This past year has had its challenges for everyone, with the ongoing global crises affecting all aspects of work. However, despite the challenges we’ve faced, we’ve been able to make significant progress towards our mission of amplifying conservation impact. We are grateful for the support of our collaborators, donors, and well-wishers who have helped us over the year. 

In these first weeks of January 2023, we look back at TfW’s 2022 highlights.

In January 2022, we began compiling and publishing maps created for conservation awareness and impact on our website. Our collaboration with Mongabay-India began in late 2021, to enhance their stories with our spatial analysis and cartography. This series of blogs documents the articles we’ve worked on together from October 2021, till the present. All our conservation cartography work can be accessed on our Pinterest board.

We conducted an internal session with our consultants in February on PARIVESH (Pro-Active and Responsive facilitation by Interactive and Virtuous Environmental Single-window Hub). The PARIVESH portal has data about all projects, both new and old, that are looking for forest, environment and wildlife clearances. This data is an essential tool for effective conservation advocacy. In August 2022, we wrote an article on how to use PARIVESH effectively, which was published by Sanctuary Asia.

With the end of the second Indian wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, we began our 2022 field season in March. Team-members made their way to the Nilgiris, where we connected with conservation actors from The Shola Trust and WWF-India. We explored the possibilities of using drones to monitor lantana invasions in wildlife corridors, and to survey wildlife in remote areas.

Late in March the core-team members met in person for the first time. We’d been working together remotely for five months, and there was something special about being able to sit together in the same room for face-to-face conversations. Though we formed bonds through our virtual interactions, it was great to put real faces to the names we had been interacting with via a computer screen.

As the team transitioned from a remote working arrangement to a hybrid structure in Goa, we had a three-day long internal meeting to ensure that the team had up-to-date information on the organisation's projects, collaborations and values. 

In the first week of April, the Supreme Court accepted the Central Empowered Committee's recommendations regarding the proposed transmission line through Mollem. In brief, fresh forests through the Western Ghats cannot be cleared; the proponents must use the existing alignment that parallels the highway. In 2021, we created a map depicting the CEC's recommendations to the SC regarding all three proposed infrastructure projects. In 2022, we were elated to see our cartographic visualisation manifested in reality.

April also saw the core-team in West Champaran district in Bihar. We were working in collaboration with Wildlife Conservation Trust (WCT) to use UAVs to monitor Ganges river dolphins and gharials along the Gandak river in Bihar.

In May we made our way to rural Maharashtra, with our collaborators Farmers for Forests (F4F) and EcoNiche to develop a pilot project for a program that encourages mangrove regeneration on privately-owned fallow land unsuitable for agriculture. We used UAVs to survey the area and locate plots of land that could be inducted into this project.

Also in May, we presented our conservation cartography work in Goa at the Liberty & Light Festival 2022. Watch it here. 

In mid-June 2022 we conducted an Open Data Kit (ODK) training session for Harsana Sunil, a Mud On Boots grantee from the Sanctuary Nature Foundation. We visited him in Mangar Bani in November 2021, and were very impressed with his conservation impact. He works towards the long-term protection of the Mangar Bani sacred grove, generating information about the biodiversity of the area and increasing appreciation for its ecological value amongst urban and rural youth. The training we provided him with would allow him to conduct his existing data collection on the forest’s biodiversity more effectively.

Two of our team members were selected to attend fellowships and workshops during the monsoon, when fieldwork is restricted. Nandini Mehrotra, our programme manager, was in Bellingham, Washington, U.S. as a Kinship Conservation Fellow, while Nancy Alice, our conservation communicator, attended the Science Gallery Bengaluru’s Carbon School.

In July, in collaboration with researchers from Florida International University, we prepared a map describing the location where a sleeper shark was discovered in the western Caribbean. This research paper, including our map, was published in Marine Biology titled ‘First report of a sleeper shark (Somniosus sp.) in the western Caribbean, off the insular slope of a coral atoll.’

Also in July, we met the Mongabay-India team in person for the first time when they visited Goa. We spent a full day meeting with them regarding our collaboration on conservation cartography, and continued the introduction over dinner and drinks.

We use Litchi for our UAV missions. It is extremely useful for setting up flights, but doesn't come with mapping capabilities. In July, we began building a QGIS plugin that can create Litchi-compatible flight paths for a given polygon.

In August we published version 0.1 of our plugin to address a need we've seen in the conservation/drone-mapping ecosystem. As of December 2022, the plugin has surpassed over 1000 downloads, we hope to continue to update and modify the same as required.

In August 2022, we play-tested a game we’ve developed, around the spatial components of human-elephant conflict, at ATREE’s 25th Anniversary event. We believe that developing a game to depict this issue spatially could be a powerful way to engage people and help them understand the issues. Read more here.

The Habitats Trust (THT) and TfW travelled to Pondicherry in August to investigate the viability of using ROVs for surveying and collecting data on coral reefs along Indian shores. ROVs can explore reefs that might be too deep or hazardous for divers to reach. We have now gained a much better understanding of the possibilities and constraints of marine robot technology for conservation study after exploring marine wildlife habitat on India's east coast, at depths of up to 30 metres.

In September, we used UAVs to map a lake in Bangalore, India, in collaboration with Paani.Earth, and also conducted a training session for them. 

Later in September, we had a two-day in-person meeting where we discussed our work and experiences over the monsoon, and discussed carbon, carbon markets, and carbon-centric spatial analysis with Nisha D’Souza from EcoNichewww.eco-niche.org/.

Additionally, TfW was invited to co-lead India Flying Labs and is currently the main organisation for any Indian drone/conservation project coming from the network. This gives the team more visibility and access to projects in our area of expertise.

In October, the team worked with IISER-Tirupati's Sciurid Lab to conduct high-altitude drone mapping missions in Ladakh, India to evaluate the effectiveness of drones in mapping the habitat and population distribution of marmots and pikas.

The team also provided remote technical support to a conservation NGO in Bihar, assisting them with their use of drones to locate a man-eating tiger. Read more here.

Conducting local field trips in Goa allows us to observe and gather data about the habitats we are working to protect and conserve. By visiting these areas in person, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by these ecosystems. Our first field trip in November 2022 was an early morning excursion to Divar island. During our visit, we walked through the mangroves, conducted some opportunistic birdwatching, and practised flying our drones. It was a great privilege to spend time in these habitats and learn more about the unique flora and fauna that call them home.

On our second field trip in the last week of November, TfW joined The Good Ocean team to explore tidepools in North Goa. During the outing, we used our UAVs to collect video and imagery along the coastline, which can be used to study the growth of seaweed in this region. This was also an opportunity for the two teams to evaluate the usefulness of drones in gathering baseline data and identifying potential seaweed harvesting sites along India’s coast.

We wrapped up our final in-person team meeting in the third week of December. We shared our individual accomplishments and experiences, as well as discussions about what the team hopes to achieve in 2023.