Story-telling app and website help communities improve their ‘backyards’
This is My Backyard (TIMBY) digital tools support safe reporting and story-telling for addressing conflict-prone issues around the globe.
Conservation Technology News
Wildtech provides news and information on how the conservation community can better leverage technology. We are a non-profit initiative.
Creating corridors: researchers use GPS telemetry data to map elephants’ movements
Researchers compared historical elephant movement corridors to current corridors from GPS data to determine the impact of human encroachment on elephants’ movement patterns in northern Tanzania.
Soil research aided by citizen scientists, boots and all
What lurks in the soil beneath your feet? In the soil beneath us live billions of organisms, ranging in size from one-celled bacteria to gophers. These critters aerate the soil,…
Underwater cameras let scientists dive beneath the surface with dolphins
For the first time ever, scientists have been able to observe what life is really like for dolphins beneath the ocean’s surface. Using custom-made, noninvasive underwater cameras that they attached…
Breaking a fence-breaking habit: maintaining the fences that reduce human-elephant conflict
As agriculture expands into traditional elephant habitat, human-elephant conflict (HEC) has become a major threat to long-term survival of African (and Asian) elephants, often facilitating poaching and habitat destruction. Governments…
Rugged innovation: Meeting the challenges of bringing high tech DNA analysis to the field
An international team of researchers journeyed into the jungles of the seldom-traveled Kabobo Massif in March 2017 along the shores of Lake Tanganyika in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)…
Location, location, location goes high-tech: Facts and FAQs about satellite-based wildlife tracking
To understand the resource needs of a species, you need to know where individual animals go and what they do there. You can follow some animals around on foot or…
Location, location, location: Facts and FAQs about radio telemetry
Why track wild animals? How do wildlife biologists know where animals go and the resources they use? They watch them over sometimes extended periods. For millennia, people have watched animals…
Going viral: How advancements in Ebola disease detection in wild apes can help to prevent dangerous outbreaks
It is regarded as the deadliest Ebola outbreak in human history: the 2014-2016 epidemic in West Africa claimed the lives of 11,325 people and resulted in 28,652 suspected, probable, and…
Effective climate change action needs technology and policy
Just one week after thousands of people marched at Earth Day events across the globe to support science and research, over 200,000 more took to the streets of cities worldwide…
An interactive map connects landowners and forest change in one of the world’s most biodiverse places
Borneo– it is a name that evokes images of a faraway island, resplendent with tall trees, thick jungle, diverse cultural traditions, and many strange and wonderful animals, including proboscis monkeys,…
Wildbook: a social network for wildlife
Nature’s Barcodes In 1974, a grocery item with the now universal black and white barcode was scanned for the first time. This invention streamlined the check-out process and has forever…
Nepal tests fencing approach to protect farms and elephants
When an Elephant Comes Knocking: A new approach to selective elephant fencing is being tested in Nepal
Bordering extinction: Can technology offer ecologically-sound alternatives to the proposed U.S.-Mexico wall?
It has been several months since the rare image of a jaguar was captured by a camera trap located along the Ft. Huachuca Trail in Arizona. It was the second…
Do the Locomotion: Bio-inspired technology creates amphibious robots that mimic salamander movement
Undulating at the surface, the Salamandra robotica cruises through the water until it reaches the shore, then ambles forward through the sand with a lumbering gait on its four paddle-like,…
Seeing in the dark and more: Facts and FAQs about thermal imaging
The novelty of seeing in the dark has captured our imagination for millennia, and people have employed fire, torches (flashlights), and, more recently, night vision goggles that amplify the tiniest…
Drones and artificial intelligence image processing improving the ‘koality’ of wildlife monitoring
In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have increasingly been used to monitor wildlife populations from above, but artificial intelligence has taken drone technology one step further. Koala populations are…
Building environmental community and transparency through maps
Map for Environment is a free online open-source mapping platform that offers spatial data, tools, and hosting to encourage a wider environmental community to produce maps and increase transparency in decision-making.
Translating the barcode of wildlife into action
One might assume that the biggest challenge in managing an ambitious, multinational initiative like the Barcode of Wildlife Project (BWP) stems from the cross-cultural dimensions of the enterprise. But the…
LemurFaceID: The facial recognition tech helping researchers track lemurs in the wild
Thanks to threats like hunting and the destruction of their tropical forest habitat by illegal loggers, lemurs — small primates endemic to Madagascar — are generally considered some of the…
