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The WILDLABS Community Base is the ideal place to get oriented with the all that our community platform offers, hear about news and opportunitys, and to meet new friends and collaborators. 

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article

New WILDLABS Funding & Finance group

Frank van der Most

5 June 2024 3:24pm

WildLabs will soon launch a 'Funding and Finance' group. What would be your wish list for such a group? Would you be interested in co-managing or otherwise helping out?

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Alex Rood

5 June 2024 4:14pm

This is great, Frank! @StephODonnell, maybe we can try to bring someone from #Superorganism (@tomquigley ?) or another venture company (#XPRIZE) into the fold!
Paul Edonga

6 June 2024 1:38am

I find the group to be dope, fundraising in the realm of conservation has been tough especially for emerging conservation leaders. There are no centralized grants tracking common...
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Link

GENZ in STEM Episode 10: Conservation technology, the meaningful career you may have never heard of

Alex Rood

28 May 2024 6:09pm

WILDLABS team members Alex Rood and Esther Githinji sit down with the GENZ in STEM podcast to share resources on how to get started in conservation tech.

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event

WILDLABS Conservation Tech Meetup, Cambridge

Henry Rees

24 May 2024 10:58am

We are excited to invite you to a special happy hour meetup hosted by the WILDLABS team at our home in Cambridge in the UK! This is a fantastic opportunity to connect with fellow conservation tech enthusiasts, share...

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event

ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMES WORKSHOP 2024

Alex Rood

23 May 2024 9:01pm

This workshop is intended for researchers, governmental and non-governmental organizations, investigative teams, legal bodies, and international agencies that develop or use Earth Observation for environmental...

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discussion

Who's attending the World Biodiversity Forum in Davos?

Talia Speaker

20 May 2024 9:50pm

Hi all, @StephODonnell and I are making plans for our trip to Davos in June for the World Biodiversity Forum. Is anyone else planning to be there? We'll be presenting the findings...

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Robin Sandfort

22 May 2024 8:29am

Sounds great.
At what day will you present your talk?

Greetings from Austria,
Robin

Talia Speaker

22 May 2024 5:39pm

We'll be presenting Wednesday morning as part of session 10.1b on "Integrating earth observations and biological tools in ecology and evolution to cogenerate knowledge towards meeting the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework targets." For the side events, we're planning tentatively for a social Monday evening (following the welcome Apéro) and a meeting Wednesday during or after lunch on leveraging animal movement to meet conservation/policy goals. 

We'd love to see you!

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discussion

WILDLABS downtime and performance issues due to AI bot attack

Filip Hnízdo

29 April 2024 3:35pm

Hi everyone,Some of you will have noticed that WILDLABS was inaccessible or frustratingly slow on Friday (April 26th, 2024). Aside from explaining this downtime, what happened is...

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Frank van der Most

1 May 2024 6:05pm

I noticed the site being annoyingly slow some time last week. Thank you for clearing that up, for finding the cause and solving the issue.

I'm not claiming deep knowledge on AI, but as a member this community, I'd be happy to give you my insights.

For starters: I am not categorically against bots scraping 'my' content, whether for AI training purposes, search engines, or other purposes. In principle, I find it a good thing that this forum is open to non-member users, and to me that extends to non-member use. Obviously, there are some exceptions here. For example when locations of individuals of endangered species are discussed, that should be behind closed doors.

Continuing down this line of reasoning, apparently it matters to me how 'my' content is being used. So, if someone wants to make an AI to aid nature conservation, I say, let them have it. There is the practical side of scraping activities that may be blocking or hindering the site, but there may be practical solutions for this. I don't know, say, have special opening hours for such things, or have the site engine prepare the data and make it available as a data dump somewhere.

Since purpose matters, organizations or individuals wanting to scrape the site should be vetted and given access or not. This is far more easily said than done. However, every step in the direction would be worth the while, because most technology publicly discussed here has good use for nature conservation, but equally bad use for nature destruction. For example, it's good to acoustically monitor bird sounds to monitor species, but also comes in handy when you are in the exotic bird trafficking business.

One could argue that since we allow public access, we should not care either about why bots are scraping the site. I would not go that far. After all, individual people browsing the site with nefarious purposes in mind is something else than a bot systematically scraping the entire site (or sections thereof) for bad purposes. It's a matter of scale.

 

 

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article

Introducing The Inventory!

Jake Burton

1 May 2024 12:46pm

The Inventory is your one-stop shop for conservation technology tools, organisations, and R&D projects. Start contributing to it now!

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Jake Burton

22 July 2024 10:55am

Hi @hjayanto ! I've given your account the ability to edit without earning the badge just to save time while we figure out why you aren't getting your Sprout Badge, so you should...
Herdhanu Jayanto

23 July 2024 2:05pm

Thank you @JakeBurton . Looks like I wasn't in community base group, instead misunderstood it was the same as thematic group. I have added our organization. Appreciate your help!
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article

A Year of Supporting East African Conservation Technology: Lessons on How You Can Amplify #Tech4Wildlife

Esther Githinji

29 April 2024 10:52am

It has been an extraordinary year supporting and growing the regional East African Conservation Technology Community at WILDLABS. We've made great strides and unlocked exciting opportunities for our community as we...

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Alex Rood

3 May 2024 4:14pm

Congrats Esther! Can't wait to continue working together.
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careers

Monitoring Team Lead, Ponterra

Ana De Lucia

23 April 2024 3:19pm

Great opportunity to join our team! We are #hiring. We’re excited to announce that we’re looking for a talented individual to perform the role of Monitoring Team Lead. If you’re a great team player, we’d love to...

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discussion

Introduction and Networking

Loveness L Mutungi

22 April 2024 9:37am

Hello Wildlabbers,I'm Loveness Lamuel Mutungi, a female Tanzanian and a 2023 graduate from Sokoine University of Agriculture with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Sciences...

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Esther Githinji

22 April 2024 10:46am

Hello and welcome to WILDLABS @loveness :) 

What a great intro to what you are doing and interested in pursuing! I'd like to help direct you to our resources page, where you can check out multiple open career and academic opportunities from across your region that are posted regularly by the community. Find our Resources page linked here. 

Which specific areas within conservation/conservation technology are you most interested in at the moment? We have over 32 specialised groups in our community you could explore here to help guide you as you go along your career journey :) 

Best wishes! 

Loveness L Mutungi

23 April 2024 12:41pm

Hello Ms Esther👋

Thank you for taking your time to reply to me with such helpful response.

I'm interested in conservation technology such as camera traps, GIS and Remote sensing, tools like EarthRanger, wildlife tracking collars, Data collection apps. I've already joined the groups just after reading your response and I'll keep visit the Resources Page to find more opportunities.

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discussion

Thoughts on RooBadge?

Alex Rood

2 April 2024 2:55pm

I came across this new Volkswagen initiative today, RooBadge, a vehicular kangaroo deterrent that uses telemetry data to automatically play high-frequency sounds in dense kangaroo...

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Colin Cook

5 April 2024 12:31pm

Sound deterrents to prevent collisions with Kangaroos in Australia have been sold for many years. None have been shown to work. Whether the Volkswagen device will be any better waits to be seen. Collision data will have to be collected for a while to see if the VW device has any effect on collision rate.

Kim Lane

8 April 2024 12:49am

That is an interesting concept, and it would be great if something out there worked. In the meantime, I will try not to drive at dusk 🦘

At one point, I knew the "sonic" animal guards were the most stolen components of cars. You head in, get groceries, and come out, and they are gone. They weren't on the car long enough for me to confirm that would work

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discussion

Variety Hour: What do you want to see?

Stephanie O'Donnell

15 September 2022 12:46pm

Hi everyone, We're settling into our new event format - we hope you're all enjoying having a regular monthly space to catch up as much as we are! I'm looking ahead at our...

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Frank van der Most

17 April 2024 7:53pm

Steph, yes, I gathered as much myself, but I still wanted to put it on the agenda. It links to the bigger problem in nature conservation, and especially funding : all projects are required to be effective and successful, scalable, profitable and so on (not to mention the paper trail that applicants need to produce to prove it ). It makes sense from the donors' perspective, because if a project is not at least one of these, then it is a waste of money an how do they explain that to the public and the donors' donors. On the other hand, the IMHO ( H for honest ) over emphasis on this requirement is counterproductive and it does not fit in the world of tech development.

To start with the latter, as we all know, in the world of tech VC and startups, people are very used to the idea that a tech invention is not successful. I've read that if you haven't had two failed startups behind you, you're a better contender with your next one. 9 Out of 10 will fail and the remaining one will more than make up for the loss, is the idea. This way of looking at projects fits very well in this tech oriented forum.

Then the counter productive part : with a funding climate like that, who is going to take risks with tech development for nature conservation? Seriously, anybody reading this: if you raise your hand, please do get in touch, because I am curious how you look at the issue and how you deal with it. Whereas I do agree that nature conservation as a whole needs to be successful, I don't believe that the sponsors' stress on it for individual projects is successful itself. Nature's degradation has developed so far ( call me a pessimist ), that we need to take risks and find out if ( and hope that ) what works for silicon valley can work for nature.

Kudos for your attempt at the 'Technical difficulties'. I didn't know about it. Maybe we ( but I mean you, of course  ;-) can tinker with the formula. Ask people to talk about how they overcame problems in some detail, because then it is a success story again. ( They could earn a badge! ) And if the recording is an issue, then don't record, or work on anonymity with temporary accounts, TOR, voice scramblers and the camera off. Maybe people are willing to write about their failures instead of doing a live presentation. That way, one has absolute control over anonymizing individuals and hiding the project from being identified. Little risk of a slip of the tongue. 

Esther Githinji

18 April 2024 12:57pm

Thanks for your thoughts on the importance of sharing more about failure in our unique sector. You bring up some very valid points @Frank_van_der_Most  and I think the perspective of 'learning by doing' is quite essential. I've shared below some stories I've covered from our East Africa community that touch on this and the perspective that has emerged has been on learning from these experiences and developing with more insight to solve conservation challenges more effectively. I hope you will find these interesting and useful.

https://wildlabs.net/article/restoring-mara-elephant-population-using-coexistence-tech-solutions-mara-elephant-projectshttps://wildlabs.net/article/human-elephant-conflict-tech-solution-tsavo-ndovucare

  

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