Conservation Technology Ecosystem

A curated map of the conservation technology ecosystem.

This repository starts with the WILDLABS Introduction to Conservation Technology course and expands outward into a practical field guide covering:

• major open-source and proprietary platforms
• domain slices such as marine, restoration, fisheries, bioacoustics, and edge AI
• citizen-science infrastructure
• sensors, hardware, and monitoring systems
• interoperability standards, schemas, and message/data formats
• end-to-end integration patterns and reference workflows
• open-source repositories worth following
• collaborations, alliances, and implementation networks
• prizes, challenges, conferences, and discussion forums

This is not “everything.” It is a working map of the conservation-tech landscape that is broad enough to orient a newcomer, but selective enough to stay useful.

Why this repo exists

Conservation technology is fragmented.

Useful tools are spread across nonprofit initiatives, academic labs, donor-funded projects, GitHub organizations, startups, corporate partnerships, scattered forums, and wiki-like inventories. A lot of valuable work is hard to discover unless you already know the right names.

This repo is meant to address that.

It is designed for:

• conservation practitioners trying to find tools that already exist
• technologists looking for meaningful projects, partners, or gaps worth building in
• funders, advisors, and researchers trying to understand the ecosystem
• open-source contributors looking for projects with real-world relevance

Start here

Best entry points

• WILDLABS — the strongest general entry point for conservation technology community, learning, discovery, and sector awareness
• The Inventory (WILDLABS) — a purpose-built discovery layer for conservation technology products, organizations, and R&D
• SMART and EarthRanger — two of the most important operational platforms in protected area management
• Wildlife Insights, Wildbook, iNaturalist, eBird, and CitSci.org — core platforms for biodiversity monitoring and citizen science
• GBIF, OBIS, Movebank, and GloBI — important data infrastructure layers for biodiversity, marine, animal-movement, and species-interaction data
• Open Foris — one of the most important open ecosystems for forest, land-use, and restoration monitoring

Repository guide

• docs/landscape.md — broad ecosystem map of platforms, tools, hardware, data infrastructure, and citizen-science systems
• docs/domain-slices.md — tighter taxonomy by problem space and ecological domain
• docs/interoperability-and-standards.md — schemas, metadata standards, APIs, exchange formats, and geospatial interoperability patterns
• docs/integration-patterns.md — recurring end-to-end workflows showing how data moves across devices, platforms, archives, and operations
• docs/open-source-repositories.md — deeper look at open-source repositories, GitHub organizations, and emerging projects
• docs/communities-funding-and-events.md — forums, communities, collaborations, open-source innovation hubs, awards, prizes, conferences, and challenge programs
• docs/gaps-and-opportunities.md — structural gaps in the ecosystem and opportunities for new work
• CONTRIBUTING.md — how to improve this list

Suggested contribution areas

High-value additions include:

• missing regional or domain-specific tools
• more marine conservation, fisheries, restoration, and climate-biodiversity overlap
• stronger interoperability notes for camera traps, acoustics, telemetry, and eDNA
• better open-source repository discovery from labs and NGOs
• procurement and deployment notes from real users
• integration patterns showing how data moves between field tools, analysis systems, operational platforms, and archives
• examples of offline-first or low-bandwidth workflows that work in practice

License

This repository content is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.