Hi Krasi! Greetings from Brazil!



That's a cool journey you've started! Congratulations. And I felt like theSearchLife resonates with the work I'm involved round here. In a nutshell, I live at the heart of the largest remaining of Atlantic forest in the planet - one of the most biodiverse biomes that exist. The subregion where I live is named after and bathed by the "Rio Sagrado" (Sacred River), a magnificent water body with a very rich cultural significance to the region (it has served as a safe zone for fleeing slaves). Well, the river and the entire bioregion is currently under the threat of a truly devastating railroad project which, to say the least is planned to cut through over 100 water springs! 



In face of that the local community (myself included) has been mobilizing to raise awareness of the issue and hopefully stop this madness (fueled by strong international forces). One of the ways we've been fighting this is through the seeking of the recognition of the sacred river as an entity of legal rights, who can manifest itself in court, against such threats. And to illustrate what this would look like, I've been developing this AI (LLM) powered avatar for the river, which could maybe serve as its human-relatable voice. An existing prototype of such avatar is available here. It has been fine-tuned with over 20 scientific papers on the Sacred River watershed.



And right now myself and other are mobilizing to manifest the conditions/resources to develop a next version of the avatar, which would include remote sensing capacities so the avatar is directly connected to the river and can possibly write full scientific reports on its physical properties (i.e. water quality) and the surrounding biodiversity. In fact, myself and 3 other members of the WildLabs community have just applied to the WildLabs Grant program in order to accomplish that. Hopefully the results are positive.



Finally, it's worth mentioning that our mobilization around providing an expression medium for the river has been multimodal, including the creation of a shortfilm based on theatrical mobilizations we did during a fest dedicated to the river and its surrounding more-than-human communities. You can check that out here:



 

Let's chat if any of that catches your interest!

Cheers!

This is super cool! Me and @Hubertszcz and @briannajohns and several others are all working towards some big biodiversity monitoring projects for a large conservation project here in panama. The conservation project is happening already, but hubert starts on the ground work in January and im working on a V3 of our open source automated insect monitoring box to have ready for him by then.

I guess my main question would be if this funding call is appropriate/interested for this type of project? and what types of assistance are possible through this type of funding (researchers? design time? materials? laboratory field construction)

Hi Francesca,

I don't think I have the exact answers you are looking for, but 1) maybe where companies have switched from paper/flyer marketing to solely web-based adverts (possibly reducing waste). 2) Check out some of the applications currently being developed around blockchain technology (which underpins the digital currency Bitcoin), specifically in regards to potentially optimising efficiency or energy usage or supply chain transparency (with knock-on effects for improving environmental certification schemes). 

Provenance are a start-up currently developing such a model, and may be worth investigating. Here in Edinburgh Uni there is a also blockchain project working with Oxfam on something related to reducing waste/increasing efficiency.