Group

Conservation Tech Training and Education / Feed

There are educators everywhere working to teach and train the next generation of sustainability minded students. Whether in formal settings (K-12, undergraduate, graduate) settings or informally as science communication now it is more important than ever to work towards advancing Conservation Tech education. By working on interdisciplinary teams we can help develop teaching and training tools to help expand the field of Conservation Technology creation.

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Wildlife Conservation Drones & Technologies Summit 2023

Engage, learn from, and network with researchers, students, and other wildlife professionals from around the world that are using or interested in using drones to support wildlife conservation, management and research.

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Thanks in advance @lmccaskill hope to be involved if there will be any access to it and looking forward to hear from youyou.
Hi Emmah,Thanks again for inquiring. At this time there is no plans for streaming of the presentations. I'm hoping in the future we can add this option but right now doesn't look...
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discussion

Moveapps: EMAC23 Coding Challenge

Motivated by having been named a Conservation Tech Award grantee in 2022, we are launching...

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Super initiative! I hope you get a lot of entries to this coding challenge!

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Welcome to the Conservation Tech Training and Education Group!

Hello and welcome to our group!In this group, we’ll be discussing all things conservation tech education. That may seem broad and the intent of it is!...

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Hi everyone! 

Popping in here to drop in the recording of the chat we had with Suzanne and Andrew about this group at our recent Variety Hour call. If you're new to the group it might be a useful orientation. 

Steph

Hi Folks, 

I'm Liz Ferguson from Ocean Science Analytics and just noticing this thread so reaching out to express interest! Thanks for posting that overview Stephanie. 

My company is an ocean science research consulting and online technical training company. We provide hands-on training for software, thus far related to passive acoustic monitoring and R, but have a Marine spatial analysis course coming out using QGIS in 2023. I also teach at a local college, and some analytical courses. Really interested in the group so happy you started it Suz and Andrew!

 

 

Thank you liz! @sstathat and I are really excited about the group as well. I can imagine there are a lot of challenges with training folks to use the software. Are these software/trainings. open source and/or available online? 

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What new best-practice guides do you need? 

Hi everyone, Two best practice guides have been added to the library this week, and i'm hearing some whispers of some others in development. I'm collating them into...

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This guide for ecoacoustics looks good. I  havent read it yet though! 

What about thermal cameras and drones with thermal cameras for monitoring of mammals?

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CT Textbook?! Want to contribute/help author? Reach out! 

Hello All,I have had some great discussions this past few weeks on the Conservation Tech Introductory textbook for undergrads. If others would still like to be involved as authors...

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Hey Andrew, 

Great to hear an update on this initiative! Do you think it might be worth having a specific call to link up people and share the gameplan for writing/publishing? 

Steph 

Hello Andrew,

I saw this post on Linkedin and would like to share my expereinces implementing tech in the conservation space.

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article

Download Now: A Best Practice Guide to Satellite Technologies for Tracking Wildlife

Zoological Society of London
The Zoological Society of London, with the support of WILDLABS and the UK Space Agency, are proud to publish this new guide to satellite technologies for tracking wildlife.

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Very nice! Looking forward to checking it out!
We had this comment come in to our team from @Redfoxmeek so I'm passing along the helpful resource: Hi Folks- Thanks for the manual, can I also draw your attention to...
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Suggestions for user research/co-design methodologies

Hi everyone, I'm wondering if anyone on here has an experience with user research or user testing for conservation technology 'products'? Please get in touch, I'd love to discuss...

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Hi,

I'm the UX researcher at Rainforest Connection (RFCx). I use research methods such as interviews, usability testing, and card sorting to understand scientists' pain points and needs while using the bioacoustic monitoring platform, Arbimon. 

In terms of tools, I use Figjam for brainstorming and mapping, Notion for a research repository, Zoom for interviews, and Figma for prototyping. I'm exploring how to use ChatGPT to speed up my process too! I use it to draft recruitment emails, summarize transcripts etc. I try to use tools that are either low-cost or that RFCx already has subscriptions of. 

Since I'm a UX team of one, I also partner with University student groups/practicum courses to let UX students take on some of our projects. 

Feel free to reach out; I'm always happy to chat.

 

 

Hi @Sicily_Fiennes 

Apologies for the very late response to this thread, are you still looking for advice on user research and co-creation methodologies? I see there is a lot of support here on tools already ;-)

I would recommend running some sessions with low fidelity prototypes as early as possible, definitely before investing in any development! You can do this with a variety of tools, but paper prototypes can also be great if you are trying to compare very different concepts. You can use sketches to run more of a co-creation session, so that you encourage your users to define the data insights that they need explicitly and explore together different ways of visualizing & interacting with the information.

I normally do 1-1 interviews to define needs and identify potential barriers, before prototyping. But, you might be further ahead in the design process by now. 

If you still need some advice on defining the key use cases or the data visualization with users, I would be happy to offer a quick chat over zoom on how to go about it.

I am an independent service designer / user researcher with 14 years of experience in the tech industry, based in Europe :-)

Hope this helps!

Yanna 

Hi @Sicily_Fiennes,

Over the past several years, I have explored how to design engaging and useful tools for the exploration of audio recording to locate calls of a particular bird species (i.e. Eastern bristlebirds). I worked to understand the practices of a species recovery team, as well as their experiences trialling audio recorders and analysis. Additionally, I explored knowledge of birders and broader audiences, and how this relates to them making sense of audio recordings and broader nature media (e.g. distribution maps and photographs of birds). My methods to understand these included semistructured interviews, artifact exploration (very low fidelity prototyping), and ethnographically inspired participant-observer fieldwork. I also took some inspiration from design research approaches such as contextual inquiry, cultural/technical probes, and more. My background prior to being a design researcher was in ecology, conservation, and environmental education, so I drew from that expertise to understand a little-known bird species and the role of technology in supporting people in becoming familiar with it. Most of my work was positioned within the field of Interaction Design, publishing via Human-Computer Interaction, Designing Interactive Systems, and Computer Supported Cooperative Work outlets (i.e. rather than UX/UI). If interested in knowing more, perhaps have a look at papers I was the first author on that are listed here, and a few videos here. My research highlights the importance of understanding the situation, knowledge, experiences, and needs of different groups of people to design enticing and useful technologies that foster learning, cooperation, and integration into existing practices. In my experience, people are sometimes compelled to be more open and creative when not interacting with technologies that can be perceived as expensive and polished products. 

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Gender Equality in Conservation

Meet the women and men supporting gender equality in conservation #tech. Here is a panel discussion the Women in Conservation Tech (WiCT) led in November 2022, during the EarthRanger User Conference (ERUC). Opening up...

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discussion

Solar panels in the tropics

We are deploying automated systems in the topics and hope to use solar panels, but this closed canopy in most places I'm seeing this as a challenge.Past the obvious: 'find a...

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Hi Tom,

I'm with Akiba, you have to test.  A collaborator has deployed solar-augmented kit in secondary jungle and some of them got enough light, and others didn't, so it can work.  The open circuit voltage of solar panels doesn't change a whole lot in dim light, but the current drops drastically.  So you would choose an oversize panel of the same voltage (or a bit higher).

Thanks

I've been intrigued by this topic. Thinking about ways you could use drones or some kind of launcher to deploy panels above the canopy. Sadly I live in the great white north so I have no way of testing any concepts. Maybe even some kind of solar balloon that could float above the canopy. Interesting design problem.

Hey Tom,
Since the output is dependent on a couple of factors such as the solar irradiance of the place, shading from the canopy, the type of solar panels (mono, poly or amorphous) and orientation of the panels, etc, I'd suggest you use a software to simulate the different parameters to get an almost accurate estimation of the output. You can try PVsyst- it has a free month trial (I haven't used it before but I hear it's great) or any other PV software :)

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event

AI for Forest Elephants Challenge

FruitPunch AI is hosting the AI for Forest Elephants Challenge. Together with 50+ AI enthusiasts and experts from all over the globe, we will apply AI to detect gunshots and elephant rumbles on sound monitoring...

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Firetail Fellowships

I'm a software engineer/data scientist at Schäuffelhut Berger. We're developing Firetail a software for GPS and acceleration visualization and behavioral annotation.

We have just launched our Firetail Fellowship Program which may be a great way to get access to a full Firetail license for your student project. Let me know if you have questions or comments on this!

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Interview for Technologies in Conservation

Dear Wildlabs community, my name is Nikolas and I am a Master's Student from Lisbon. Like many of you, I grew up with a great passion for the wildlife that we are surrounded...

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I'd be happy to chat with you if you wanted! My expertise is within passive acoustic monitoring particularly. The Conservation Tech Directory might be useful for you in identifying relevant actors within the space.

My original background is in ecology and conservation, and am now in the elected leadership of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware which convenes researchers developing open source tech for science. I am not working on a specific piece of technology right now, but am happy to contribute some higher-level views for your interview if that helps.

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Introduction to CT Textbook 

So this is an idea that I've had for a while, and I have some bandwidth for it now. I want to make a purely online (free for all users) conservation technology textbook (...

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Conservation Tech Course Syllabus

Hello All,I wanted to share the syllabus I have worked on over the last few years at Georgia Tech in developing a project based conservation technology curriculum with formative...

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Kindly share

 

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discussion

Looking for partner_Project in Madagascar

Hi, I run a small NGO in Madagascar and would like to set up a continuous training about technology in Conservation for girls and...

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Hi Ny Aina! Thank you so much! Is there a time commitment for this? I know in our last Wednesday update there are groups working on this specifically: @Phyllis22, @Alasdair @Jkavutha are working on some similar projects! Also @carlybatist might be interested in this. 

Salama Ny Aina! And misoatra betsaka to Andrew for mentioning me! I do passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) in Madagascar, focused on lemurs now but hoping to bring in collaborators for other taxa as well as whole-soundscape analyses. I mostly work in the southeastern rainforest corridor but have collaborators working in the south and in the Masoala peninsula. 

I actually developed a bunch of PAM training materials (in Malagasy, French & English) that can all be found on my website: https://carlybatist.commons.gc.cuny.edu/pam-training/. Feel free to use any of it! There is a video recording from a PAM training workshop I did at Centre ValBio as well as the slides from the presentation, a list of papers representing different case studies, lots of resources, etc.  

I would love to chat further if you'd like too! Feel free to reach out: [email protected]. Veloma for now :)  

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