Operational tools for conservation

Built to be trusted with a partner's life's work.

We build the machine-learning systems that let conservation teams get through the data they have already collected.

The data is already collected. Getting through it is the work.

Conservation research generates more imagery, audio, and field data every year than the people doing the work can process. Field seasons keep producing; the archive keeps growing; the questions that motivated the collection wait their turn.

Operational Ecology builds production-grade machine-learning systems that close that gap. The biologists and technicians whose careers are devoted to these populations are the experts; our role is to amplify that work, without replacing or overshadowing it.

Where the work happens

Software in daily use, and research into how orca speak.

Everything else on GitHub →

finwave

In production

Population-scale photo-identification workflows used by working biologists today. Individuals are recognised from dorsal-fin patterns and markings, with expert review in the loop and the model's confidence visible at every step.

Role: Architected and maintained by Operational Ecology
Scale: 1M+ images, used by international research groups

finwave.io

Project Fathom

Research · Principal investigator

Four generations of Northern Resident orca have been recorded at OrcaLab since the 1970s: tens of thousands of hours of continuous sound and context that no human ear can revisit across years. Project Fathom asks what is in it: how vocal exchanges are structured, what varies with family and season, and what the whales attend to.

The work is a collaboration with researchers carrying over 130 years of combined orca experience, and it is valuable for what it finds out, not for anything it ships.

Role: Principal investigator
Host: Raincoast Research Society

Project overview

How we work

We work with your data as it is.

Decades of folders, inconsistent naming, spreadsheets that only one person fully understands. There is no cleanup you need to finish first, and nothing has to move anywhere new to get started.

Every engagement ends with a handoff.

Runbooks, checklists, monitoring recommendations, and a written operating procedure your team can run after we leave.

Tell us what is piling up.

A short email is enough to start. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.

alex@operationalecology.io