Mr. Davies is a conservation technologist developing, designing and deploying conservation technologies globally. He is Technical Director of the Arribada Initiative, a Senior Technical Specialist and Advisor to the Zoological Society of London, and a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, with 14 years’ experience developing, designing and deploying conservation technologies for conservation organizations globally, including the National Geographic Society and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
His primary focus is the development of open source conservation technologies, with his most notable achievement the release of the first open source Argos satellite transmitter reference design for telemetry and biologging. Alasdair was awarded a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship in March 2017 for his dedication to the development of open source conservation technologies. He founded the Arribada Initiative as a program of the Shuttleworth Foundation to unlock access to open source conservation technologies, managing a $1.2 million budget focusing on human-elephant conflict, low-cost telemetry, biologging, and passive acoustic monitoring technologies. As a Fellow, Alasdair continues to direct funding to numerous field conservation programs, including pangolin reintroduction work in unison with IUCN SSC Pangolin Specialist Group and other partners. He strives to break down the barriers that inhibit access to conservation technology, delivering better, cheaper, reliable solutions to help the global conservation community better monitor and protect our planet.
About the Arribada Initiative
The Arribada Initiative is a consortium of conservation technologists that co-develops open, customizable and impact-driven conservation technologies for conservation organizations across the globe, driving down costs and scaling up access to the tools and solutions we need to solve conservation challenges, together. They espouse the idea that if we’re to solve real conservation challenges, we need to break down the barriers that inhibit our access to conservation technologies that afford us the ability to do so. Open solutions can deliver better, cheaper, reliable solutions and Arribada Initiative are at the forefront of working to help the global conservation community access open solutions, so together, we can better conserve, monitor and protect our planet. They are currently developing biologging & telemetry platforms, rugged timelapse cameras, thermal imaging, microbial fuel cells, miniaturized acoustic recorders, SMART Desktops, and others based on emerging communications and data processing platforms.
You can read more about the initiative here.
About the Shuttleworth Foundation
The Shuttleworth Foundation is a small social investor that provides funding to dynamic leaders who are at the forefront of social change. They look for social innovators who are helping to change the world for the better and could benefit from a social investment model with a difference. They identify amazing people, give them a fellowship grant, and multiply the money they put into their own projects by a factor of ten or more. The Foundation is at its core an experiment in open philanthropy and uses alternative funding methodologies and collaborative ways of working to ensure that every fellow receives the necessary support to succeed. Their ideal future is one where it is much easier to find solutions to social challenges in a global open knowledge society with unhindered access to essential information and limitless opportunities for innovation and replication. Knowledge is open if it is free to use, reuse and redistribute without legal, social or technological restriction. In this sense an open knowledge society is one in which a superset of open data, open content, open access and open source is available to all. The Shuttleworth Foundation funds people who are unafraid to re-imagine the world and the way we live in it through open knowledge societies with limitless possibilities.
Read more about the foundation here.
