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 2024 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. 

• Variety Hour November | Featuring talks from @RLong on a wildlife scent dispenser for surveying rare carnivores in inaccessible locales, @Diane_Detoeuf on grievance redress mechanisms, @KooiChee on developing solutions to mitigate the impacts of fishing trawlers in Malaysia, and @vinz on empowering conservation and sustainable development decisions with the UN Biodiversity Lab
• Variety Hour October | Featuring talks from @Lars_Holst_Hansen on an AI-driven polar bear detection system, @Seamus_Lombardo on Project Centinela, a program to help leading scientists, conservationists, and stewards monitor and safeguard up to 50 of the world’s vulnerable biodiversity hotspots, @PhilAtkin on the pipistrelle family of ultra-affordable bat detectors, and @jkendallbar on an interactive data-driven browser for exploring high-dimensional biologging data in 3D. Registration is open!
• Variety Hour September | Featuring talks from @aamir  on WildCamp's autonomous drones, Kirah Forman-Castillo on MarAlliance's sea turtle conservation efforts,  @jsulloa on scikit-maad, an open-source Python package designed for the quantitative analysis of environmental audio recording, and @emilydorne on a no-code custom AI for camera trap species classification, allowing conservationists to train custom species classification models that can then be used to label images, all without writing any code.
• Variety Hour August | Featuring talks from Héloïse Frouin-Mouy about acoustic imaging sonar that reveals northern elephant seal behavior, Diego Balbuena on GPS tags that monitor the success of rehabilitated and reintroduced Andean condors, Lucie Laporte-Devylder on infrared cameras that detect thermal tracks left behind by humpback whales, and Kakani Katia about an underwater community science experience that improves AI algorithms.
• Variety Hour July | Featuring talks from @NevilleCLS on Argos satellites for animal tracking, @DaveGaynor on using airborne synthetic aperture radar to detect snares, @saraolsson on using ChatGPT for wildlife monitoring, and @LuciKirkpatrick on recording movement behaviour in small animals with tiny equipment.
• Variety Hour June | Featuring talks on Move BON, a new initiative to mobilize animal tracking data in support of national and global scale conservation goals, a multi-sensor bee monitoring system, thermal imaging applications in conservation, and an effort to build an AI-assisted evidence synthesis pipeline using LLMs, with the ultimate goal of building a living evidence database that is able to keep up the the rapidly growing scientific literature.
• Variety Hour April | Featuring talks from @Annacq on bridging biodiversity and business, @BrunaTeixeira on using acoustic indexes as an indicator of anthropogenic pressure, @kklibra on mitigating human-wildlife conflict & illegal trade through IT solutionsm, and (@capreolus on bridging classical biodiversity monitoring with emerging bioacoustics and AI
• Variety Hour March | This month we're talking about making AI more accessible with Pytorch, new developments from WildMe and TagRanger, and working with geospatial data with Fauna & Flora.

Do you want to speak at an upcoming Variety Hour Show? Email community@wildlabs.net 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!