EcoNet Charitable Trust is delighted and honoured to be a finalist in the Innovation Category of the NZ Biosecurity Awards.
The EcoNet CAMS (Conservation Activity Management System) concept was initiated by trustees Richard Hursthouse, Annalily van den Broeke and Keith Salmon, three very keen conservationists, who recognised huge gaps in the technology tools available for community conservation.
The development of the CAMS Weeds tool arose from discussions between Richard Henty, who founded the Society Totally Against Moth Plant (STAMP) crowd-sourced moth plant control group in 2011, and Keith Salmon and other members of the Pest Free Kaipātiki weeding control “hit squad”. The vision of trying to maximise community participation in weed control with low administrative overheads was a key goal in the next steps.
Richard Henty’s original GIS map for moth plant, developed by GIS in Conservation (GIC) volunteers, was rewritten to implement a range of new features and was applied to cover all environmental weed species.
Scott Sambell and Anais Schanzel supported Keith Salmon in the development of the CAMS Weeds tool which now has nearly 40,000 weed instances across Aotearoa New Zealand.
We thank major contributors to the tool:
. Scott Tansley a leading GIS systems architect who helped define systems principles for combining AcGIS and Dynamics CRM
. Sahil Bhouraskar who along with Anais has provided excellent GIS expertise to Keith and the EcoNet team
. Nigel Charman of Old Mans Beard Free Wellington who has provided expert insights and developed a groundbreaking integration from iNaturalist to CAMS
. Fung Lai who has developed a great range of functionality for the Weeds tool
. Carolina Almaguer and Elliot Chisholm who contributed UX (user experience) insights to the app
. Sean Li who has developed CAMS Weeds dashboards
. Barry Pyle, our CAMS CRM volunteer developer, who has developed the integrations with the CAMS contact management system
. Members of the Pest Free Kaipātiki team including Kim Ollivier who have provided feedback and a framework for developing the concepts of community engagement in weed control
. The Kaipātiki Local Board for a donation to the project
. All the STAMP and other users of the tool who have provided inspiration and encouragement.
