Despite their increasing prevalence, the positive and negative impacts of collaborations between conservation organisations and academia remain poorly understood. 2015), and the number of such constellations is rapidly rising (Arts et al. Jepson and Ladle 2015 Joppa 2015 Saito et al. Such partnerships primarily concern the co-working of ecology and computing sciences (e.g. Partnering with academics is one of the ways through which this expertise shortage can be addressed. 2015).įor new digital technologies to be adopted, nature conservation organisations require technological expertise that is not typically found within their institutions (Arts et al. In spite of this, nature conservation organisations adopt new digital technologies because of the belief that these may help them to deliver the plurality of conservation and organisational objectives more efficiently (see Verma et al. Inevitably, the use of digital technologies has not only brought positive outcomes, but also created challenges in the ways people interact with nature, such as potential exclusion of certain groups that are not technologically-minded and the risk of volunteer fatigue in digitally enforced public engagement activities (e.g. The adoption of new digital technologies by nature conservation organisations, such as GPS enabled mobile devices, interlinked databases and high-performance computing, has led to state changes in a wide range of dimensions including data gathering, public engagement, increased knowledge and skills, and monitoring (e.g. Most importantly, collaboration with academics was shown to bring the opportunity of a profound change in perspectives on technologies with benefits to the partner organisations and individuals therein. Negative impacts include the time and resources required to learn new skills and sustain new technologies, managing different organisational objectives and shifts in working practices as a result of the new technologies. Positive impacts include new ways of engaging with audiences, improved data workflows, financial benefits, capacity building and the necessary digital infrastructure to help them influence policy. Through in-depth interviews with three UK research-council-funded case studies, we show that by working with academics conservation organisations can receive positive and negative impacts, some of which cut across their operations. This has led to collaborative forms of working with academia to spearhead digital innovation. Nature conservation organisations increasingly turn to new digital technologies to help deliver conservation objectives.
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