A dehisced fruit, held up by Dr. T R Shankar Raman (Scientist, NCF), its star-shaped form a glimpse into the forest's complexity.
photo by Prashanth Balasubramanian
Conservation Coalition
A shared, trust-based infrastructure for ecological intelligence.
Built from the ground up with field teams, technologists, and funders, it’s a listening-first effort to design open tools for complex ecosystems-modular, memory-aware, and made for the commons.
The Team behind it
We are a team of four who have spent the last several years working at the intersection of technology and the social sector. While we do not come from conventional conservation backgrounds, our orientation has always been toward field-rooted, systems-aware design, with emphasis on how tools get built, who they serve, and how they hold up over time.
Building shared tools for fragmented frontlines
Conservation in India doesn’t often make front-page news.
It's carried out far from the billboards of climate ambition. In rain-wet notebooks tracking sapling survival. In forest clearings where invasive species are uprooted by hand, again and again. In the repetition of seed collection, where every pod held is both a record of loss and a wager on return.
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And while it is intimately tied to climate, biodiversity, and livelihood goals, it remains critically underfunded.
In a landscape this stretched, data becomes not just insight but leverage.
The picture that emerged was clear:
Sharing among conservation practitioners isn’t a technical hurdle, it’s a structural one. In an under-resourced field, data is one of the few assets a conservation group can reliably control.
What may look like a reluctance to share, is more often, strategic caution; shaped by years of labour, uncertain funding, and hard-earned credibility.
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Yet the cost of fragmentation is high. It limits collaboration. It slows replication & blunts policy influence.
So the Conservation Coalition was launched, as a multi-year, listening-first infrastructure initiative; a way to build trust-based systems that can support the frontlines of conservation, without erasing their complexity.
The spade work on the Conservation Coalition began in September 2024. We started speaking with over a dozen conservation organizations and more than 50 stakeholders across the ecosystem, and met:
Why this work matters
Lantana Camara; photo by Anusha Meher Bhargava
Conservation is not a peripheral concern. It is a central pillar of global sustainability efforts, directly linked to six of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Climate goals don’t mean much without conservation goals.
Healthy forest ecosystems stabilise microclimates, recharge groundwater, hold carbon, and support species diversity.
But the work of protecting and restoring them is often undervalued and undersupported.
Our focus, in year 1, on invasive species monitoring and restoration benchmarking tackles one of the most urgent yet overlooked threats to biodiversity. Plant invasive species like Lantana Camara, Chromolaena, and Senna have overrun native landscapes, choking forest understory, altering fire regimes, and reducing usable habitat for wildlife.
Globally, invasive alien species are the second leading cause of species extinction, after habitat destruction, yet their control receives only a fraction of the funding it deserves.
*IPBES Invasive Alien Species Assessment 2023 summary).
What we are doing
Designing technology that listens before it speaks
Since late 2024, we’ve worked closely with the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) and
The Shola Trust, embedding ourselves in their field programs across Aanamalai Hills, the Nilgiris & the Western Ghats. These are deep, deliberate partnerships shaped by months of trust-building and two weeks of immersive fieldwork.
We’re not just mapping tech gaps, we’re walking them.
A photo-monitoring platform to track long-term forest recovery; across 70+ forest fragments.
A drone-assisted invasive detection system for lantana, chromolaena, and senna, using iterative model feedback loops.
These tools deepen our ability to conserve natural forests, not as static spaces, but as evolving ecosystems, strengthening their role in climate resilience, biodiversity protection, and evidence-based planning.
Each intervention is designed with three values in mind:
Co-created with field teams: No amount of code can substitute for the wisdom of those who have walked the forest a thousand times and still paused to listen.
Modular and open: What is built in one place may serve another, and no system becomes a locked room with only one key.
Respectful of pace and process: Growth is not hurried. Technology must learn to walk at the speed of trust.
What does this mean for the sector?
This is not just about improving monitoring in a few pilot sites.
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It’s about laying the groundwork for a shared conservation intelligence infrastructure.
A system that could allow:
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Restoration ecologists across geographies to compare regeneration timelines
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Forest department & Self Help Groups to forecast invasive spread and plan interventions proactively
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Researchers to layer phenology, biomass, and biodiversity records into a single ecological timeline
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Funders and policymakers to see conservation not as anecdote, but as evidence
