🦚Guardians of Earth: Fostering custodianship & engaging everyday people - to track and promote biodiversity [BA+ 2023 cohort]
TLDR; With GoE’s gaming platforms and data oracle, property owners & managers - from parks to eco-tourism lodges - can delight their guests, AND collect data to verify the nature value of their assets
The problem: We know that nature brings value to our society in ways that are not priced effectively into our economy - but we lack the localised data and ways of knowing that we need to recognise this value and the communities that are protecting and restoring it.
On the other side of the coin, as our world becomes more digitised and increasingly urbanised, people are becoming less connected to nature.
While we may abstractly be able to conceptualise nature’s value, many are losing a personal connection to our non-urban environments.
Collecting data on biodiversity at scale is challenging to complete and verify, especially if we are interested in understanding localised biodiversity at the level of individual species. Finding a rare gecko, dragonfly, or small mammal, for example, cannot be done with the best available satellite-based methods today, due to insufficient spatial resolution, or dense canopies which obscure life on forest floors. Public remote-sensing data is also limited in its temporal resolution, meaning that it cannot always provide daily updates. While satellites might be able to estimate habitat connectivity or carbon sequestration potential, getting more granular biodiversity and species data necessitates the collection of data at the ground-level.
What if there was a unified way to solve the problems of both data and connection at once?
The solution: Harnessing the power of everyday citizens and consensus-based verification, Guardians of Earth has built games-based systems to connect the public with nature, while collecting asset-level biodiversity data.
It all starts with a nature realm: a real-life digital twin of local biodiversity. To date, Guardians of Earth has built 350 nature realms for locations including Singapore’s Botanic Gardens, Avana Retreat in Vietnam, and UC Berkley.
Visitors to any property with a nature realm can then open the Guardians of Earth game apps to see what species have been spotted there in the past, and when, and can also submit their own sightings when they find them, in exchange for rewards within the game. It’s a great way to engage with kids on a walk outside, especially in the absence of a specialised guide. Guardians of Earth counts organisations like the Jane Goodall Foundation amongst its supporters, with the platform reaching 290,000+ participants to record over 120,000 species with 4,150 validators.
Beyond their own user-generated content, the Guardian of Earth apps also draws from species entries from a number of other open source nature identification apps, such as eBird. But the magic of the Guardians of the Earth platform is the blind, consensus-based verification system that underlies it all. After users submit species sightings, their species name has to be verified by other users via Guardian’s of Earth Oracle of Life platform, in exchange for more tokens. If multiple users attribute a sighting to the same species - without having seen each other’s entries - they are then rewarded, and levelled up such that their future identifications will be given more weight.
The nature realms are easy to set up, and anybody can do it, but paying asset owners can benefit from additional functions such as remote sensing or eDNA data add-ons. Ecotourism operators such as Big Tiny in Singapore have seen benefits in the way they engage with their guests.
Meet the team: For founders Andrew, Malika, and David, Guardians of Earth is the culmination of years of dedication and grit to build the business to where it is today.
Biodiversity Accelerator+: What is the customer segment you've had the most traction with? Why do you think this has been the case?
Andrew Robinson, CEO: Eco-Tourism, especially Luxury Eco-Resorts and Hotel Chains. This has proven to be an easy sell, as our "Nature Realms" technology enables these properties to showcase their biodiversity in ways they couldn't before. It's transparent, real-time, visually compelling, grounded in science and community-verified. This attracts eco-conscious travellers (70% of whom, according to Booking.com, make their booking decisions based on the property's eco-friendliness). Plus our AR, AI and mobile games provide fun biodiversity tracking activities for the guests, connecting them to the local wildlife and incentivising them to form lastings bonds so they visit repeatedly.
Biodiversity Accelerator+: Since starting your business, what is one thing you've learned that has helped improve it it significantly?
Andrew: Community-built and tested technology - following principles of data sovereignty and interoperability - will out-accelerate and out-impact traditional ventures. By investing heavily in our Oracle of Life (see BioExpertise.org) over the years, we now have thousands of ecologists on our team, all working together on biodiversity analysis. Which makes the results transparent and trustworthy. We are disguised as a gaming company because validating biodiversity credit systems (eg. TFND, BCA, Web3, etc) requires community involvement + behavioral economics. Mobile games are by far the most impactful, well-tested, and cheat-proof way to do this.
Biodiversity Accelerator+: If you could ask for anything from our readers, what would it be?
Take a moment to ask yourself, what piece of land on this planet do I (or my organisation) feel most connected to? Maybe a local park, a school, a development site. Any piece of land. Then go to GuardiansofEarth.io and create a Nature Realm at that location. See if you and/or your community can monitor and grow its BioScore. It's super easy and fun. You can even increase the BioScore by playing our new Spirits of the Realms game.
Thanks for reading! You can also learn more about the Biodiversity Accelerator+ at our website today.