Resources

Blending a century of wildlife investigations on the Sacramento River with modern monitoring technology and techniques, like installing cameras and autonomous recording units (ARUs), is giving conservationists a clearer picture of the wildlife that once thrived in the Sacramento River Wildlife Area, what disappeared, and what’s now returning.

With key funding from the California Wildlife Conservation Board, River Partners has partnered with Bat Conservation International and Conservation Metrics Inc. to study bats in the Central Valley.

Together, with renowned bat experts, River Partners looks to learn more about how bats live and how we can help them thrive.

Climb above 400 meters in the Solomon Islands and the air changes. Clouds drift closer. Trees grow dense with moss, and the ridges carry an unmistakable weight of history. These are the Sky Aelans—sacred highlands that hold ancestral shrines, origin stories, and the cultural identity of the people who live nearby. Protecting them means safeguarding both biodiversity and culture.

In late 2024, Planet launched a new impact program called Project Centinela to help leading scientists, conservationists, and stewards monitor and safeguard 50 of the world’s vulnerable biodiversity sites. Project Centinela provides a three-year “biodiversity subscription” of Planet imagery and analytics for those on the frontlines of conservation around the world. We consider the program a core element of Planet’s contributions to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and an initiative that helps us fulfill our Public Benefit Corporation purpose. We inaugurated the program with an initial set of ten sites in 2024, and now we’re proud to welcome another five sites into the program.

Conservation Metrics works with indigenous communities worldwide to provide tools and systems for environmental monitoring and protection. As part of our Guardian Connector toolkit, our team needed a workflow orchestrator that could handle data processing from various sources, particularly for centralizing data from many different field data collection applications used by communities, and monitoring illegal activities in protected territories.

Having migrated from Dagster, we found that Windmill offered the accessibility and ease of use we needed for our small teams and non-technical users. Its intuitive interface and flexibility allowed us to focus on our core mission, rather than spending time on framework configuration or building additional user interfaces.

While there is a wealth of spatial data and tools available to support forest protection, these resources often remain inaccessible to the communities that need them most. To bridge that gap, Conservation Metrics, along with UNDP, the Equator Initiative, NASA, Nature4Climate, Awana Digital, Rainforest Foundation US and Global Forest Watch, developed an online, self-paced certificate course to equip Indigenous and frontline communities with foundational knowledge and practical skills to map, monitor, and manage their forests.

From facial recognition technology that monitors brown bear populations, to intelligent robots sorting recycling, these initiatives are having a positive impact on the environment

The vulnerable California red-legged frog faces pressure from farmers who need their breeding grounds to irrigate crops. Conservation Metrics, is using machine learning technology to better identify the frogs’ habitats and flag them for protection.

This tutorial demonstrates how to quickly develop an automated system to detect the sounds of a species of interest using only a handful of short clips exemplifying the species.

Counting elephants helps scientists know where and when they’re being killed. Despite elephants’ massive size, they are hard to spot in the rainforest.

On the mountainous island of Kauai, elusive shearwaters and petrels burrow deep in the forested terrain. Saving them requires a radical effort, led by a man who is no less extreme.