A platform to end Australia's deforestation crisis.


Type
Digital Platform
Client
The Wilderness Society

Status
Active
Recognition
Good Design Award Winner 2023

The Wilderness Society (TWS) approached us with a pre-existing website that had been built as a power user tool for a small number of in-house geospatial analysts. Unfortunately over 90% of analyst time was spent combing through map imagery searching for potential clearing. An issue that was exacerbated by a counterproductive user experience that made navigating these maps slow, tedious and confusing to interpret.

Our team proposed to re-envision Watch on Nature as a community campaigning platform for The Wilderness Society to engage and activate their volunteer base around strategic areas of interest that were at high-risk of clearing.

By opening up the ability to monitor near real-time satellite imagery to the TWS community, the total number of clearing events discovered increased substantially. This enabled analysts to focus their limited time on validating submissions and catching clearing events while they are still underway.

Notable Stats


Measuring Our Success

  • Over 900 clearing submissions were captured in the first 5 months, a significant increase over the 340 events captured in the preceding 3.5 years.
  • As of writing, we’ve seen a 4x increase in submissions in approximately a third of the time, demonstrating a 12x increase in monitoring efficacy. Geospatial analysts reviewed over 90% of these submissions, with over 75% being verified as genuine clearing.
  • Verified clearing has led to 14 drone missions being deployed to capture footage of clearing in progress, leading to 9 national news stories, including an ABC 7:30 feature on an illegal clearing in the NT.
“The intersection of macro impact, grassroots involvement and technology makes Watch on Nature a very strong proposition. It’s powerful enough to ensure decision-makers acknowledge the issue and create change, yet also addresses the individual barrier of, “I’m too small to make an impact”. We would happily call Watch On Nature a triple 'top-line' project involving People, Planet and Purpose (and ideally, Profit).”
The Good Design Awards Jury 2023

What we did...

Digital Product

Design

  • UX & UI design
  • Interaction & motion design

Development

  • Full-stack development

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