Tuesday, July 7, 2026

2:30 PM - 4:00 PM

Room DM.1.15

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Details

14:30 - 14:36 Introduction to the Symposium Effective biodiversity conservation requires a solid knowledge basis that can support conservation planning and action. Gaps in this knowledge basis can be filled using the increasingly large amount of online digital data documenting biodiversity and the ways humans interact with it. Emerging areas of research such as iEcology and conservation culturomics have explored novel ways to capture, synthesize and generate insights from such data to support conservation efforts. New opportunities, challenges and potential applications continuously emerge in this fields, as new platforms emerge, data access changes and users migrate between platforms. Our proposed symposium aims to provide a platform to discuss some of the opportunities and challenges associated with the rapidly expanding fields of conservation culturomics and iEcology as they enhance conservation knowledge and insights and support conservation policy and management actions. In our planned symposium we aim to touch on how recent advances in these two fields contribute to invasion sciences, behavioural ecology, and food security. The proposed lectures will also explore various challenges and advances in these parallel fields including validation and trends across multiple data sources, ethical considerations of using such public digital data, and issues of access and republication of the underlying data. We aim that our symposium will stimulate discussion on both challenges and opportunities of using such digital data in for biodiversity conservation. Ultimately, we hope that this venue will both enable interested conservationist to start using such tools and approaches, and researchers that are already versed in these fields to engage with new ideas. We aim to feature 10-11 speakers working on different applications of digital data to conservation, using a diverse array of approaches and methods.

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Speakers and Presentation Titles

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Organiser