Learn how to create an initiative like Tech4Nature Mexico

#Is this toolkit for you?

Yes, if you work in a protected area, a community, a local government, a university or an organization and want to harness the positive impact of technology and data to effectively conserve species and territories. To get started, you need a goal and partners willing to work toward it together.

Here you will find what we learned over four years of work in the Dzilam State Reserve, in Yucatán, together with community leaders, the state government, universities and technology partners. You will also find examples from Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and other parts of Yucatán, because each territory solves the same challenges in its own way.

With this toolkit you can

• 1Align goals across institutions to work toward a shared purpose.
• 2Agree with the community and institutions on who decides about the data and how it is shared.
• 3Place camera traps and acoustic devices using local knowledge of trails and wildlife crossings, with manuals in Spanish.
• 4Use BioScanner and other free AI tools to review thousands of images in days.
• 5Observe changes in the territory with mapping and AI platforms that require no coding.
• 6Bring the evidence into management decisions and sustainability models for the territory.

#How to use it

The toolkit has five stages. You can read them in order or go straight to the one you need. Each stage explains what it's for, what we did in Dzilam, how to move forward, a lesson learned, tools to get started and an example from another initiative in the region.

#The five stages

1. 1

   Aligning goals with needs and contexts

   What do we want to achieve, why, and who decides?

   By the end you will have: Goals aligned among partners and a data agreement

2. 2

   Co-design and deployment

   How do we design monitoring with the territory and collect reliable data?

   By the end you will have: An agreed monitoring design and equipment installed and logged

3. 3

   Analyze with AI

   How do we turn thousands of files into information?

   By the end you will have: Species and jaguars identified and validated by people

4. 4

   Observe the territory

   What is changing in the territory?

   By the end you will have: A shared reading of changes in the territory

5. 5

   Decide and sustain

   How is the evidence used, and how do we sustain what we have built?

   By the end you will have: Informed decisions and a sustainability model for the territory