In June I attended the Young Conservation Scientist Conference in Thailand. I presented on acoustic monitoring using open source hardware as a representative from the Lndscape ecology group at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (we had four people in attendance, one professor, me as a post-doc and two master’s students (now PhD)). This was a great conference for young aspiring conservationists, the atmosphere was friendly and welcoming, including certain talks (such as the speed talks) being on purpose designed to have a committee that could give feedback to the presenters. There were a range of interesting talks on everything from snake tracking to using paleo data for predictions. For many I think this was the first time to present and many presented in their second language, so it was great to see that both the organizing committee and the attendees ensured that it was a nice and encouraging environment to have their first experience of presenting in.
