What is Conservation Technology?

Listening for elephants from the air

ChatGPT is all the rage as I write this. Here’s what it produces when I ask it the title question:

Conservation technology refers to the use of technology to protect, preserve, and manage natural resources and the environment. It involves the development and application of innovative technologies to address environmental challenges such as climate change, habitat loss, and biodiversity conservation.

Conservation technology includes a wide range of approaches, from sensors and data analytics to artificial intelligence, robotics, and renewable energy. For example, satellite imaging can be used to monitor changes in the earth's surface, such as deforestation or urbanization, while renewable energy technologies like solar and wind power can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Conservation technology also includes the use of tools and techniques for habitat restoration, species management, and sustainable agriculture. For example, precision agriculture technologies can help farmers reduce their use of pesticides and fertilizers, while genetic engineering can improve crops' resilience to environmental stresses.

Overall, conservation technology plays a vital role in promoting sustainable development and protecting the planet's natural resources for future generations.

That is accurate as far as it goes – identifying a few of the problems addressed and a sample of technology approaches. The last sentence is quite a statement - a vital role indeed. I agree, but it requires elaboration on how, in what way, and why. It is also a role that is, at best, partially realized. The application of technology to conservation was, until recently, primarily restricted to use by scientists and constrained to the funding available from grant money to support research.

Despite its potential, technology has just begun to play a vital role in any real sense in preserving ecosystems and biodiversity. Conservation practitioners were not applying available technologies that could have an immediate and profound impact on the:

• Understanding and combatting wildlife trafficking;

• Protecting protected areas (marine and terrestrial) adequately; 

• Surveying species abundance and distribution;

• Reducing conflict between humans and wildlife;

• Financing conservation by supporting a market for trading in “bio credits.” 

The barriers to technology adoption were (and still are) many. While emerging technologies show even more significant potential for expanding the potential of technology to be a game-changer for conservation management and finance, their potential will go unrealized unless we address the underlying adoption barriers.

Lack of funding, good governance, human capital, and infrastructure are all significant barriers to sustainable technology adoption. Underlying all these problems is our inability to account for the value of nature to human health and our economy. Conservation of nature in all its many forms is fundamentally a tragedy of the commons. Properly discussing how we fail to value nature would require a whole book – and many have been written. 

The barriers to adoption are essential to understand when building and deploying conservation technology. They provide the context we must consider to provide technology tools that meaningfully contribute to solutions toward conservation goals. Perhaps the most critical implication for conservation managers is the sustainability of adopting any given technology. The topic of sustainability and sustainable business models for delivering conservation products (and I use the word products intentionally) is of critical importance that I will focus entirely on in another article. 

Now is a good time to note something I often say that seems obvious but isn’t. Technology is a tool, sometimes an exceptionally potent and scalable tool, but nonetheless, just a tool. There was a fantasy among some technologists and even conservation groups that somehow technology would be the ‘savior,’ the silver bullet for conservation. That never was and is never going to be true. It may well be accurate to say that without technology, we can’t possibly hope to sustainably finance, manage, and protect the natural world on a global scale. That makes it an essential tool, or perhaps the glue (in the form of data and information) we require to conserve nature. But unless we value nature sufficiently, we will not fund conservation, we will not provide adequate governance structures, we will not develop the required human capital, and we will not support it with the necessary infrastructure. 

In many ways, Conservation Technology is the story of grassroots efforts by a small number of people to deploy technology in the face of daunting barriers. There is a mountain of failed efforts to apply technology to conservation. The failures have taken many forms and occurred for many reasons. I plan in future articles to describe a few of them in detail to explore why they failed and the lessons those failures provide for informing future applications of conservation technology.

I was fortunate to be part of the emergence of conservation technology as a vital part of conservation. It has been quite a journey. Technology’s applicability across conservation problem domains gave me a unique opportunity to work on a wide range of issues and experience the particular challenges and differences between marine and terrestrial conservation. It is my dream job, fusing my love of interdisciplinary thinking across technology, policy, and science coupled with a love of wildlife that has blossomed over the last decade-plus of work in this space. I hope to share in subsequent articles the insights and perspectives I gained working across geographies and conservation domains.

When I first began work in wildlife conservation in 2013, there was no such thing as conservation technology, at least not in any organized or recognized way. Today, several universities offer fellowships, student groups, workshops, and concentrations in Conservation Technology. A thriving Slack group dedicated to AI for Conservation has over 1,000 members. There is a Conservation technology directory with over 700 organizations, communities, companies, open-source projects, and other resources within the conservation technology space. Wildlabs.net is a thriving online community for Conservation technologists. 

I could reference many peer-reviewed articles that give a thorough academic perspective of the uses and potential of technology for conservation, but I will note three. The authors of these three articles are some of the field's early thought leaders. Together, these articles provide a solid introduction to Conservation Technology.

Novel opportunities for wildlife conservation and research with real-time monitoring, published in 2014 by Jake Wall et al., described the potential for real-time monitoring. The focus is on monitoring animal movements. However, the concepts described in this paper were some of the core concepts of what became the EarthRanger protected area management product. EarthRanger expanded to monitoring other “objects” and visualization of data from many different sources, such as sensors, camera traps, and human observers. But this paper showed the potential of such a real-time monitoring system. 

Emerging Technologies to Conserve Biodiversity, published in 2015 by Stuart Pimm et al., discusses the promise of technology to provide solutions with sufficient scope and scale to meet the scope and scale of the challenges we face in preserving biodiversity. 

A Comprehensive Overview of Technologies for Species and Habitat Monitoring and Conservation, published in 2020 by Jose Lahoz-Monfort and Michael MacGrath, is an excellent summary of the stunning range of technologies with applications for wildlife conservation. The article notes that technologies like camera traps and tracking collars have been used by scientists for decades, primarily to study animal behavior. It highlights the many ways technology is now being applied to conservation aims.

I will finish this article by briefly identifying the areas of conservation I have had the opportunity to work in and which I will focus on in future articles. I will put the application of technology into context with policy, science, and economic aspects and drivers. 

Illegal Wildlife Trafficking

The Wildlife Conservation Society defines Illegal wildlife trafficking as “any environment-related crime that involves the illegal trade, smuggling, poaching, capture or collection of endangered species, protected wildlife (including animals and plants that are subject to harvest quotas and regulated by permits), derivatives or products thereof.” 

Many Conservation NGOs work to fight illegal wildlife trafficking. TRAFFIC is an organization focused on legal and illegal trade in wild species. Indeed, the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) is an international agreement to manage wildlife trade, declaring some species as prohibited or restricted in some way from being traded. Technology has significant applications for addressing illegal trade. It also has a vital role in managing and monitoring legal wildlife trade, one largely unrealized thus far. This lack of technology enables subversion of the rules set by CITES. 

Marine conservation faces particular challenges due to the ~$250B legal global seafood market. It makes laundering illegal catch relatively easy. By some estimates, one-third of all seafood we eat is caught illegally. Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is the term used to describe the range of activities that are one major factor in the depletion of ocean biodiversity. The remoteness of the ocean presents particular challenges for monitoring, managing, and enforcing it. For these reasons, technology is especially essential. Remote satellite sensing and artificial intelligence in the form of computer vision are critical tools in the fight to protect the seas.

Protected Area Management

EarthRanger being used in a security operations room 

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) defines a protected area as a geographically defined area that is designated or regulated and managed to achieve specific conservation objectives. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) did a considerable amount of hand-wringing over the definition of a protected area (see page 22). They settled on: “A clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.” The IUCN developed categories of protected areas based on how they are protected. 

There are currently over a quarter million protected areas, according to the Protected Planet database maintained by IUCN and UN Environment Program. Presently, ~15% of terrestrial and ~8% of the marine regions of Earth are protected. In December 2022, the world’s countries agreed at the Convention of the Parties (COP) 15 to achieve the following goals by 2030: 

• Protect 30% of Earth’s lands, oceans, coastal areas, and inland waters; 

• Reduce by $500 billion annual harmful government subsidies; 

• Cut food waste in half

The SMART Partnership, formed in 2011 by six non-governmental conservation organizations (NGOs), was one of the first organized efforts to apply information technology to conservation management. They built the SMART platform to support data-driven management of protected areas - an umbrella term to describe any geographic space designated to conserve nature. National Parks, Wildlife Refuges, and National Forests are all examples of protected areas. 

As the SMART Partnership notes: “Protected areas are the cornerstone of nature conservation. Despite their vital role in preventing species extinctions, protected areas continue to be poorly resourced and managed, with less than a quarter providing effective protection.” SMART, which stands for Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool, was developed to bring the power of information technology to protected area management. EarthRanger, the program I helped create and led for nearly four years, is a protected area management tool. We have extended EarthRanger to other uses, but its initial focus was to help secure protected areas through real-time data-driven management and monitoring. 

Marine Protected Areas (MPA)s are a much newer approach to ocean conservation. Getting from 8% to 30% will be a massive challenge. Importantly, it is not enough to declare areas protected. They must be monitored, managed, and protected — forever. The Skylight program I have led for the last three years aims to provide the data and analysis necessary for managers to protect MPAs. We have joined forces with other technology-focused marine conservation NGOs, including Global Fishing Watch, in a collaboration called the Joint Analytical Cell to combine our efforts and make them easier to adopt. I’ll discuss the importance of collaboration among conservation organizations, why it has been challenging, and why it is essential in a future article.

Species Surveys of Abundance and Distribution

The first conservation project I was involved in was the Great Elephant Census, which surveyed 20 African savanna elephant range states over two years from 2014-2015. The Great Elephant Census aimed to determine the continent-wide population of elephants and other large herbivores. To my amazement, the accepted survey method was (and is) to fly small airplanes back and forth like mowing a lawn (called transects). The plane carries a pilot, a front seat observer who manages the rear seat observers who stare out the window counting the animals they see. 

Obviously, this area was ripe for new methods, including taking photographs or videos and then using computer vision techniques to count the number of animals in the images. Many advances have been made towards modernizing aerial survey methods, though at this point, they have yet to be adopted officially. 

Movement Ecology

Old elephant collars

Scientists have tracked animals using various devices attached to animals for over two decades. The kind of tracking device depends significantly on the physiology of the animal. Birds can carry only very lightweight devices to avoid impacting their flying ability. Land animals are typically darted and tranquilized to attach a collar with a GPS device and batteries. The methods for gathering GPS coordinates have advanced from VHF “H” antennae to cellular or satellite data transmissions. 

Movebank is a “free, online database of animal tracking data hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.” It is the definitive database for animal tracking researchers to manage, share, protect, analyze, and archive their data.

The work done by Jake Wall, as described in the paper I referenced, has created a whole new way of using movement data for real-time monitoring and management. Thousands of giraffes, lions, elephants, wild dogs, and many other animals are now tracked in real-time, helping protect them while also adding to the body of knowledge about how they use landscapes and behave. 

Human-Wildlife Coexistence

The interface between humans and animals creates the potential for conflicts to arise between them. Elephants may raid farmers' fields. Wolves, lions, and other predators may take a cow or a goat. Humans may kill antelope or other animals for “bush meat” to eat. The IUCN has a good brief on the issue. 

Some have tried using technology to alert people when animals encroach on their space. These efforts have been limited, and much more remains to be done. Gathering information about incidents of animal incursions can help identify opportunities for mitigating future incidences. Kenya Wildlife Service has adopted EarthRanger as a single place to collect data on human-wildlife conflict incidences country-wide. 

I titled this section Human-Wildlife Coexistence. The term Human-Wildlife Conflict continues to be used to describe the problem. Recently, Conservationists have worked to “rebrand” this to coexistence, the desired end state. 

Wildlife Economy

The newest, and to date nearly entirely unrealized, area that I have recently focused on is what might be termed the wildlife economy. The African Leadership University (ALU) holds an annual conference on the Business of Conservation. There are a large number of organizations, many of whom have worked in the carbon market space, thinking about how to create a market in biodiversity. Developing such a market is a three-legged stool of finance, technology (to provide the necessary data), and policy. 

Conservation finance must move from one based mainly on philanthropy and government aid to one supported by investors who have some way of knowing that their investment is producing the expected “returns.” ALU School of Wildlife Conservation produced a report that identified ecotourism, hunting and fishing, carbon markets, forest products, and wildlife ranching as potential areas for market-based revenue sources for conservation. Ecotourism does produce significant revenue, but only for a small slice of protected areas where ecotourism is viable. Hunting comes with massive controversies and is, in any case, in steep decline. Wildlife ranching also has serious challenges. Forest products are also helpful but limited in their potential. Ultimately, only carbon credits and biodiversity credits, if we can develop them, have the potential to provide the scale of funding necessary to support conservation. 

Technology is essential to realizing the potential of market-based finance for conservation. Stay tuned.