Shah Selbe

Shah Selbe is the founder of Conservify and a National Geographic Explorer and Fellow. He is an engineer and conservation technologist that works with communities, NGOs, and developing countries to identify and deploy technologies that can help with their greatest conservation challenges. This includes low-cost observation platforms (conservation drones, acoustic sensors, open source sensors, satellite imagery, etc) and better methods to share and manage the data gathered (using mobile technologies, crowdsourcing, etc). He founded the first solely conservation technology makerspace and nonprofit prototyping lab called Conservify, which uses open source technology to empower local communities to bring innovative tools into how we change our planet’s’ future. Over the last few years, Conservify has built open source hardware for use in the field on National Geographic expeditions and through our network of scientists and conservationists. Our work has included water quality characterization in Peru’s Boiling River, biodiversity protection in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, tracking glacial melt in Canada’s Banff National Park, understanding the behaviors of Congo’s lowland gorillas, helping citizen scientists monitor water in the Amazon Rainforest, and many more diverse activities across the globe. Our main initiative is FieldKit, an open-source software and hardware platform (environmental sensors, app, and FieldKit.org website) that allows individuals and organizations to collect and share field-based research data and tell stories through interactive visualizations. Designed to be easy to deploy customizable, FieldKit can be adapted to meet the needs of diverse research teams, from biology and ecology to marine and environmental sciences, from post-doc researchers to elementary school students. FieldKit offers a simple platform for enabling live data expeditions, and for the creation and deployment of environmental sensor networks or in situ monitoring.