Case Study - Creating a Cross-Platform App for Conservation

Overview

The Conservation Hub is a cross-platform application that is used by community-led conservation groups around New Zealand to connect with users, record accurate data on-site and report to their stakeholders.

We created a web, mobile app, and API that has been used by community groups, local councils, and the Department of Conservation to record over 200,000 conservation datapoints in 2023 with features such as offline support, custom form building, data conversion, and geospatial queries.

The Challenge

New Zealand wants to be predator free by 2050, but faces significant technical challenges to support this ambitious goal.

The first main challenge is that there is no central place for every conservation group's data right now. Even within individual groups, data is disjointed across multiple applications for different use-cases such as Health & Safety, predator trapping, volunteer management, and bird monitoring.

To solve this challenge, many groups consider and have tried to build their own custom application for recording their data in the way that uniquely fits them. This is when they encounter another main challenge, which is that building a custom solution to house your own data is prohibitively expensive for community groups, and the ongoing hosting and maintainance costs of a custom solution are incompatible with the funding models of most groups.

The Conservation Hub was created as an accessible solution to recording and sharing conservation data that can be customised by each group individually to cater to their unique needs and processes.

The Solution

The Conservation Hub is a web app, mobile app, and API that boasts a number of features that New Zealand community groups desperately need, including:

• Offline support for recording data on your mobile device
• An easy to use API, so that groups can concentrate on building unique ways to capture data, while we handle the data recording and sharing.
• The ability to customise the way that data is captured so that we can meet the needs of any use-case whether that be recording volunteer activity, monitoring bird nests, mapping geospatial data and more.
• Features for community management and engagement including an event manager, community notice board, and granular access control.
• The ability to generate reports and send data compliant with country standards for data such as Kiwi call and Bittern monitoring.

On the technical side, The Conservation Hub's web app and API is built using NextJS hosted with Vercel allowing for useful features such as end-to-end testing, fast application loading, and a development experience that simplifies building + testing new features.

For the mobile app, React Native is used with Expo to product an easy interface for people on the field to join community groups, record data, and keep up to date with community events.

For the database, We used MongoDB because it's a non-relational document database that is well suited for geospatial data, and without the constraints of a relational database The Conservation Hub can better adapt to the unique storage and access patterns of the users.

The Results

Since it's inception, The Conservation Hub has been used and well received by conservation groups across New Zealand, and has become the data collection tool of choice for over 120 groups and 1,000+ individual users to record over 200,000 conservation datapoints in 2023 to date.

The Conservation Hub is free for individual users to start creating forms and recording data, test it out on the official website.