Event / 

Tech Tutors: Review Session

Missing Tech Tutors? Us too! Catch up on every episode from Season 1, check out some of our community highlights, and find out what we loved most about launching this series in this mid-week Tech Tutors review session. We'll be featuring more community highlights from the collaborations and projects that were brought to life thanks to Tech Tutors, so stay tuned! In the meantime, let us know what you want to see next season by visiting our forum thread here.

Online Event

An Overview: Tech Tutors Season 1

We announced our new Tech Tutors series this spring with the goal to bring #tech4wildlife experts directly to you. By presenting tutorials on some of our community's common "how do I do that?" questions, our Tech Tutors addressed a growing need on WILDLABS and in the conservation tech world at large: providing the tools to simply get started and take the next step with new technologies!

The WILDLABS community's greatest strength is the wide variety of expertise, skill sets, interests, and research areas found here. Programs like Tech Tutors help us maximize the potential of that outstanding variety in several ways: by allowing community members from different backgrounds to connect and help each other, by creating a space to ask questions (or, if you're brand-new to a subject, to recognize the questions you didn't yet know to ask!), and of course, providing a first step from which you can build your knowledge, expand your projects, explore new collaborative ideas, and find new areas of conservation tech that could use your unique skill set!

In our first season, we aimed to create learning opportunities for beginners of all knowledge levels (and yes, even experts can still be beginners when it comes to tackling a new aspect of a familiar technology!). For members who simply wanted to explore the possibilities of conservation technology or identify new areas where their skills could be useful, the tutorials themselves were perfectly bite-sized and welcoming introductions. And for members who came prepared with big questions, previous experience, and ongoing projects, the live Q&A sessions provided lively discussions and inspiration.

The WILDLABS Community Gets Tutored!

We're so proud of this first season of Tech Tutors, and so delighted by how the community has embraced this program! In addition to welcoming new participants to WILDLABS during each episode, we were also excited to see a core group of Tech Tutor participants form, returning week after week to have ongoing discussions about #tech4wildlife. This unique dynamic of new participants, series regulars, and Tutors meant that you weren't just learning from one lecturer per week: you were learning from each other, too.

Check out these highlights from Twitter about how you engaged with Tech Tutors, the projects you collaborated on together, the lessons you learned, and what you enjoyed about our first season!

I've been working on an easier way to apply #MegaDetector to #cameratrap images to help filter out the empty images. Check out this @GoogleColab notebook that I worked on with @yangsiyu_ and released today on their github repo.
Thanks @WILDLABSNET @sarameghanbeery https://t.co/ctVUulCavD

— Al Stewart (@alsnothome) July 1, 2020

Problems with very time-consuming processing of #cameratrap images? Well, the wonderful Alistair Stewart and others might be able to help you out https://t.co/aUsgVQDIyP pic.twitter.com/PmqP9kXxYr

— A/Prof Euan Ritchie (@EuanRitchie1) July 5, 2020

Best note from this morning's @WILDLABSNET webinar from @sarameghanbeery "We should train young conservationists as technologists" 

— Mairin Deith (@sapiensimulator) June 25, 2020

Tech is so martian to me but vital to my PhD project. This series is already making things seem more plausible and great to know there is a community of people looking to help others 

— Maxine McNaughton, MSc. (@MaxineM_M) June 26, 2020

I just generally enjoyed learning more about technology and how people use it for conservation. It's a basic comment I know, but as someone who's always tinkering with software/hardware, it was useful to discover some ways I could potentially help the conservation field!

— Tom Southworth (@TechDevTom) August 29, 2020

Ready-set-go for the last TechTutor episode for a while! Curious to learn more about #Arduino and #tech4wildlife @WILDLABSNET pic.twitter.com/vvZTMDoEBL

— Ineke Knot (@ieknot) August 20, 2020

The most important thing: It is great to know that this community exists and hopefully you will get a clear picture about how to get your hands dirty to empower people in their aims to save something on this planet. No one has THE answer and that's why different views are great.

— Carlos Gustavo Merolla (@DNNACGM11) August 28, 2020

Great conversation, thank you all ! I've learned a lot and hopefully I'll be able to fix a few of my cameras ! Looking foward to rewatching it and paying more attention to the uses of the multimeter! I will definately add this to our field gear  https://t.co/AG2HycJDqt

— Gabriela Nicosia (@GabiNicosia) July 23, 2020

We'll be featuring more highlights from our Tech Tutors community soon, so stay tuned!

Catch Up on Tech Tutors!

Our Tutors covered highly requested, helpful, and just outright cool topics like getting started with machine learning for acoustic and camera trap data, making the most of bioacoustic data, repairing camera traps, building and customising tech, using drones to track wildlife, and even portable genomics!

Watch the full season below and on our Youtube channel, and click through to each episode's main page to find collaborative notes, resources from our Tutors, and forum threads to keep the conversations going.

Daniel Situnayake: How do I train my first machine learning model? 

Sara Beery: How do I get started using ML for my camera traps? Building Accurate Project-Specific Models​.

Carlos Abrahams: How do I perform automated recordings of bird assemblages?

Tessa Rhinehart: How do I scale up acoustic surveys with Audiomoths and automated processing?

Laure Joanny, Rob Appleby, and Alistair Stewart: How do I repair my camera traps?

 Nigel Butcher: How do I build bespoke conservation technology? What are the key things I should think about/look out for?

Debbie Saunders: How do I use a drone to capture radio-tracking data?

Ineke Knot: How do I use portable genomics in the field?

Akiba and Jacinta from Freaklabs: How do I get started with Arduino? Customised datalogging with WildLogger.

See You Next Season!

We're working on making season 2 of Tech Tutors bigger, better, and more interactive than ever. Let us know what you want to see, and submit here to become a future Tutor!


Add the first post in this thread.

Want to share your own conservation tech experiences and expertise with our growing global community? Login or register to start posting!