Guardian Connector

Guardian Connector helps Indigenous organizations bring together data from the tools they already use, keep that information under their control, and turn it into maps, dashboards, alerts, and other useful outputs.

What Guardian Connector enables

🔥 Support Indigenous Guardianship
Tools, integrations, and workflows designed around Indigenous-led stewardship of lands, waters, cultures, and collective well-being.

🔑 Own and control your data
Organizations retain ownership and control over their information, including who can access it, how it is used, and where it is stored.

🔗 Connect your tools and data act
Bring together information from mapping, surveys, biodiversity monitoring, remote sensing, and other sources in one secure environment.

📊 Turn data into useful information
Explore data through maps, dashboards, galleries, alerts, and reports that support community priorities and decision-making.

🌳 Built for the long term
Open-source, interoperable, and designed to support different levels of technical capacity and greater local ownership over time.

Works with tools you already use

Guardian Connector is not intended to replace the tools communities already use. Instead, it provides connective infrastructure for bringing data from different systems together for storage, management, analysis, visualization, and action.

Guardian Connector connects seamlessly with widely used tools: CoMapeo, KoboToolbox, ODK, Superset, Timelapse – and integrates with ArcGIS/Survey123, CyberTracker, EpiCollect, Global Forest Watch, iNaturalist, Locus Map, Mapbox, OpenStreetMap, QField, SMART, and more.

Why it matters

Digital technology can play a vital role in supporting Indigenous Guardianship, helping communities gather and use information to care for their lands, waters, cultures, and collective well-being. Yet many off-the-shelf solutions fall short for Indigenous and local communities, who protect over 80% of the world’s biodiversity and more than 35% of intact forest landscapes.

These tools are often overly complex, built around Western data frameworks, dependent on external servers, and difficult to use in remote or low-connectivity environments. Just as critical, little attention is paid to where the data resides once collected, leaving communities without true ownership or control.

As the UN Human Rights Council’s Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples notes:

“Indigenous Peoples remain largely excluded from the collection, use and application of data about them, their lands and their cultures. Existing data and data infrastructure fail to recognize Indigenous knowledge and world views and do not meet Indigenous Peoples’ current and future data needs.”

Guardian Connector is being built with Indigenous partner organizations to help close this gap, guided by the principles of Indigenous Data Sovereignty and designed to support Indigenous-led guardianship.

Built through co-creation

Guardian Connector is co-developed by Conservation Metrics in collaboration with Nia Tero, Indigenous partner organizations, and r technical partners. The platform continues to evolve through its use in real community monitoring and data management programs.

Guardian Connector is free, open-source, and self-hostable. Organizations can operate it on infrastructure they control or work with technical support partners to host, configure, and maintain it.

Please stay tuned for updates, or contact us at guardianconnector@conservationmetrics.com for inquiries.