The Supercomputer in Your Pocket: Mobile Tech for Land Trusts

Five or 10 years ago, it still made sense to talk about what a future of pervasive technology might look like when it arrived in a few years. That future has arrived.

The vast majority of American adults carry smart phones, and every one of those smartphones is more powerful than the supercomputers of the early 1990s. The Federal Aviation Administration estimated last year that it would register more than 1 million unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drones) by the end of 2018 and 2.5 million by the end of 2022.

So almost everywhere we look we see increasing use of mobile technology, web applications and automation. But simply having massive computing power in your pocket doesn’t mean it’s obvious how or where to use it.

I run the nonprofit GreenInfo Network, which helps nonprofits and government agencies use geospatial technology to solve problems. And there are many problems that can be solved at least in part by creative use of new technologies.

But more often than not it’s the human element — thoughtful planning, judicious experimentation and good old-fashioned conversations — that turn our world’s ambient technological noise into real solutions for conservation. With that in mind, I talked to people from three different land trusts using technology in quite different ways to tackle key parts of their work: for monitoring, for media production and for engaging their communities.

Keeping It Simple

The accredited Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. POST has substantial resources, a large staff and a sizeable volunteer corps, so we might expect it to be working at the cutting edge of technology. But when I asked Tiffany Edwards, POST’s easement project manager, to name one tech tool that has given her the most value over time, she was quick to answer: “Avenza, hands down!”

Avenza Maps is a smartphone application that does one thing really well: It lets you reuse the print maps you already have in a new way. You can load them on your phone and get location data from your phone’s GPS overlaid on top of the maps. You can also drop pins and attach photos to location points, among other actions. That simple feature set is hardly a revolution, but it is immediately useful in a lot of monitoring contexts, and adopting the technology is about as easy as these things can be, assuming you have existing paper maps that you are using already. Export those as GeoPDFs, open them in the Avenza app and head out into the field.

But what about drones and remote sensing and all that? “I tend to be pretty conservative,” Edwards says, “because we need to be consistent in our monitoring practices over time.” POST also has a GIS team that creates maps of all properties using commercially available aerial imagery.

And some efficiencies, like fewer trips out onto the land, also have hidden costs, like less familiarity with the land. “We believe the investment in staff and volunteer time in easement monitoring is worthwhile to stay connected to the land and to landowners,” says Edwards.

But she is quick to point out that every land trust is different and needs to find its own balance. For POST, being at the edge of a metropolis means easier access to both people and preserved lands: “We are close to urban hubs, so we have capacity to find volunteers, and we work across a tri-county area; it’s probably a different scenario for land trusts working across a large portion of a state.”

Though using Avenza presented few technical hurdles for Edwards and her team, she did need to take time on policy questions around volunteer use of their own smartphones. “Make sure people are not keeping or sharing photos,” she says. “Some volunteers use their iPhones, but they are very well trained around confidentiality and records retention: Submit photos and then remove them from your device.”

None of those restrictions were at play when POST used the iNaturalist citizen science app for a recent “grassroots bioblitz” in collaboration with the Coastside Land Trust and the California Academy of Sciences. The whole purpose of the event, on a publicly accessible property, was to encourage people to use their own phones to observe wildlife and share the results.

Forty people converged (pictured at right) on the Wavecrest Open Space in the town of Half Moon Bay, logging more than 1,000 observations of 218 species in just a few hours. But the real payoff was in community engagement at the park, which is right next to a baseball diamond that was hosting Little League games that day.

“A family whose kids were just next door playing softball walked over to see what we were doing,” says Edwards, “and this little girl was so excited that we could identify plants with iNaturalist!”

Taking to the Sky, Connecting on the Ground

Elias Grant, stewardship manager for the accredited Bear Yuba Land Trust (BYLT) in Grass Valley, California, has gone all-in on drones, both personally and professionally. He and Erika Seward, BYLT’s co-executive director, presented their work with drones at last year’s Land Trust Alliance Rally. Elias is an FAA-licensed pilot, and he owns the drones he uses for his work both at BYLT and for side projects.

Finding a staffer with Grant’s level of drone knowledge and capacity is a tall order. But there’s a lot to learn from BYLT’s experience for any land trust even thinking about using drones in its work.

Grant has spent the past year developing a drone monitoring protocol, setting guidelines for use on properties of various sizes and forest types. “No protocol is going to work for every single property,” says Grant. His goal is to find the places where using a drone can cut down on monitoring time, but then use that time for more valuable work on the land or in connecting to the landowner.

Two of the more surprising ways BYLT has used drones include 1) to give a landowner a virtual reality experience of his own property and 2) to make public-facing marketing videos that attract new supporters to the land trust.

“Originally when we started, I had been flying drones for about two years,” Grant says. “We had a monitoring situation where the landowner has degenerative Lyme disease in his legs, and I thought it would be neat to show him more of the property.”

So they hooked up some virtual reality goggles to the drone control pad and gave the landowner a “heads up” view of parts of his land he hadn’t seen in years.

“It felt good to provide this experience to someone who hadn’t been exposed to the technology and also hadn’t seen his property from this perspective,” Grant explains. And it also gave both the land trust and the landowner a larger scale view of the crown health in the rugged pine forests on the property.

Since then, Grant has gone back and done the same flight again. “It really helps build our relationship over multiple years with the landowner and all the work he is trying to do to care for the forest. As a conservation organization, it has been exciting to offer that.”

If drone video can be so inspiring to one landowner, what about sharing such footage with the wider community?

Seward has a background building brands in sports and entertainment, including for ESPN and Walt Disney. Under her direction, the land trust created both short- and long-form content, exclusively from drones, as part of its recent Open Spaces, Wild Places campaign.

“Aerial photography and video showcase land on an epic scale and provide views that may be inaccessible,” says Seward. “With the grace, speed and agility of a drone, it is both a cost effective and powerful tool for visual storytelling.”

Sharing Is Caring, Content Is King

One day, Adam Moore, executive director of the accredited Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation in Massachusetts, was out on a trail with a board member and got a little lost. He wasn’t quite sure at which trail junction they were, since he was on land owned by another agency. “What if there were an app for that?” he thought. “Then we’d know.”

So the land trust created TrailsMV, an iOS and Android app that provides comprehensive information about trails on Martha’s Vineyard. Using TrailsMV, people can find maps, images and information about every trail on the island, and they can find out where they are on those maps at any time with their phones’ GPS.

Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, the island’s main land trust, spearheaded and funded the work, built using a platform called OuterSpatial from Trailhead Labs. Even just a few years ago, it was a huge technical lift to create a branded, public-facing smartphone app, a lift that was hard to justify for most land trusts, given that phone technology changes rapidly and requires constant software updates.

That picture has changed substantially with platforms like OuterSpatial providing all the technology as an ongoing service. That doesn’t mean creating an app like this is easy, but the challenge is less about technology and more about content.

“There’s a lot of organizational work,” says Moore, “overall, in how the information is presented in the app, but there’s also thought in every detail: Do you want every detail shown on the map or only certain ones? And you want to have a great deal of control over app content, so if a trail is closed, you need to be able to make that clear.”

Sheriff’s Meadow hired a dedicated project manager, Kate Warner, who then coordinated data flow from other agencies and recruited 26 volunteer photographers to provide high-quality images of each trail and trailhead. They even created a special Instagram account.

That transformed a content “problem” into a community-building opportunity, with photographers both contributing to the app but also becoming invested in the outcome.

The Land Bank, a government agency that also protects land on the island, holds a cross-island hike on Trails Day each year, and Sheriff’s Meadow decided to launch the app on that day last June. “At the end of that, we held an event at which we showed at least one photo from every photographer, and 300 to 400 people showed up,” says Moore.

Those photographers have stuck around: “They really had a hand in building it, and they may stay involved in the organization in other ways.”

Moore noticed that in the fall 2018 annual fund cycle, significantly more donors contributed, and he suspects that’s at least partly because new donors have found the app. “We made a strong effort on our annual fund, but I also think our increased profile helped with that.”

Warner has stayed on staff to coordinate quarterly data and content updates with both volunteers and the other owners of accessible lands on the island.

Moore sees the project as an ongoing success: “Most of the time in land management when you do a project, some people are supportive and some are opposed. Not this one. Everyone is supportive.”

Dan Rademacher is executive director of the Greeninfo Network, a nonprofit geospatial communications consultancy that serves many land trusts.

Photos

• Drone aerial of protected land captured by Elias Grant of Bear Yuba Land Trust.
• Bioblitz participants at Wavecrest Open Space in Half Moon Bay, California, used the iNaturalist citizen science app to collect information on plants and animals.
• Two of Elias Grant’s drones include a DJI Mavic Pro (small one) and a DJI Inspire 2.