Tim Shields wants to make saving the world fun. He compares environmentalism to broccoli, everyone knows they should do it but very few people follow through with the act. Shields has studied desert tortoises for almost forty years, mostly in the Mojave desert. In the last decade several tortoise populations have lost around eighty percent of their group, and Shields says that predators are the main source of the shrinking numbers. Raven numbers increased one thousand percent between 1975 and 1995.
In this TED Talk from early 2014 titled Playing for keeps Shields discusses the engineering steps that he and his team at Hardshell Labs have taken to repel the ravens and keep the turtles safe. The team is also running a Kickstarter campaign that ends on Oct. 16, 2015.
Shields first partnered with Pete Bitar and Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems to use technology meant to repel birds from airport runways. They built a laser based no-fly zone in parts of the desert, but wanted to make it usable remotely. Shields envisioned gamifying the system and allowing players in their living rooms to drive rover type vehicles around the desert and zap ravens with lasers. Tim hopes to tap into the competitive nature of gamers along with the human aspect of helping and doing good for the environment. A long term vision is that submersible drones could be used to fight invasive species in the ocean and UAVs could be used to fight predators in the sky. Rainforests can be monitored for illegal logging and mining.
Six different stakeholders work within the system to bring about what Shields calls crowdsourced conservation. Biologists, inventors, game designers, gamers, ecological groups and the environment itself all have a stake in the game.
Several iterations of rover have been built and are being crowdfunded in the Kickstarter campaign, with the basic idea of a remote control vehicle body and a smart phone camera attached. The campaign now needs help with what they call a techno-tort, a 3D printed tortoise body that will house the next generations of rovers. Lure propulsion, raven predation recording, raven marking and aversive training are all areas where Hardshell Labs is seeking help from the makerverse.
Hardshell Labs is doing great innovative work and it’s always inspiring to see engineering applied to environmental science projects. Seeing the different early iterations from the TED Talk is a striking contrast to the next generation in the Kickstarter video and the techno-tort of the future.