Conservation Technology

Technology that serves the field

Conservation researchers collect data in some of the most demanding environments on earth. Low connectivity. Dust. Heat. Rain. Satellite tags that transmit a few bytes a day. Camera traps that fill SD cards with false positives. Field notebooks that get soaked through. The tools available to them should not be another obstacle.

We build open source conservation technology designed for the field. Offline-first data collection. Geospatial pipelines that turn raw observations into actionable insight. Standards that let researchers share data across organisations. Everything we build ships under permissive open source licenses so conservation teams can inspect, adapt, and own their tools.

What We Build

The Field Company

James Burgess and Martin Kilombe founded The Field Company, an open source platform for ecological field research and data collection. The platform combines geospatial tooling, offline-first architecture, and scientific data pipelines. Researchers use it to track wildlife populations, monitor ecosystem changes, and manage conservation projects across Southern Africa. Every component is open source.

fieldlog — Field Data Platform

fieldlog is the data collection application at the core of The Field Company. Designed for researchers who work where the cell signal is unreliable and the nearest power outlet is a solar panel. Forms sync when connectivity returns. Observations geotag automatically. Photos attach to field records with metadata preserved. Offline-first architecture means the app works the same way with one bar of signal as it does with none. Built for Android field tablets, works on any modern browser.

BioX — Biodiversity Data Standard

BioX is an open biodiversity data standard and toolchain we maintain under The Field Company. It defines a common schema for species observations, population counts, habitat assessments, and threat classifications. Researchers using different tools and operating in different countries can exchange data without manual mapping. The standard ships with validation libraries, conversion tooling, and reference implementations. Built with input from field researchers across three continents.

Wild Me — Wildbook

Our engineers have contributed pull requests to Wildbook, the open source platform behind Wild Me's wildlife identification system. Wildbook uses computer vision and machine learning to identify individual animals from photographs. Our contributions include performance improvements to the image processing pipeline and data export tooling used by marine biologists worldwide.

Why Open Source Matters for Conservation

Proprietary conservation tools lock data into formats that outlast the companies that built them. Researchers funded by grants that run for two or three years cannot afford to lose their data when a vendor shuts down or changes their pricing. Open source code lives as long as someone finds it useful. Even if The Field Company disappeared tomorrow, every researcher running fieldlog could continue collecting data, run their own instance, and maintain the code themselves. That permanence is the point.

Transparency matters too. When a conservation agency uses software to make decisions about protected areas, funding allocations, or species management, the code behind those decisions should be inspectable. Open source lets researchers verify the analysis, reproduce the results, and challenge the conclusions. Science requires it.