Background

Understanding changes to animal and plant species and their environments is crucial to the long-term well-being of our planet.  Minor changes in habitats, consumption, and industrial “pressure” can have a profound impact on multi-billion dollar industries including food production, resource management, navigation and recreation to name a few. The current methods for recording and publishing conservation data are antiquated, proprietary and expensive. Correspondingly, in many cases, the data driving conservation policies is sparse and the means to comply and enforce those policies is prohibitively complex. All of this directly affects how well we manage the conservation of living resources, the impact of development, our food supply and ultimately, our ability to live sustainably. 

To address this challenge, the founders of EarthNC have formed a new venture called Conserve.IO with the singular focus of bringing conservation into the 21st century. We are deploying a mix of mobile, web and crowdsourcing technology to simplify and scale the collection of conservation data and to make that data more actionable. By doing so, we will better understand changes to our environment, enact better policy, and facilitate consensus action on that policy, leading to more sustained and prosperous existence for all of us. 

We don't know all there is know about this market yet, but we do know we're on to something. We believe we are just bumping against the tip of the iceberg with our mobile platform and are looking forward to the amazing opportunities in front of us -  whether its achieving standardizing on conservation collection effort, harnessing crowd-sourcing as a true compliment to scientific research, or innovative new aproaches to big data challenges such as a world-wide species photo matching database. The world is ("ahem") our oyster, and we love be involved in work that could help us all.

-The Conserve.IO Team