Abstract
Nature conservation organisations increasingly turn to new digital technologies to help deliver conservation objectives. This has led to collaborative forms of working with academia to spearhead digital innovation. Through in-depth interviews with three UK research-council-funded case studies, we show that by working with academics conservation organisations can receive positive and negative impacts, some of which cut across their operations. Positive impacts include new ways of engaging with audiences, improved data workflows, financial benefits, capacity building and the necessary digital infrastructure to help them influence policy. Negative impacts include the time and resources required to learn new skills and sustain new technologies, managing different organisational objectives and shifts in working practices as a result of the new technologies. Most importantly, collaboration with academics was shown to bring the opportunity of a profound change in perspectives on technologies with benefits to the partner organisations and individuals therein.
Highlights
The adoption of new digital technologies by nature conservation organisations, such as GPS enabled mobile devices, interlinked databases and high-performance computing, has led to state changes in a wide range of dimensions including data gathering, public engagement, increased knowledge and skills, and monitoring (e.g. Bonney et al 2009; Dickinson et al 2012; Miller-Rushing et al 2012; Arts et al 2015)
The first case study involved the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which is concerned with the conservation of wild birds, other wildlife and the places in which they live in a wide variety of ways. dot.rural’s collaboration with the RSPB resulted in a dedicated web platform (Blogging Birds), which portrayed automatically generated blogs that captured the movements of satellitetagged red kites (Milvus milvus), and through which the public could engage with the life of this species (Ponnamperuma et al 2013; Van der Wal et al 2015b)
Co-working was perceived to be at the centre of the work by interviewees, the independent working style of academics meant that progress was ongoing: ‘‘the tool evolves without us saying [...] because there’s constantly improvements being made’’ [BBCT, executive team (ET)]
Summary
The adoption of new digital technologies by nature conservation organisations, such as GPS enabled mobile devices, interlinked databases and high-performance computing, has led to state changes in a wide range of dimensions including data gathering, public engagement, increased knowledge and skills, and monitoring (e.g. Bonney et al 2009; Dickinson et al 2012; Miller-Rushing et al 2012; Arts et al 2015). For new digital technologies to be adopted, nature conservation organisations require technological expertise that is not typically found within their institutions (Arts et al 2013). Partnering with academics is one of the ways through which this expertise shortage can be addressed Such partnerships primarily concern the co-working of ecology and computing sciences Jepson and Ladle 2015; Joppa 2015; Saito et al 2015), and the number of such constellations is rapidly rising (Arts et al 2015). Despite their increasing prevalence, the positive and negative impacts of collaborations between conservation organisations and academia remain poorly understood
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