discussion / Community Base  / 22 August 2019

The future of conservation tech: 5 key discussions

Hi everyone, 

I just posted my wrap up from ICCB 2019, though in reality it's more of a synthesis of all of what I've been hearing from you all over the past 12-18 months. You can check it out here: 

5 Key Discussions about the Future of Conservation Tech

I wrote it as an active call to action, and I do intend on starting some separate threads to pick up specific points (e.g. the hype cycle, roadmaps and failure ideas). But I'm getting a lot of thoughtful comments coming back over email, twitter, linkedin, skype... so I think it's probably worth having a space here to discuss the points more generally so we can see what everyone thinks, see if I've missed anything (keen to hear from others at ICCB, especially if your take aways were differeent) and get moving on some actions. 

So, let me know what you think. 




Thanks for the great article Steph - really useful to have all these themes from ICCB pulled together. Thanks also for the kind mention of my talk! 

I spotted a mention of 'virtual ecologists' in the white board image near the end of your article. I'd love to hear more about this idea. I can see the appeal of outsourcing a lot of ecology and conservation fieldwork to tech, but I really worry about this in three ways:

1) Conservationists need to understand the places that they work, and there is no substitute for spending time there on the ground. I'm sure I've seen a recent paper about the reduction in fieldwork-based methods in recent conservation and ecology papers, but I can't find it right now to provide a link. 

2) If tech replaces the functions previously carried out by field staff / rangers (like border patrols, monitoring, field surveys etc.) then there will be job losses, and these will mostly fall on staff who are often recruited from the local community. This could have a negative impact on the local economy and potentially on support for conservation

3) On a related note, the staff who currently carry out functions that might be outsourced to tech (like border patrols), also do other things that go unseen but can be incredibly important. Things like chatting to people living in the area as they pass through, or giving someone a lift to market on their motorbike. These interactions can be very helpful for building positive relations with residents and getting intel that can be useful for conservation management. I worry that these side-benefits of having people out in the field can be overlooked and will be lost when they are replaced with technology. 

Much of this is educated guesswork rather than based on any formal research - I would love to hear whether others have the same concerns, or perhaps I am just a Luddite getting worked up about nothing!

Thanks - Chris

Hi everyone,

This feedback came through over email. It voices some practical, necessary questions so i wanted to bring them into the public discussion here. However, the person has asked me to share it anonymously, as they don't want to be *that* person (a somewhat telling thing in itself..).  

I’m kinda annoyed that my org didn’t send me to the conference now….

I thought it was really a good article and nicely outlines these issues that I think we have all seen and the community is still facing. For me it’s still a question of who, who, who?

Who is in the position to provide on the ground field support and consultancy for tech without pushing their own agendas? Who will vet these people to ensure that field teams are getting value for money?

Who follows up people’s hype and lays bare the facts of money spent versus impact achieved (from my experience honest self-reported failure is a very rare beast in this community).

Who can actually cut through hype without sounding bitter or jealous? Who does the fact checking and testing? Who pays this person?

Who can do these maps and then who will update them and pull them together?

I do think that there is a lot more infrastructure for this all now with WildLabs and the WildLab in Kenya with a lot more experience and outside interest in the community removing some of the more cowboyish behaviour but I guess it’s a case of working out how we now progress.

I personally think WILDLABS is well positioned to provide a lot of this objective, neutral questioning/truth to power commentary - it's part of what we were created to do. And it seems like you argree - in the Community Survey, some of the responses to our question ' What do you think WILDLABS should be doing 5 years from now?' included: 

  • Holding people to account for conservation technology, revealing failures and celebrating success. It is too easy to keep hyping the next big shiny thing without it being properly analysed by constech experts who could say early if something is likely to not work and waste conservation funding.

  • Becoming an interactive portal that is reference for conservation technology and collaborative projects....where you can find in the same place all types of information, media, codes, step-by-step guides, and access specialist  to help in such conservation effort worldwide

  • The go-to tech portal for those working in conservation, and the go to for tech-types looking for collaborations with conservationists to apply latest advances to conservation problems. And maybe a (truly living, not static) discovery portal of discovery portals for data, tools, APIS and learning resources - if you have the stomach to get into standards etc. and can figure out long-term financing model...

I'm interested to hear other thoughts on the questions of 'who, who, who..' - are there other sectors who do this better than us that we could look to for how to deliver on these priorities? 

Steph 

Who, who, who?

Steph! Steph! Steph!