I figured someone, somewhere, is trying to grow food that doesn’t murder the soil. Someone has terabytes of wildlife camera monitoring and drowning in footage. Someone has a brilliant idea and absolutely no software skills or budget.

Maybe we can help.

We’re just people who can code, but maybe “just people who can code” might be exactly what someone needs right now.

We’re already collaborating with some rewilding projects, and we’d like to do more of it and meet more people trying to do things that matter.

The few people we talked to, who are fighting the important fights, are using broken tools, or no tools at all.

Maybe we can be of use to people protecting and restoring ecosystems, innovating sustainable food systems, or those tracking what’s actually happening to the living world around us.

We don’t have all the answers. I don’t even have most of the questions most days, and I’m trying my best to learn. But we’re good at software, we can build things that work, and we’d rather build things that matter.

To end this thread, I’m casting a wide net but if you’re trying to save one specific part of the world and software is the thing standing between you and doing it better—please talk to us! We want to meet you.

#OpenScience #Conservation #RestorativeAgriculture #RegenerativeAgriculture #EcologyInAction #CitizenScienc #Biodiversity
#ForestRestoration #Agroecology #SoilScience

One of the sites at Travis Wetland where we set up our invertebrate sampling yesterday was in the new southern woods.

I helped with a planting day for this back in 2014, when it was still a wet field. Now, it feels like a real forest, with a canopy well above my head and lots of wild seedlings scattered about underneath. It's amazing how quickly trees grow when the ground is always wet.

Here are two photos of the same part of the wetland in September 2014, when trees were being planted, and now. It's like magic!

Many of the trees planted here were sourced from Pūtaringamotu, Riccarton Bush, the old growth fragment of kahikatea swamp forest in central Christchurch. Pūtaringamotu is a much drier site than it was when the city was founded so it's fantastic to see a new swamp forest emerging.

(Now we just need to rein in our carbon emissions to stop the impending sea level rise that will otherwise submerge all these sites in a few centuries.)

#UrbanEcology #ForestRestoration #wetland #nz #Ōtautahi #Christchurch #nature