I have the same question!

Hi @sebjwallace and @maggs,

Thank you so much for your question! In my opinion, the easiest way to start in this context is to download a user-friendly GIS application such as QGIS (free and open source).

If you are a complete newcomer to GIS, there are many wonderful video and written tutorials available for free online:

https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/

https://qgis.org/resources/books/

An Absolute Beginner's Guide to QGIS 3

ESRI Free Training Courses

If you have some background in GIS but are curious about how you can start applying it within conservation specifically, the answer might be a bit different. It's important to remember that applications of GIS in conservation are extremely diverse, just like the field of conservation itself and so the first step is understanding what tasks or uses you would have for GIS. Some of the most common uses are things like:

• Land use and land cover mapping (forest cover, agricultural land, urban surfaces)
• Protected area mapping
• Forest fragmentation
• Wildlife tracking
• Habitat mapping
• Many more!

In honor of the passing of the great Dr Jane Goodall, this video is a nice real-world overview of some of the applications of GIS within conservation.

Another useful resource if you enjoy coding is Google Earth Engine. They have many many free tutorials on using satellite imagery and other data for environmental and conservation purposes.

I hope some of this helps! Feel free to ask more follow-up questions.

Happy mapping!

Hi @filippo , thanks for your question!

I have to admit that I'm not best positioned to answer about the use of geospatial technologies in marine environments. I do know there are many groups out there focusing on those issues though. Perhaps @elsa or @cbreen  might have some insights into this.

As for geospatial modeling, practices are as diverse as the use-cases. Both frequentist statistical approaches and ML approaches are used often. AI is gaining more popularity recently too, but this tends to be more on the leading edge of development rather than well-established within the average user's workflow. ML is often used for remote sensing while statistical approaches or mathematical modeling approaches are commonly used for species distribution modeling, habitat suitability, landscape change modeling, and more. There are organizations such as the Allen Institute for AI, which work on developing foundational multimodal models for use in earth observation or conservation tasks.

If you're interested in learning more about AI and geospatial applications, we are co-hosting a speaker panel with the WILDLABS AI group about some of the intersections of geospatial technologies and AI. It will take place on December 11, 2025 at 5 PM GMT.

Connecting geospatial data products to policy decisions is an important part of application, it depends on the governing body as well as the level of decisions involved (local-global). But to my knowledge many data products for these uses are made by trusted organizations like FAO, UNEP, NASA, or other national agencies, or they are developed through direct partnership with decision making organizations. But I might be missing something.

Anyway, I hope some of that helps!

Thank you so much @tcsmith !