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
- 13 Resources
- 56 Discussions
- 24 Groups
- @EllieW
- | She/Her
- 64 Resources
- 124 Discussions
- 14 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
A researcher from Monash University working on developing Computer Vision facilitated insect monitoring systems for agriculture and entomology.
- 0 Resources
- 3 Discussions
- 2 Groups
- @szacoustics
- | he/him
Bioacoustics @CarbonRewild
- 0 Resources
- 7 Discussions
- 3 Groups
Software Engineer
- 0 Resources
- 5 Discussions
- 10 Groups
- @luciegallegos
- | she/her
Natural Solutions
As an agronomist engineer, I specialized in environmental management and resource conservation. 🌍 Interested in developing solutions for biodiversity conservation #indicators #monitoring
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 9 Groups
- @matt_hron
- | He/Him
Wildlife Protection Solutions (WPS)
Product Manager at Wildlife Protection Solutions
- 0 Resources
- 7 Discussions
- 8 Groups
University of Adelaide
- 0 Resources
- 10 Discussions
- 17 Groups
- @StuartHalewood
- | He/Him
I am Oceanographic Research Engineer at The University of California Santa Barbara specializing in Underwater imaging. Also an avid user and maker of Trail/Remote Cameras.
- 0 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 1 Groups
- @PierreBonnet
- | Pierre
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2828-4389
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 6 Groups
Care for Wild Rhino Sanctuary
Technology Manager at Care for Wild Rhino Sanctuary
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 7 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 8 Groups
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
The Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior at its sites in Constance and Radolfzell offers an international, interdisciplinary, and collaborative environment that opens up unique research opportunities. The goal of our...
13 March 2024
Hussey Labs seeks a senior post-doctoral researcher/senior research associate for movement ecology of Greenland halibut in the context of fisheries management across Baffin Bay-Davis Strait, Eastern Canadian Arctic.
13 March 2024
Texas A&M is seeking applicants for a fully funded Ph.D. assistantship to begin a long-term study on collared peccary (also known as javelina) ecology in southern Texas.
13 March 2024
The Lonely Hearts Club Challenge is a $1 million commitment and open funding call for early-stage organizations and solutions focused on fostering meaningful social connection, teen belonging, and wellbeing in a tech-...
13 March 2024
Article
Learn more about our new badges feature, including what badges are available and how to obtain them!
12 March 2024
We’re unveiling badges, a new feature that allows you to showcase how you’re involved in WILDLABS. Keep track of engagement, show off your collection, and maybe even engage in some friendly competition.
12 March 2024
Catch up on the conservation tech discussions and events that happened during World Wildlife Day 2024!
7 March 2024
WILDLABS was honoured to represent the global conservation technology sector on the world stage, joining the World Wildlife Day celebrations at the UN. As an invited speaker, Stephanie O'Donnell used her talk to share...
7 March 2024
Our team at WILDLABS has just been announced as the Canva Community Awards Campaign Champions Winner! 🎉 and we couldn't have done it without you!
5 March 2024
Do you have a solution to a global problem? Apply to Solve's Global Challenges, which are open to anyone, anywhere in the world between February to April each year.
4 March 2024
Whether you’re an aspiring or established entrepreneur, an early-stage startup, or a researcher, apply to the Project 71 – A Venture Competition for Ocean Regeneration. This competition is for you if you have a bold...
4 March 2024
June 2024
event
event
October 2024
November 2023
event
event
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
---|---|---|---|---|
Hello all! Bluspark is a plateform that allows natural area managers such as natural parks or reserves to optimize their day to day... |
|
Citizen Science, Community Base, Connectivity, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Ethics of Conservation Tech, Protected Area Management Tools, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 year ago | |
Here's a new one for your calendar! Circle the dates for this year's EarthRanger User Conference. Hosted in Cape Town from 1-5 November 2023, the EarthRanger User Conference... |
+6
|
Community Base | 1 year 1 month ago | |
Hey everyone,On Thursday 11th May, Howard Frederick from Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute will be covering a Tech... |
|
Community Base, East Africa Community, Protected Area Management Tools | 1 year 1 month ago | |
Posting this with the caveat that I have NOT listened to this yet so it's not an endorsement. I have skimmed the accompanying article though and found it through Simon Gardener... |
|
Community Base | 1 year 1 month ago | |
Hi Carly, many thanks for getting back to me and apologies for the slow reply. The internet has been down here for the last week. We do not currently do any acoustic monitoring... |
|
Community Base | 1 year 2 months ago | |
I'm obviously quite biased, but always looking for more acoustic monitoring stuff! ;) I think all conferences nowadays should be hybrid. We obviously have the capacity to do... |
|
Community Base | 1 year 2 months ago | |
Hi everyone,I am conducting a ~10 minute survey which I hope you can fill out and share with your networks... |
|
Conservation Tech Training and Education, Community Base | 1 year 4 months ago | |
intrested. |
|
Community Base, Data management and processing tools, Early Career, Emerging Tech | 1 year 4 months ago | |
Hi Steph. Would be interested also. |
|
Biologging, Community Base, Connectivity, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Remote Sensing & GIS | 1 year 5 months ago | |
Hello EO101 community!We hope you have enjoyed the EO101 lecture series! With all four parts now available on the WILDLABS YouTube channel... |
|
Earth Observation 101 Community, Community Base | 1 year 6 months ago | |
The year that never was... *sigh* Yeah, taking another shot at it would be nice. There was much enthusiasm from folks at the time! |
|
Community Base | 1 year 7 months ago | |
Thanks so much!! |
|
Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Biologging, Camera Traps, Community Base, Data management and processing tools, Drones, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 year 8 months ago |
WILDLABS Platform Updates
31 May 2022 9:20am
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.
-----------
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
WILDLABS Awards 2024: Further Information
1 December 2023 11:00am
WILDLABS AWARDS Webinar
30 November 2023 12:17pm
Wishlist for kit in a field-based Research Station or tech testing space?
27 November 2023 10:41am
28 November 2023 3:25am
Regine Weckauf over on linkedin:
'Little to do with research and tech development, but given how hard it is to attract and retain experienced staff to field based positions, I know it makes a difference how nice the space is. Just because it's the "field", shouldn't mean staff living in basic conditions, regardless of how many times we've been told to see it as a badge of honor. If you have the money, put in nice bathrooms, kitchen, living spaces, and private accommodation. Maybe even a nursery? It creates more local employment opportunities and people genuinely want to visit.'
28 November 2023 2:25pm
Love the idea for in-house gear/supplies! It can be SOO difficult to travel with batteries, electronics parts with airline regs, country policies, etc. and shipping recorders/trail cams/etc. gets VERY (prohibitively) pricey in some countries with customs and taxes. Would be great to have an in-country place to source that kind of equipment.
Housing educational resources related to that tech (in the form of people, print materials, computer tutorials) in-house would be similarly awesome. Particularly/especially in local languages.
Having in-country wet labs as well helps the eDNA/genetics folks, since sample import/export permitting can be (always seems to be?!) a nightmare, so if you can even just do PCR and/or extractions in-country that helps a ton.
In terms of overall field-station-wishlist - honestly, just the promise of continued funding and staff. Every field station I've been to or worked at is in a constant search for enough money to get through the next month/year, because the funding comes in the establish a station but then not to maintain it long-term. It's not sexy for a wishlist per se, but boy is it over-looked and much-needed.
@hikinghack from Dinalab would probably have lots of good insights on this!
29 November 2023 7:59pm
My suggestion would probably be a 3D printer and Solder Station with a stock of common components. With those two things you can solve most problems.
NSERC-CREATE Graduate Programs
27 November 2023 10:36am
Atos and WWF partner up to leverage technology to support biodiversity conservation
27 November 2023 9:32am
Atos & the WWF announced a 3-year strategic partnership to leverage technology to support biodiversity conservation & encourage businesses to decarbonize. 1 of the 4 main initiatives of the partnership is: Atos to develop responsible IT solutions for WWF & its partners.
Freshwater and Community Conservation Remote Externship
27 November 2023 8:31am
ICOTEQ launch TAGRANGER® system of products
23 November 2023 1:25pm
Catch up with The Variety Hour: November 2023
16 November 2023 12:59pm
Have your say: Take the 2023 WILDLABS State of Conservation Technology Survey
15 November 2023 9:20am
The State of Conservation Technology 2023: Five Key Findings
15 November 2023 9:20am
The Ultimate Biodiversity Fact Sheet. 14 stats to convince people about the importance of nature.
9 November 2023 5:10pm
You have probably been there before.
The person in front of you is not convinced that nature is that important.
🎉 Enter the stage: Fact Sheet.
✅ Sources so people can learn more
✅ Easy to save on your phone & use at any time
✅ Never look for powerful stats or arguments again
Insight; a secure online platform designed for sharing experiences of conservation tool use.
7 November 2023 1:01pm
A secure platform designed for those working to monitor & protect natural resources. Insight facilitates sharing experience, knowledge & tools to increase efficiency & effectiveness in conservation. By sharing we reduce time & money spent to find, test, & implement solutions.
A SPOTLIGHT ON CUTTING-EDGE BIOMONITORING TECHNOLOGIES
31 October 2023 9:09am
15 November 2023 6:10pm
31 January 2024 7:17pm
Takeaways from the First-ever Africa Climate Summit: Conservation Technology is Still New(ish)
27 October 2023 11:54am
Introducing The Debrief: Season 1
27 October 2023 10:48am
Help Panama Fight Ecocide
23 October 2023 7:59pm
Catch up with The Variety Hour: October 2023
19 October 2023 11:59am
WILDLABS Team Hiring: Community & Communications Associate Specialist at WWF
17 October 2023 9:05pm
Anyone else attending ADSA in Texas next week?
17 October 2023 8:46pm
GOSH Community Call: Open Hardware for Marine Science Applications
10 October 2023 12:33pm
Mozilla Foundation, funding for nature conservation
4 October 2023 6:30pm
1st Wildlife Scientific Conference 2023
25 September 2023 11:10am
Read the 2022 WILDLABS Annual Report
18 September 2023 12:11am
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: