Yeah, I have been meaning to ask this too, Jess! Sorry for not actually having done it

thanks for your comment, Thirza, and yes, I am doing fine, thank you.

I got the impression that this was a one round call for this particular question. The website suggests that there are annual calls, each with its own specific topic/question. It is a matter of keeping an eye out.

WildHub is a very open community. The only requirement is having an interest in nature conservation. There are no criteria when it comes to education, geographical location, cultural background, or experience in the field for example. This inclusiveness clearly shows in the still ongoing growth of the community and probably resonates with Mozilla Foundation's aims. However, I doubt that this in itself is enough to win a grant.

Hi Thirza, thanks for your comment. I offered Cristina to be a contributor, but she graciously declined. If you want to ask her questions, you can find her on LinkedIn and her personal website ( although I don't know if that has the possibility of commenting )

Sorry for the late reply. I have been on long holidays.

I used ChatGPT to see if it could generate a useful logo for my company ... waste of my time. I could have prodded for more or better but ran out of the monthly free credits and the results thus far did not incentivize me to spend a dime.

Besides the direct questions and issues that you raise, I am more interested in the dynamics of a world, or in this case the entire conservation sector, that starts using ChatGPT or other AI tools? Does that lead to more or less good or bad results, or will the developments all balance out to a new status quo - different but in many ways the same? For example, what happens if all funding applications are written with the help of ChatGPT?

There is a matter of access. Can everybody in a sector have the same access to such tools? Or do we get a reproduction of the same 'haves' and 'haves not'? Or perhaps it becomes a matter of who can pay what for the use of which AI? What does that do to the overall dynamics in nature conservation?

What happens if both parties of an interaction use an AI tool? For example, an applicant can use ChatGPT to write a funding proposal, but a sponsor can also use an AI to analyze those proposals. Perhaps ChatGPT can be used to recognize its own handywork. If so, will the proposal loose points in the evaluation, or is a good idea simply a good idea - no matter who or what came up with it? And are the sponsors going to use an AI to determine what is a good idea?

About your footnote ... another conclusion could be that considering that you wanted to write a text that is 'yours' and you did invest two hours, could you not also have spent the two hours to write it from scratch? The situation sounds similar as with OCR and voice recognition : the tech works fast but is not flawless, and correcting the mistakes, i.e. make it perfect, can take as much time as not using the tech.

We will see a lot of actions, changes, discussion, panics, fears, expectations, warnings, etc., just as we have seen with all ground breaking technology from the past ( stone tools, fire, the wheel, bronze and iron, printing press, steam engines, electricity, combustion engines, nuclear technology, plastics, biotechnology, internet, nanotechnology, smart phones). Do we have a better world now than x decades or centuries ago? Well, in some respects yes, in others no, and in yet other respects things have become downright worse. Will that be really different, simply because this time it is really next-next-level new? For the time being, I think not.

Should we then not be discussing opportunities, risks and fears? Of course we should, otherwise things will be really different this time. But we should do more than discuss the technology, not be blinded by the novelty, and definitely consider the societies in which it is being integrated.

Probably too late, but who knows ... usually one would search for funding at research councils in the country of origin or the country of destination. Perhaps there are supra-national organizations.

They may all require at least a poster presentation.

One option is applying for paid positions. I know that in some countries, people are paid to work as a PhD student ( since the PhD student not only studies, but also teaches and does research, by law it is considered a job ). This is the case in The Netherlands and Sweden. I think also Germany, and would not be surprised about other countries. One has to apply for the job, not for a grant. 
Otherwise, it is hard work to find something. You 'liked' my overview article (thank you for that), so you know about it. Keep in mind that student-ship grants are grants, not salaries. So, one probably has to pay insurances privately.

With this one, perhaps wildlabs.net is a better forum to ask.

My two cents: you'd need to be more specific about the amount of data in MBs or TBs that you expect to get. "6hr video" is not saying that much because a lot depends on filetype and quality for example.

If the total is ranging in TBs then consider from where all this data is going to be uploaded to a cloud. If the connection is lousy, you may have to wait for days. You'll need to know exactly how fast your network is and how much data you want to upload to be able to calculate approx. how much time it is going to take. Perhaps you are better of with harddisks ( including back-up disks ) instead of cloud space.

I am terribly sorry, Nguyen, but I can not spare the time. I do one day pro-bono work per week and it is already overbooked.

Moreover, I am not a field specialist in any nature conservation, so I would not be of much help. The only thing I would do is what you can do yourself : check if your application addresses all the criteria of the funder ( they do not list them for nothing ), including the ones that are not about the content.

Another tip : WildTeam and others provide grant writing courses for which one needs to pay. However, I noticed that WildTeam's coursebook can be downloaded for free. https://www.wildteam.org.uk/online-training-grant-writing It seems helpful to me.