Sharing, Interpreting and Visualizing

One of the most pervasive barriers to conservation effectiveness has always been the lack of capacity in our community for easily sharing, interpreting, and visualizing complex ecological information, and our stories have suffered for it. In subsidizing the development of Data Basin™, our primary goal was to help Wilburforce grantees share their data easily and more effectively – to provide the latest technology and help foster more of those aha! moments when maps overlay to illustrate and communicate important threats or opportunities.

If we could also save a grantee or two from feeling compelled to spend resources on developing a new tool or database, so much the better – we’d seen a lot of tools and data libraries come and go and we were confident that our team, led by the Conservation Biology Institute and including Rhiza Labs and ESRI, would develop something head and shoulders above previous efforts.

By meticulously mapping tool development to user feedback and need assessments, CBI has done just that and we are thrilled with Data Basin. What began with a desire to help Wilburforce grantees save money while combining their data resources has turned into a much broader opportunity to create communities of data-users and advance conservation at scales we did not anticipate. In the face of such complicated and pervasive drivers such as climate change, this is perhaps the most important outcome of this effort and we applaud CBI and their partners as well as the other funders that have recognized the opportunity that Data Basin presents. Though conservation has never operated on a level playing field, the effective use of new technology can go a long way toward improving the odds!