Category Archives: Sponsors

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is Cooking for Solutions

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As we rev up our PDXSeafood campaign one of our primary supporters, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program, has been busy cooking up some sustainable seafood support down in California! Their annual event, Cooking for Solutions, is a 3-day celebration of sustainable seafood where celebrity chefs prepare food and host events at the aquarium to highlight just how delicious and amazing sustainable seafood can be.

Image courtesy of Seafood Watch

Image courtesy of Seafood Watch

Celebrity Chef Sam Choy at Cooking for Solutions 2013 (Image courtesy of Seafood Watch)

Such a great event! And it is only a small part of what Seafood Watch does to promote sustainable seafood. We are so lucky to be one of their Conservation Outreach Partners, and to be able to use all of the solid research they have done developing their seafood guides in our PDXSeafood program. Want to make sustainable seafood part of your routine? Visit their Seafood Recommendations page to look up your favorite fish, download your own pocket guide, or get the smartphone app. So many ways to be a savvy seafood consumer!

A Panda a Week (or every two): Ying Ping 英萍

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If you’re wondering why there was such a lag between posts for the last couple of weeks it’s because we’ve hit the second “wave” of females going into estrus over here in Bi Feng Xia. One of the females that went into estrous right before Nate and my whirlwind visit to Hong Kong to renew our visas (yes we SHOULD have work visas but communication break down during prep for China and we ended up having to get regular old tourist visas). Continue reading →

Panda Cameras!!

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Hurray for me!! We finally got the panda cameras installed and working (with quite a bit of technical support from Rob Cleminson at VideoSurveillance.com).  I really cannot say too many wonderful things about their team!  Even in China they were emailing me at 10pm their time to answer questions about my system.  Talk about great costumer service!

The major problems I faced:

  1. I’m not a computer networker and . . .
  2. I’m not a computer networker

No, actually, the first major hurtle was getting the electrical setup in the breeding area which meant that I had to arrange a dinner with all the managers (nothing major gets done without discussing it over dinner first here in China).  The dinner went off smoothly with everyone enjoying themselves, which meant that we were allowed to set up electrical the next day . . . or as it turned out the next couple of days.  Finally, we had electrical running to the routers and cameras.

Toasting everyone at dinner. Good luck to my research!

Then came the actual setup which included lots of CAT5 wiring and making connectors on my part.  Thanks to Matthew Maderios from Comcast cable for the donation of the CAT5 and the CAT5 heads.   Continue reading →

Thanks for your support videosurveillance.com!

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What a wonderful way to start off the new year: non-profit status and a camera system donation from videosurveillance.com.

Their team is based locally in Portland, OR and offers a wealth of expertise in the latest IP video and security technology with more than 50 years of video surveillance experience. Plus, they offer complimentary consulting and custom system design.  Their video surveillance experts worked closely with us to determine the best solution for our research requirements (there were quite a few limitations with the panda pens) and were so helpful the whole way through.  I can honestly say that Rob Cleminson, the sales manager, got back to us within two hours every time we had a question.

Through their support and donation we ended up getting higher quality cameras for our research than we could have afforded by ourselves on our limited budget.  We went with Vivotek IP7330 IP Cameras and can’t wait to see how they work for us in China.

We’re even hoping to get the CCRCGP to approve live streaming during some of the introductions!  Stay tuned!

Make sure to support videosurveillance.com if you need anything in the camera department and tell them that you heard about them through PDXWildlife!