It’s been quiet here at 14N 121E the past seven months. I’ve been transitioning to my new research job at the Department of Biological Sciences at National University of Singapore. After five fruitful years at Fauna & Flora International’s Philippines country programme, which is part of a productive career spanning fifteen years in conservation work, I am back to doing research in academia where my professional career all began for me.
I read a recently published review paper by Pimm et al. regarding emerging technologies to conserve biodiversity [1] in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution. It provided a good summary of the challenges and opportunities that came with new technologies that have been improving conservation efforts and helping to solve species and habitat loss. The authors posed outstanding questions, of which some were very relevant to my own work on conservation geomatics, most notably on combining remote sensing of environments with species distribution data and photographs of species that would allow rapid responses to threats; broadening outreach to those who collect data on endangered species and ecosystems and sharing the results with them; and filtering large amounts of data relevant for analysing and processing key questions.