Our latest project Unseen Empire is in app stores now

Today we’re launching our latest project: Unseen Empire! 

Unseen Empire brings to life a massive ten-year study by Professor David Macdonald (WildCRU - Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit), and his team, on the impact of deforestation on the habitat of the clouded leopard. It’s the biggest camera trapping project ever attempted and resulted in the largest catalog of photos of any research project on any species.

We are always looking for new data sets with great stories behind them. We’d already done a few projects with GPS data and also observed behavior data, and so when I sat down casually with David Macdonald at a research conference where I was mostly feeling like a fish out of water, we got to talking about his work in Southeast Asia and the incredible data set he and his team had put together over the previous 10 years. From that point, I was determined to see what we could come up with and David and his team were equally keen to see their work featured in this way.

Typically, a study like WildCRU’s, however groundbreaking, doesn’t travel far beyond conservation science circles. Unseen Empire not only reveals a never-before-seen world of rare species in mesmerizing candid photography, it also pulls back the curtain on the immense effort by humans on the ground to keep our biodiversity and wild spaces intact.

I pride myself on knowing a fair bit about animals, not in a scientific way, but just out of personal interest and affinity, and I was blown away by the number of mammals alone that I never knew existed until we started seeing the photos. It actually heightened my sense of urgency around these habitats knowing that so much can live and potentially thrive there with just a little protection.

Unseen Empire represents a new approach to boost public understanding and support of science, and help conservation work to reach a broad, cross-cultural audience. 

TRY IT OUT YOURSELF!

Check out the project website here. It’s available for free in the app store and google play.