Offering a New Way of Seeing the Conservation Tech Landscape
How Graphicacy helped WILDLABS visually develop the first formal report on how conservationists utilize technology
Wasps carrying radio tags, hawks wearing ultrasonic microphones, and drones identifying species using thermal cameras and machine learning give the scent of science fiction. In reality, these are just a few of the technologies conservationists use in their endless push to learn more about “the secret lives of animals,” in the words of The New York Times.
As the first online global community dedicated to conservation technology, WILDLABS is at the forefront of this movement, and is a central hub for wildlife experts, engineers, and developers worldwide. In 2020, WILDLABS set out to formally capture and report on the challenges, needs, successes, and developments defining conservation tech.
With its research in hand, WILDLABS connected with Graphicacy to make its data more accessible, digestible, and impactful. Graphicacy’s streamlined, easily digestible visualizations enabled WILDLABS’ State of Conservation Technology report to take the niche subject of conservation technology to a much wider audience.
The first wide-angle look at conservation technology
From 2020 on, COVID-19 has disrupted the scientific community worldwide. This created an opportunity for WILDLABS to examine two factors defining conservation technology: the global environmental crisis and the proliferation of new technology.
To capture the effect of those concurrent forces, WILDLABS surveyed 248 respondents from 37 different countries, and held focus group discussions with leading experts across seven of the most widely used technology applications in the field. Initially, WILDLABS only planned to publish their findings in an academic publication, but they were inspired to think bigger after seeing other industries publish their own annual “State of Technology” pieces in the popular press.
“We were really excited about the content of the research, but we knew academic publications weren’t the best avenue for connecting with the audience we wanted to reach,” said Talia Speaker, the research lead at WILDLABS and one of the report’s authors. “We wanted it to be accessible and exciting for people outside the academic community.”
Making less data say more
Conservation technology is a subject outside the mainstream, enough so that Speaker sometimes has trouble explaining the concept to her own family — but that wasn’t an issue for this project. “I was pleasantly surprised,” Speaker said. “We didn’t have to go into a bunch of details for Graphicacy to understand. They asked really good questions and grasped the subject matter quickly.”
For this project, Graphicacy sought a clean, straightforward approach that quickly communicates the core message and highlights the most important data from WILDLABS’ research. This strategy gave WILDLABS the best value based on their deadline and budget.
One key message of the report is how practitioners ranked conservation technologies on their current performance (how much impact they are making now), vs. their capacity to advance the field (how much impact these technologies may have in the future). The original chart displaying this data was complicated, and showed all values from the survey responses. Graphicacy proposed a novel chart form, which did not show the underlying values from the survey responses, and instead focused on the overall rankings.
“This was a totally different way of looking at the data that we hadn’t considered,” Speaker said. “It’s a much more concise way to present the most important info. It connects with our audience because most people reading will be mainly interested in the tech that they work with. Graphicacy helped us come up with this design to help people easily find what’s important to them.”
Another key visual is a grid of profiles on the 11 key conservation technologies. When clicked on, they expand into profile cards, displaying charts on how users rated that technology’s strengths, weaknesses, and proficiencies. Graphicacy custom-designed many of the icons featured in the chart, which WILDLABS also now uses on their website.
Finally, with WILDLABS’s budgetary needs in mind, Graphicacy designed the report for long-term use by employing clear, user-friendly code that can be easily updated with future data.
Changing the future of conservation
As an industry, wildlife conservation has struggled to leverage technology’s maximum potential. WILDLABS hopes this report will help change the conversation.
“Most of us were trained as field ecologists. We’d hike miles to change a battery for a device, though the iPhones in our pockets were often way more sophisticated than anything we were actually working with,” Speaker said. “We wondered, ‘Why aren’t we using that technology in the field?’ It could make a huge impact on conserving species, tracking habitat loss, and more.”
As the first global assessment of conservation technology, the report provides a valuable step towards a unified understanding of systemic technologies and strategies that effect change. Future reports offer enormous potential to track trends over time and direct new investments to where they can have the most impact.
“A lot of the value we got from Graphicacy was working out the vision of what we wanted the report to be,” Speaker said. “We’re very happy with the outcome and it’s something we’re excited to build on.”
Graphicacy partners with clients to tell engaging stories with data. Graphicacy’s team combines storytelling, thoughtful human-centered design and deep technical capabilities to build and deploy strategic, data-rich digital projects. Graphicacy’s team has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the Center for American Progress, the Anti-Defamation League and many others.
