Guardian Connector

Digital technology plays a key role in helping people to gather the information they need to make better decisions about community well-being and ecosystem health. However, many off-the-shelf tech solutions fail to meet the needs of Indigenous and other local communities with place-anchored relationships that are on the frontlines of protecting their territories, which comprise over 80% of the world’s biodiversity and over 35% of the world’s intact forest landscapes.

Conservation Metrics is a mission-driven company committed to co-creating rigorous and sustainable monitoring solutions that strengthen communities, conserve biodiversity, and restore ecosystem health. We adapt and integrate emerging technologies or build new tools to solve monitoring challenges at every stage of the project lifecycle and for projects of any scale.

Together with Indigenous communities and technical partners, Conservation Metrics is co-creating Guardian Connector, a free and open-source data sovereignty platform for communities to securely access, explore, and derive insights from their data, which will be stored on premises which they own entirely.

It is our objective that Guardian Connector will meet the unique needs and challenges of our Indigenous partners, which include a desire to own and control their data, have access to biocultural metrics that reflect their perspective on well-being, easily use datasets from multiple monitoring and data collection tools, and receive near real-time alerts about incursions in their territories. Our vision is that Guardian Connector will be suited to serve as a sustainable, centralized, and private platform for Indigenous and any other communities to meet their data management needs in the very long term, without dependency on outside support.

❗ Note: Guardian Connector is a working title. We hope to have a different name for this tool soon.

Accessible, secure, and seamless data workflows enable data sovereignty

Guardian Connector is being designed to easily integrate with existing best-in-class tools that are already in use by many Indigenous and other communities across the world:

• ODK & KoboToolbox for collecting survey data 📝
• CoMapeo for collective territory mapping and monitoring 🗺️
• Superset for customizable data visualization 📊
• Terras for change detection alerts, other remote sensing products, and dashboard visualizations 🛰️
• Terrastories for documenting place-based oral histories 💬
• Timelapse for managing tags and labels for camera trap data 📸
• Earth Defenders Toolkit for sharing guides, case studies, and other pedagogical materials for using the tools 📚
• …and more. Guardian Connector will have a user-friendly, accessible UI for integrating and securely accessing data from other tools, now and in the future 🔗

Guardian Connector itself is a flexible data retrieval and centralized storage system that creates much-needed interoperability between these and other tools, and provides additional views for data exploration. It is offline-compatible, and will be possible to translate into any language.

Coming soon

We are currently co-creating Guardian Connector with our Indigenous partners and a small consortium of organizations led by Nia Tero, but we plan to release an open version in the future. The tools themselves are free and open-source, and you will be able to self host Guardian Connector using our documentation; or, we can work with you to provide technical support and onboarding. Please stay tuned for more announcements.

For any inquiries or questions, please contact Rudo Kemper, Senior Technical Lead at guardianconnector@conservationmetrics.com.