Are you looking for ways to grow your conservation technology knowledge and skills this year? Tech Tutors: East Africa is your opportunity to learn practical skills and steps that will become the building blocks you need to push your conservation tech work and research forward! 

Returning in February 2023, WILDLABS Tech Tutors is the virtual series that answers the "how do I do that?" questions of conservation tech. With a new regional focus, our fourth season of Tech Tutors will feature outstanding expert speakers across East Africa who will cover a variety of conservation tech topics and themes. Organised and hosted by our first East Africa Regional Community Organiser, Netty Cheruto, our speakers will provide quick, practical, and interactive answers to questions emerging from our growing regional community. 

Our aim this season is to cover tools and topics that help address conservation challenges unique to East Africa and the needs identified from research, while also opening up new tech skills for our global community. Wherever you are in the world, we hope you'll join us!
 

What will you get out of each session? 

With each session delivered virtually from 4-5PM EAT/ 1-2PM GMT (30 mins presentation & 30 mins Q&A), Tech Tutors: East Africa is a great way to learn, interact, and grow your knowledge and skills, and a perfect addition to your Thursday calendars!

These tutorials will help you discover the practicalities and feasibility of different conservation tech tools you can employ in your projects, and chat directly with experts who can set you on the right path. From camera traps, acoustic monitoring tools, wildlife crime data tools, GIS/RS, drones, aerial survey tools, protected area management tools, and biologgers, and much more, we have great tutorials lined up! With the help of our presenters, you'll learn how to put these tools into use in the field or lab, and live participant Q&As will let you connect with these experts to ask your own questions & get advice.

Our speakers are happy to answer any questions you have on the tools they will cover, so feel free to drop your questions in the threads posted prior to each session, when registering for an event, and during the session. If you have encountered any challenges or failures in your projects while working with some of these tools, use this chance to identify where you went wrong and how best you can fix the issue.

Can't make it to an episode this season? Don't worry! You can find every tutorial after it airs on our Youtube channel. Want to catch up on the 30+ tutorials covered in earlier seasons? Check out all episodes and extra resources from previous seasons here: Season 1, Season 2 and Season 3.

Meet Your Host

This season, we're delighted to introduce a new host of Tech Tutors, Netty Cheruto. Netty joined the WILDLABS team in 2020 as our first Regional Community Coordinator. Alongside launching and growing the East Africa group here on WILDLABS and hosting conversations to explore new tools and projects in the region, she's been involved with a heap of WILDLABS projects behind the scenes, including as an organiser and trainer on our first Women in Conservation Tech Programme in Kenya. 

As the host of Tech Tutors: East Africa, Netty has selected and organised the expert lineup ahead of us this season. The topics and speakers have been chosen to answer some of the most frequent and interesting questions she's heard in her role as the East Africa Community Coordinator. Her goal as host will be to create a space for our community members to better access and share conservation technology resources. Having grown up in Kenya and worked in the landscape, Netty understands some of the complex conservation challenges faced in East Africa, which has greatly informed the tailoring of the tutorials.  As we roll out ‘Tech Tutors, East Africa!’ she hopes that the diverse themes shared by our speakers will upskill the conservation technology community, lead to the discovery or advancement of some research or work, and result in serendipitous collaborations!

If you'd like to ask Netty any questions about the season, you can reach out to her through her profile here on WILDLABS, or connect with her a [email protected] -  she's more than happy to answer you!

Upcoming Schedule

Registration links for each episode will go live on Tuesdays, one week before that episode airs. Join our email list here to get an alert when registration goes live for each tutorial. Otherwise, keep an eye on this list for updated registration links, or watch the WILDLABS homepage for updates and resources from each presenter. 

• Arthur Muneza: How do I fit GPS satellite tags to remotely track giraffe movements? | 9 Feb (recording available)

• Kennedy Muriithi: How do I get started with setting up my camera trap to monitor wildlife? | 16 Feb (recording available)

• Mtalii Ochieng: How do I get started with mobile phones in sea turtle monitoring? | 9 March (recording available)

• Phoebe Oduor: How do I get started with using Landsat for land use and land cover mapping? | 16 March  (recording available)

• Moses Otiende: How do I select the most efficient ivory sampling method to generate intelligence data for wildlife crime reporting? | 23 March (recording available)

• Alina Peter: How do I export and project spatial data from EarthRanger to create maps on QGIS and/or ArcGIS Pro? | 13 April (recording available)

• Yuri Njathi: How do I get started with bird audio processing and classification?| 20 April (recording available)

• Richard Lamprey: How do I get started with systemic reconnaissance flights for aerial wildlife surveys? | 11 May (recording available)

• Howard Frederick: How do I create an aerial survey flight plan for wildlife monitoring? | 18 May (recording available)

• Jacquiline Bubi: How do I get started with collecting mobile digital data to combat Illegal wildlife trade? | 25 May