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Conservationists today are grappling with troves of complex data. From GPS collars tracking animal movements to patrol logs and environmental sensor readings, extracting meaningful long-term patterns is no small feat. Decision-makers need insights they can rely on for monthly reporting and ongoing planning, not just day-to-day snapshots. Making better decisions quickly depends on turning that data into information.
Ecoscope is purpose-built, free, and open source. It is designed for conservationists as a data analytics and reporting platform that bridges the gap between data collection and analysis. Ecoscope helps reveal insights by transforming raw data into interactive maps, plots, and dashboards. Integrated seamlessly with EarthRanger today, it reduces analysis time from weeks to minutes, helping uncover trends faster and giving those on the ground the context they need to drive more informed conservation action.
You can sign up now to start exploring Ecoscope’s capabilities here.
At the heart of Ecoscope are workflows that can run advanced analyses on data from EarthRanger, such as patrol coverage, subject home-range, and event densities, and will be expanded to include other sources over time. Each step intelligently filters, processes, and visualizes information to ensure every piece of data contributes to meaningful outputs. Historically, conservationists spent hours wrangling data in spreadsheets, a time-consuming and error-prone task that Ecoscope now automates. Outputs appear as interactive widgets—dynamic maps (with zoom, pan, 3D rotation, and static exports), and interactive plots—that help teams uncover patterns in movement, coverage, and speed, monitor trends, identify risks, and act faster than ever before. Ecoscope doesn’t merely display data; it converts it into outputs meaningful to conservationists.\
The platform empowers conservationists to run advanced analyses on their own, while centralizing reporting to reduce duplication and improve efficiency. Its user-friendly framework provides consistent, repeatable outputs that decision-makers can trust.
A vision built from the field
Like EarthRanger, Ecoscope began as a response to real conservation challenges, first envisioned by Dr. Jake Wall in the effort to understand and protect African elephants. Now, programmers and practitioners across six continents have shaped its development into a truly global effort.
Led by Dr. Jake Wall and Wildlife Dynamics, Ecoscope has been co-developed with EarthRanger with support from Allen Family Philanthropies, the Mara Elephant Project, Save the Elephants, and Elephants Alive. In beta, Ecoscope has already demonstrated it can be applied quickly and easily to generate a wide range of outputs from data collected in EarthRanger.
“Each year Big Life responds to thousands of human-wildlife conflict incidents across a 1.6 million-acre area, generating an overwhelming amount of data that previously went into bottomless Excel sheets,” said Craig Millar, COO at Big Life Foundation. “Ecoscope has changed the game entirely; at the click of the button, we can make sense of it all, seeing patterns and trends that help us to design more effective conservation responses. This tool completes the loop, quickly turning data inputs into useful outputs.”
Looking forward
The launch of Ecoscope introduces three ready-to-use workflows for Patrols, Events, and Subject tracking. The real story is what comes next. Built with expansion in mind, future updates will add connectivity to SMART and Google Earth Engine, giving conservation teams an expanding toolkit for long-term monitoring and strategic planning.
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Ecoscope also lays the groundwork for developers, with an open architecture designed so that in the future they can build custom workflows and modules on top of it.
This initial release is the jump-off point for a platform that will continue to evolve and improve, delivering the intelligence conservationists need to act with confidence. Ecoscope isn’t just a product; it’s a foundation for what’s next—where conservation data doesn’t just accumulate, it accelerates decisions, fuels collaboration, and illuminates the long-term trends that guide conservation action.