Botswana's Okavango Delta is one of the most incredible places on this planet. Named a UNESCO World Heritage site for it's biological diversity, the Delta is a pristine habitat for all the charismatic megafauna that subsaharan Africa is known for: elephants, hippos, lions, giraffes, and more. It is one of the most incredible places that I have ever been and the need to monitor and protect it has never been more necessary. It was in this magical place where FieldKit was born, with support by the National Geographic Society. 

FieldKit was inspired by a collaboration between National Geographic Explorers Shah Selbe, Steve Boyes, and Jer Thorp. Steve was conducting biodiversity surveys of the delta from canoes year-after-year in the same old ways that scientists have done for decades (if not longer). While working in the field in Botswana, Angola and Namibia, the team realized that there were few good open source hardware and software tools that met the specific needs of field research. Not only in sensor technology but also ways to organize and visualize the data. Responding to this need, Shah and Jer began to prototype software and hardware solutions and field-tested these approaches from 2014 to 2017. 

We wanted to share the science and the story behind the expedition real-time, so anyone could join and provide insight or support. By turning Into The Okavango (ITO) into a live-data expedition, we have been able to bring thousands of people along with us on expeditions in the Okavango Delta (including an astronaut that was following along from the International Space Station). We collected, stored, and shared 40 million open data points and continuously measured ‘the heartbeat’ of this crucial ecosystem through large-scale open source sensor systems.

This experience we had with ITO was transformative, and it made us realize that we should bring these same capabilities to anyone anywhere in the world by giving them a publicly available, fully featured ITO of their own. The lessons learned and understanding that came from years of continuous field use allowed us to architect FieldKit in way that can be scaled and expanded across various users regardless of how much they know about engineering and computer science. Scientists have already been embracing social media and blogs to share their expeditions with the world visually, but there wasn't a good tool out there for them to do that same sharing scientifically. @Jacob Lewallen has been helping with the hardware and software development on a volunteer basis since the beginning, and stepped in as FieldKit's Principal Engineer at Conservify in 2017.  

We already have additional working partnerships with scientists to use FieldKit in their efforts, which include:

• Handheld GPS-correlated environmental sensor laboratory developed with the National Geographic Society Labs that easily interfaces with iNaturalist and other online biodiversity databases.
• The largest partner for FieldKit is the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Moore Foundation for their Citizen Science for the Amazon project. This is deploying citizen science water monitoring and weather stations across seven countries in the Amazon Basin (covered in an earlier post).
• Gathering scientists data around UCLA Center for Tropical Research's Congo Basin Institute field stations at Bouamir, Cameroon.
• Deployment of a FieldKit camera module, as a request from the Wildlands Conservancy and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to monitor the first California Condor to return to the Wind Wolves Preserve. This will also stream the video live to a "condor cam" that will serve as a public outreach and conservation communication tool. 
• Tracking changes to glaciers in Banff National Park, in partnership with Parks Canada, University of Alberta, and Office for Creative Research.
• Measuring water quality along a mythical boiling river in the Peruvian Amazon (partnering with the Boiling River Project, Southern Methodist University, and the villages in the community).
• … and many more currently in development.