Authors: @elsa @tcsmith @cbreen 

From  July 2025 to July 2026, Elsa Carla De Grandi (Fauna & Flora), Tanner Smith (University of Geneva), and Catherine Breen (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) led the WILDLABS Geospatial Group. During this time, we organized two online events ( December and July) and two in-person events (November and February), featuring geospatial experts discussing how they’re using geospatial data for conservation and environmental applications. 

Membership in the group grew by approximately 105 members for a total of 717 active members, the total number of discussions increased by 123, and the number of resources shared increased from 332 to 387. The group leaders also added 31 new products, datasets, and R&D projects to “The Inventory”, shared 19 resources via links, and authored one article. 

Last year, based on the baseline survey we carried out, there was a strong demand for: (a) increased understanding of remote sensing techniques; (b) more events and job posts; (c) developing skills in geospatial data management, and (d) geospatial data visualisation.

(a) Increase the understanding of remote sensing techniques: we tried to fill the gap by providing links to papers and training courses, showcase how remote sensing can be used for conservation by inviting speakers working on detecting wildlife from space and integrating text with earth observation data for predicting environmental variables. 

(b) Events and job posts: we shared the latest events including training and conferences such as ESA’s Earth Observation Training for Biodiversity Conservation, ForestSAT 2026, AI + Environment Summit. We’ve also added the trainings to the WILDLABS courses in case you’ve missed them! On the other hand, it was a bit more challenging to find relevant geospatial for conservation jobs.

(c) Developing skills in geospatial data management and storage: it was difficult to get more input from the community on this and drive discussions (see post). We would encourage the next geospatial group leaders to actively work on this topic and share relevant material.

(d) Developing skills in geospatial data visualisation: Unfortunately, we did not have the chance to focus more on building skills for geospatial data visualisation. We would encourage the next geospatial group leaders to actively work on this either by posting links to Dashboards or adding PowerBI or Tableau tutorials.

Stats

• 4 events (2 online and 2 in-person) (special thanks to the AI for Conservation Group for co-hosting one event @annavallery @ViktorDo @jyseltz )
• 4 invited speakers 

• 110 total participants for the speaker event

   

Top discussion posts

• Geospatial 2025-2026: Event Ideas and Community Needs
• No Stupid Questions
• Insight into Some Geospatial Calculation

• Anyone using InVEST?

   

Lessons

Over the past years we have learned: 

1. We still need more data to generate better insight: similar to last year, we still need better background information on the group's members. This would help target future posts to drive up engagement and provide a useful space for the community.
2. Online events jointly organised with other groups were popular. The AI + Geospatial Panel was really successful thanks to a great collaboration with the AI Group. We had 182 registered members and great participation during the break-out groups. We recommend hosting more live events in the future.
3. First in-person events were successful: we organised events in Washington D.C. and in Lima as part of ICTC 2026. These networking events were useful to raise awareness of WILDLABS. These were the first two in-person events that group has organised, and we’d love to see these happening more in the future!
4. Discussions and articles were great to put together, but didn’t generate large numbers of comments. Similar to last year, some posts received ‘like’ emojis and thumbs up, and sometimes generated a comment, but the engagement within the group was not very high hence it was hard to understand what really mattered to the community. For that reason, it might be beneficial to understand the number of clicks on a link, if possible, to gauge interest.
5. External engagement with wider geospatial community (outside of conservation): we tried to get the wider geospatial community more involved into participating on WILDLABS via LinkedIn particularly to help us build “The Inventory”. We received many post likes and messages stating the usefulness of “The Inventory” but unfortunately, we found no additional products, data or R&D projects were added even if the interest was very high!
6. Working with new colleagues and cross-collaboration with other WILDLABS groups was rewarding. Despite coordinating our calls and organization across several time zones, we found working with colleagues and groups we didn’t know before this effort to be a rewarding experience.
7. Review the Group Charter periodically. We set out a very ambitious plan for this year and managed to meet a lot of our goals but we still needed to pivot based on availability of the group leaders and seeing what was working and what wasn’t. 

We’d like to take the opportunity to say thank you to everyone who attended our events, participated in discussions and contributed in some way to the Geospatial Group! Your contribution really matters 😊 

We wish the 2026 - 2027 group leaders a successful year!