your content
If none of this happens you don't get an email, you only get an email about the same updates once, and if you visit the Platform yourself you clear any emails from sending. This cuts down the notifications feeling spammy and just lets you know about the direct interactions other members had with your profile since you were last here.
On-Platform notifications (the little bell) remain separate and unchanged.
Other improvements
Here are some of the other bits that we've done across the site since I last posted an update:
- Dozens of design and visual usability tweaks, especially on mobile, to make things more usable and readable. A big shout out to front end developer @valeria who moved on from Octophin this month for all her work on the Platform over the last few years.
- Embeds of external links should be faster and clearer now as we've built our own system off the back of the iframely embed service and cached them the first time they're loaded.
- We've tidied up some of the information collected on events and careers and made certain things required so that it's clearer what something is about and who it is for.
- Introductions / summaries are now compulsory on all content.
- The little hover popups on people's names are in more places across the site (not just mentions) and have more useful, clearer information in them.
- There are some new sort options in the members directory, including sorting a search by members' contributions to the community (also look out for some more tools to count your Platform contributions coming soon).
- We've rebuilt the list of a member's activity that shows up on their / your user profile into a paginated list that shows everything rather than only a handful of recent entries.
- We've rebuilt the sorting and filtering for the "global feed" and "my feed" to more accurately show what is going on on the site and in your groups. The "my feed" list especially should make much more sense now.
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From me and the rest of the Octophin team, I hope you've had a wonderful 2023 on and off the WILDLABS Platform. As challenging as it often is, seeing the activity and collaborations on here every day makes it one of the most rewarding projects to work on.
Looking forward to a whole new set of improvements and features in 2024!
18 December 2023 2:24pm
It's been awesome and a honor to work on this platform!
Keep up the good work!
Master Project Collaboration/Ideas!
4 November 2023 10:37pm
4 November 2023 10:58pm
My email address: [email protected]
14 December 2023 9:35pm
Hi Zach,
Our organization (SEE Turtles) has a campaign working on the illegal tortoiseshell trade around the world called Too Rare To Wear. We are going to be updating our Global Tortoiseshell Report next year and one of the gaps we have in data is in China, where the illegal trade is now happening most frequently on platforms like WeChat.
We'd be interested in discussing with you if interested in how we might be able to gather some data on this trade in the country. I'm including a couple of links below about the program and the last report and will reach out by email.
-Brad
Watch now - The State of Conservation Technology: 3 Year Trends
13 December 2023 5:25pm
WILDLABS.net Scheduled Website Maintenance
Head of Partnerships
Conservation of Kikuyu Escarpment Forest
1 December 2023 12:38pm
WILDLABS Awards 2024: Supporting accessible, affordable, and effective innovation for nature
1 December 2023 11:00am
14 February 2024 1:37pm