Biodiversity and tourism management platform

**Vision**

Biodiversity is key to mitigating climate change, and it is also a key engine of tourism. However tourism can also be one of the most destructive forces for biodiversity. Without careful management, visitor activity can degrade green spaces, introduce alien species and damage ecosystems, in turn negatively affecting tourism itself, with both environmental and economic costs. Covid-19 has brought unique pressures to bear. Every time lockdown has been eased, a number of natural spaces have struggled to cope with a sudden influx of visitors. More importantly, established patterns of visitor engagement with biodiverse spaces can no longer be regarded as predictive of behaviour and usage patterns in a post-Covid world.

Our existing booking platform is already used to schedule visitors by leading custodians of biodiverse areas, such as the National Trust and local governments. The goal now is to empower these institutions to achieve new breakthroughs by integrating geographical information systems, cutting edge, AI-powered, predictive analytics, and behavioural prompts. This will allow institutions in charge of areas rich in biodiversity to understand, predict and manage visitor behaviour and interaction with natural spaces.

**Key Objectives**

\* enable institutions to map and understand visitor behaviour, anticipate and identify behavioural patterns, and combine scheduling, geolocation and behavioural prompts to achieve a step change in sustainable behaviour.

\* comply strictly with user consent and device availability, ensuring equitable access to facilities and services while providing permissioned access to data where available.

\* use beacon technology, WiFi, Bluetooth and phone geolocation data to monitor population density at the micro-level, allow real time population density management, mitigate of overcrowding, track footfall and over/under utilisation of natural resources.

\* enable environmental behaviour management through zone-based access scheduling to manage population density and intensity of resource use.

\* provide behavioural interventions through notifications, vibrations and messaging enabling incentive programmes to maximise compliance with environmental requirements.

\* feed the data into heuristic and machine learning models that can analyse, recognise and predict behavioural patterns to facilitate planning and adaptation.

**Areas of Focus**

a) local authorities

b) National Trust and tourism institutions

c) policy makers and research institutions

d) visitors

**How it is Innovative**

While there exist scheduling systems, geolocation apps, and behavioural nudges, nothing in the market integrates all these functionalities in a way that is usable and respects privacy and consent, while estimated visitor numbers do not operate at the geolocation level. One can estimate how many people have visited a beach or a forest, but not which spots at which times in what densities.

Our solution integrates all these aspects to innovate a tool that can go most of the way toward achieving environmentally successful behaviours, and significantly accelerate and improve society's capacity to combat climate change while maintaining economic prosperity.

Our innovation will make it easier to reconcile environmental and economic imperatives, and enable public sector and leading charities to progressively arrive at an environmentally sustainable "new normal".