Greetings!
This is my first post, I hope to get to know all of you better!
I am a PhD in Ecology that wants to jump from academia to the industry. I will start a master's on Data Science soon, and I want to see real perspectives for my future.
I know there are many job opportunities for data scientist, but I struggle to find some environmental-related. Moreover, it's still more difficult to find opportunities in biodiversity or wildlife conservation with a focus on data science.
Do you know of any companies or resources that focus on this?
Thank you very much!
22 September 2024 3:32pm
There are many companies that focus on biodiversity data, especially quantifying and reporting specific biodiversity statistics. You may want to familiarize yourself with some of the policies driving biodiversity data gathering and also climate data gathering. One of them is TNFD which are nature-based risk disclosures for financial companies. This is on it's way to becoming a requirement for many financial companies in much the same way that TCFD became a requirement for financial companies to disclose climate-related risk. Since climate related risk disclosure is mandatory in the EU and a growing number of countries, a lot of financial orgs are scrambling to quantify their exposure to climate risks. The same is likely going to happen with TNFD.
In any case, some companies to check out are NatureMetrics, Pivotal, WildMon (@carlybatist feel free to jump in here), and many others.
Good luck!
22 September 2024 8:34pm
The TNFD "Tools Catalogue" is technically a list of tools, not a list of companies, but in practice it's a list of (mostly small) companies that support biodiversity assessment and reporting.
And maybe this goes without saying, but, just to make sure we don't overlook the obvious... if you go to the WILDLABS Resources page, and click "career opportunities", that's the most complete list I'm aware of re: job opportunities in conservation technology.
Also, it doesn't look like LinkedIn allows you to see who someone else follows (you can see someone's connections, but not their follows), but... if you follow Carly, you will inevitably discover some new companies. I say this because I recently did a similar search for biodiversity-related companies, and when I clicked on every single one of them (literally), I saw "Carly Batist follows this page".
23 September 2024 3:54pm
Hi! I'm currently launching a startup EarthScape to get landowners to manage their land more responsibly and plant the 'right' native plants. There's a ton of data going into it and at some point I'll definitely need a data scientist. Just giving you an idea of what's out there from a private sector perspective. :)

Margaux Armfield
Wildlife Protection Solutions (WPS)
23 September 2024 6:10pm
In addition to what others have already mentioned, you can look at universities and biodiversity research institutes as well! Places like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, UCSB, Yale Center for Biodiversity, Stanford Natural Capitol project, National Center for Ecological Analysis, and others. When I was looking for a software job in conservation, I found that its hard to find conservation jobs through LinkedIn and other traditional job boards. There are just so many more non-conservation job listings for "software" or "data science" that it can be hard to sift through them all. (Though I did have better experience searching "biodiversity software" on Glassdoor than the others).
It may be better to identify the organization that does the kind of work you are interested in first, and then go to their job postings, follow them on linked in, and just be patient. Also, I did find that the WildLabs resources was the best place to find jobs, so I will second that comment from @dmorris !
Akiba
Freaklabs