Digital Conservation Practices and Perspectives: Insights from North America

About the Project

Our project assesses how conservation organizations are using new data technologies in an era when data and analytical capabilities are both proliferating and questioned. Big data and algorithmic analysis promise these organizations the ability to track species, monitor ecosystem services, and target ecological restoration with unprecedented precision at large geographic scales. Data can be communicated and shared in highly visualized ways with government agencies and the general public, offering support for a variety of natural resource-related decisions. This era of 'digital conservation' is touted as transformative, with the potential to dramatically improve the efficiency, efficacy, and timeliness of environmental management.

Is this potential being realized? If so, under what conditions and at what cost? If not, why? These questions are especially significant in a “post-truth world” where emotional appeals and instant commentary seem to override data-driven decisions and in an economy that demands digital literacy. While we have some sense of how data technologies may transform or threaten our social networks, healthcare services, or even how we grow food, we know relatively little about what they mean for nature conservation. Canadian governments are moving to address the accountability of their own collection and use of data, but more and more non-state actors are collecting data, raising privacy risks and concerns about a “surveillance society” (SSHRC 2018 a,b,c). We don’t know whether and how data-driven conservation groups are confronting these emerging ethical challenges as they monitor our environment.

The core premise of our research is that governing nature with the digital is inseparable from governance of the digital, and that this is what may transform conservation organizations and paradigms. We need social science that explains what organizational, policy, ethical, and economic factors shape conservation technologies’ adoption and use. Human geographers are at the forefront of critically assessing data technologies’ promises, evaluating their design, use, maintenance, and impacts alongside other governance trends like marketization and metrification. We ask:

• Who are the (new) organizations involved in digital conservation and what data, algorithms, and platforms are they using?

• How are these organizations applying data technologies to inform their own nature conservation decisions and those of others?

We will:

• utilize innovative digital methods to document conservation organizations’ practices and perceptions (objective 1);

• draw from and contribute to the new field of “digital geographies” to categorize these (objective 2);

• theorize them in relation to existing research on the political economies of environmental knowledge production (objective 3).

This research offers unique and timely empirical, theoretical, and practical contributions to conversations at the intersection of environment and technology. We mobilize new knowledge on digital conservation from a social science lens showing how conservation data is actually managed and used, not just how it could be made more precise or accurate. We will summarize ethical challenges at this intersection, enabling the public to assess proposed data governance frameworks and ensuring conservation professionals can navigate the rapid changes their sector faces. The project prepares one MA student and two undergrads with training in digital literacy, research, and project management skills, and introduces them into practitioner networks. Our surveys, published across three open access articles, serve as starting points for future collaboration with environmental governance and digital geography scholars exploring specific case studies.