Ten years ago, we couldn't have imagined how tools like machine learning, eDNA, and satellites would advance and transform conservation work. Now technology is advancing faster than ever, and as tools become smaller, lighter, and more affordable, it's vital to have a space where community members can discuss the next big thing, share ideas, compare tool options, and tell the story of their experiences - positive, negative, and anything in between - while using new technologies.
In 2021, the WILDLABS State of Conservation Tech report detailed what tools show the most promise according to community members, as well as what tools are currently seen as the most effective. And as new tools enter the field, we're excited to see how this data will change over time, and how this group grows over time as well.
Our State of Conservation Tech research also discusses something called the "Hype Cycle" - the pattern that occurs when a new technology bursts onto the scene, promises to be an exciting solution, encounters challenges as new users adopt the tool and put it into practice beyond just theory, and eventually settles into its most effective state as users acquire the right skills to use it to its actual potential. Machine learning, one of the most promising technologies, is currently in the middle of its own hype cycle, and we see community members working through their own hurdles to incorporate ML into their work effectively. Despite what you may think, this Hype Cycle can also be positive for tech development, as it means that users have big ideas for new tools, and with the right resources and skills, they can work toward bringing those ideas to life. And as our community members experiences the Hype Cycle for various tools at their own paces, we hope this group will also serve as a place to discuss that process and overcome hurdles together.
Ready to discover new possibilities? Join our Emerging Tech group now and get to know your forward-thinking conservation tech peers!
Header photo: Internet of Elephants
St. Lawrence University
Professor of Biology at St. Lawrence University
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- @SamuelHertz
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I'm a PhD researcher at Royal Holloway University of London (Centre for GeoHumanities) researching modalities of sound-sensing technologies across climate and conservation sciences. Interested in ethics and histories of acoustic monitoring as well as new visualization methods.
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- 3 Discussions
- 10 Groups
- @DBayley
- | He/him
Fauna & Flora & University College London (UCL)
I'm a tropical marine ecologist, specialising in coral reefs, MPAs, and blue carbon. Within conservation technology my focus has been around developing underwater imaging techniques, primarily to assist coral reef monitoring
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- @EliThore
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Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
I am a biologist with a broad interest in how the environment affects the behaviour and ecology of wildlife. I also like seeking creative and practical solutions to reduce our impact on the environment.
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- 5 Groups
PhD student with research focused on using on-site DNA sequencing for rapid species identification. Interested in wildlife forensics, and conservation genomics.
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- @Gcharron
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Cofounder of Outreach Robotics, I have a master in mechanical engineering and I thrive on developing new technology for field scientists using remote controlled robots.
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I am a forensic geneticist with a long term interest in developing and applying DNA markers to combat wildlife crime. Currently developing and validating STRs for raptors and rapid on-site species ID using the ONT MinION portable sequencer.
- 2 Resources
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- 5 Groups
- @garthpaine
- | He/Him
Arizona State University
Garth Paine (https://www.activatedspace.com/ ) is acoustic ecologist, composer, sound artist, and academic (ASU) based in USA/Australia. He is known for his pioneering work on species density metrics from ambient recordings and his anti-poaching efforts
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Cave biologist and conservationist
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- @Gody
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Godfrey Nyangaresi, a dedicated Protection Manager with 12+ years of wildlife conservation experience. Skilled in technologies, administration, and law enforcement, he leads protection efforts at STEP, ensuring the sustainable conservation of elephants in southern Tanzania.
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Director of Spatial Planning and Innovation Nature Conservancy of Canada
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In this Conservation Tech Showcase case study from Fieldkit, you'll learn how accessible tools are revolutionizing environmental monitoring through innovative sensor technology.
23 May 2023
Careers
We are a team of ecologists and technologists who believe good business must be good for nature. We’re building an economy that puts nature and business in balance by incentivising the restoration of nature at scale.
16 May 2023
The new role will support the growth of BioSciences’ new People and Nature Laboratory at UCL East through conducting cross-disciplinary research, teaching, outreach, and entrepreneurial activities in applied ecological...
16 May 2023
Are you using or creating tech to protect wildlife? We want to support your organization through two $15,000 grants!
15 May 2023
Welcome to our new Conservation Tech Showcase, a series highlighting innovative and impactful projects from outstanding organizations around the world.
11 May 2023
Non-profit organizations addressing issues related to climate justice such as (but not limited to) climate change mitigation/resilience, pollution, hazardous waste, wildlife conservation/restoration or environmental...
10 May 2023
Why you should know about Kenya-founded data analytics company - Gro Intelligence, arguably the largest funded tech startup within the African startup ecosystem and the only platform that brings together live, global...
5 May 2023
We are a team of ecologists and technologists who believe good business must be good for nature. We’re building an economy that puts nature and business in balance by incentivising the restoration of nature at scale.
2 May 2023
Article
Running a startup addressing the biodiversity crisis and generating early revenues or looking to pivot your business model? Don’t miss this great chance to grow alongside a like-minded community of founders, investors,...
2 May 2023
Building on the previous GSMA Innovation Fund for Climate Resilience and Adaptation, the objective of this new Fund is to pilot and scale-up digital technology innovations that make a positive socio-economic and...
21 April 2023
Careers
We create Precision Fishing technology to help commercial fishermen catch their target species more consistently & sustainably.
5 April 2023
August 2024
event
November 2023
event
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I don't think KEH would influence accelerometry at all.One other way to think about it is - the KEH is a movement sensor itself.The GPS is quite a severe factor in the energy... |
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Biologging, Emerging Tech, Sensors | 1 year 9 months ago | |
Any results coming out of this survey that you would like to share? |
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Community Base, Emerging Tech | 1 year 10 months ago | |
We’re so excited to see what comes of the growing discussions on sustainability started throughout our community. As the WILD... |
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Emerging Tech | 1 year 11 months ago | |
Some folks doing work in this space - Wildlife Drones, Conservation Drones, UAV Wild, AfricanDrones, Oceans Unmanned, Geonadir. |
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Drones, AI for Conservation, Citizen Science, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech | 1 year 11 months ago | |
Dear Community,Together with Hackster.io, Seeed Studio is very happy to jointly organize “IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Plant... |
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AI for Conservation, Connectivity, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 1 year 11 months ago | |
A bit opposite of what you're looking for but according to this, the share of non-NFC enabled phones was 10% in 2020. They don't state their source unless you pay, but I suspect... |
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Biologging, Emerging Tech | 1 year 11 months ago | |
Job description WPS seeks a game developer to work with our videography team and existing library of wildlife 360 video content to... |
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Emerging Tech | 2 years 4 months ago | |
That's pretty cool Can you send us the info at [email protected] happy to help |
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Emerging Tech | 2 years 10 months ago | |
I only know Internet of Elephants! Have you heard about them? I think their new competitor is Google, have you seen? https://9to5google.com/2020/07/10/google-3d-animals-list... |
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Emerging Tech | 3 years 10 months ago | |
Hi - my name is Rogue Marechal, founder of HAL-13, a game board publisher specifically interesting in connecting the gaming community to the world and challenges of wildlife... |
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Emerging Tech | 5 years 11 months ago | |
We've recently published in Scientific American on some of the ways AR/MR can be used to support wildlife. Great to have any feedback... |
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Emerging Tech | 6 years 5 months ago | |
Yes - good points in there about why traditional attempts at these attempts have hit a ceiling - we have some great approaches to that - will have some prototypes to share very... |
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Emerging Tech | 7 years 10 months ago |
Earth Species Project - Senior AI Research Scientist
15 July 2022 6:40pm
Fast Company Feature: Smart Parks
14 July 2022 4:19pm
Quantum sensing for environmental sciences
14 July 2022 4:17pm
Service Designer
13 July 2022 9:05am
What emerging technologies could make conservation technology more sustainable?
1 July 2022 4:34pm
Intro webinar - The Biodiversity Digital Twin: a new solution to support protection & restoration of ecosystems
30 June 2022 1:22am
Conservation Tech Award: Apply For Two $15K Grants
23 June 2022 6:38pm
Cofounder needed
9 June 2022 4:23pm
17 June 2022 6:54pm
How exciting @Joyeeta ! I'd love to learn more about the companies and projects you worked on, can you share more info about them?
I once chatted to an entrepreneurial advisor with a couple of my conservation tech ideas, and he said my ideas are good/impactful but don't make for a product worth millions of $$$ of turnover per year that would interest investors. So I am very curious about how you got your conservation tech businesses off the ground!
18 June 2022 8:33pm
Some folks doing work in this space - Wildlife Drones, Conservation Drones, UAV Wild, AfricanDrones, Oceans Unmanned, Geonadir.
Join Seeed’s “IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Planet 2022” on Hackster to Get 100 Free Hardware and to Win $14,000+ in Prizes!!
14 June 2022 11:04am
Join Seeed’s “IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Planet 2022” on Hackster to Get 100 Free Hardware and to Win $14,000+ in Prizes!!!
14 June 2022 9:14am
Video: Delivering edge computing on Robinson Crusoe Island (Chile) to preserve biodiversity
13 June 2022 2:08pm
Virtual Meetup Discussion: Future Questions & Tools in Movement Ecology
7 June 2022 9:38pm
11 June 2022 4:42pm
We've actually been looking into NFC to automatically provision field devices to set/read/store metadata. We're staring down the barrel of a large deployment and metadata is one of the issues that we think really needs automation. We're thinking of having a dedicated device to write and read the tags that would go on the devices as stickers and automagically sync the metadata with the database. An added bonus would be that most recently modern phones support NFC protocols like NTAG or MiFare Classic. That would mean that they could also be both read and written with the GPS coordinates, timestamp, etc as they're deployed in the field. It's still under discussion with the many other things that need to be implemented, though. I do think it's interesting that what we're seeing in a lot of conservation technology applications is not just a need for new technology but also the less exciting but more practical need for things that improve productivity like automating metadata management.
12 June 2022 1:08am
Using NFC makes a lot of sense too. I'm just on an older lower-end device that doesn't support it, which is why it didn't pop immediately to mind. Would be interesting to see what the adoption rate for NFC-capable phones is across countries though I'd imagine some phone manufacturer or something already has that data.
12 June 2022 2:29am
A bit opposite of what you're looking for but according to this, the share of non-NFC enabled phones was 10% in 2020. They don't state their source unless you pay, but I suspect that's in terms of total phone models, not total phones in use. So it's highly likely that phones with no NFC in use is much higher than that.
UKAN+ Monitoring UK Biodiversity Symposium 15-16th June
31 May 2022 2:58pm
New paper: A practical approach with drones, smartphones, and tracking tags for potential real-time animal tracking
29 May 2022 1:15pm
New wildlife forensics lab - Singapore
29 May 2022 12:34pm
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Future Questions & Tools in Movement Ecology
24 May 2022 10:10pm
Job Opening - VR / Unity Game Developer for Wildlife
28 January 2022 2:23pm
Technical Difficulties: The Path to Success
14 October 2021 12:00am
Internet of Elephants is seeking test users for our early prototypes
3 October 2016 6:13pm
25 October 2016 9:43am
Thanks Stephanie for giving it a go. It is most certainly very basic right now - hardly a game yet - but purposely left that way so as to leave a lot of space for feedback and ideas. We'll put out another version in a few weeks - what is promising is that a lot of the things we were thinking to do next align with a lot of the feedback that is coming in.
25 October 2016 9:44am
Hi John - thanks for giving it a try - It is so basic that I'm surprised at all the positive response we get - nice to see people are open minded about this being version 0.000001 :)
Yes - definitely - the idea is to do this for maybe 10-15 different species around the world. We want the user to eventually come in and 'spin' the globe, see what is happening with real wild animals in different parts of the world, and have a fun way of engaging with them.
We don't yet even know which animal we would go live with first - that is still discovery to see what data is the most interesting from a game perspective combined with what captures the attention of people the most. Elephants certainly do the latter, so we're testing out with some elephant data we have. But we're seeing that wildebeest data and migratory bird data could be far more fun.
8 July 2021 8:40am
Introduction
29 June 2020 9:19pm
6 July 2020 11:16pm
Guess not!
27 July 2020 6:50pm
I only know Internet of Elephants! Have you heard about them?
I think their new competitor is Google, have you seen? https://9to5google.com/2020/07/10/google-3d-animals-list/
Internet of Elephants last launch was Wildeverse - https://www.wildeversegame.com/
Explorer Classroom: Gautam Shah
19 May 2020 12:00am
Creating the Wildeverse
13 May 2020 12:00am
Introductions
15 February 2016 8:13am
26 June 2018 10:58am
Hi - my name is Rogue Marechal, founder of HAL-13, a game board publisher specifically interesting in connecting the gaming community to the world and challenges of wildlife conservation.
Our first game, Serengeti: A Race For Life is an attempt to raise players/consumers awareness to the importance of biodiversity, by emphasizing the need to study and protect a wide range of species, as a means to help the enrire ecosystem.
By joining this community, I’m hoping to gain useful insight into wildlife protection, to enrich my knowledge of this field, and feed it back into my game designs.
Applications of AR/MR for Wildlife Conservation
22 December 2017 6:10am
Pokemon Go concepts for wildlife conservation
14 July 2016 10:10am
14 July 2016 10:47am
Hi Gautam,
Really interesting idea, thanks for sharing the post. Although this isn't quite the expansive action plan identified in the piece, it reminded me of the #pokeblitz hashtag that's sprung up in parallel with the Pokemon Go frenzy. If you find an actual creature while playing #PokemonGO, you can tweet pic with #PokeBlitz & experts will help you identify it! It seems to me to be a nice first step for 'making pokemon go real'.
Cheers,
Steph
4 August 2016 5:26pm
'Pokémon-Go players could capture 400 years of wildlife sightings in 6 days' - what an incredible figure! Like you, @mygshah , and Jordan, Dr Tom August has also been thinking about how Pokemon go could be applied to conservation:
http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/blogs/pok%C3%A9mon-go-players-could-capture-400-years-wildlife-sightings-6-days
6 August 2016 2:25am
Yes - good points in there about why traditional attempts at these attempts have hit a ceiling - we have some great approaches to that - will have some prototypes to share very soon, but happy to tell people about these ideas if interested.
Gaming with real data
4 January 2016 11:55am
17 June 2022 1:14pm
What about developing a drone conservation training course for field conservation staff teaching specific skills for specific research needs.