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Federal government promotes wildlife management at home

Wild at Home: Federal government promotes wildlife management at home

“Innovations in the field of education and information access with special consideration of social impact“ – that was the requirement. With our wildlife database Wild at Home we were able to offer exactly that and are therefore delighted to have been awarded funding for our project under the Innovation Program for Business Models and Pioneering Solutions (IGP) of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. In the course of a three-stage selection process, we were able to convince the jury that development of a civil wildlife management tool for private owners is an equally important and innovative project.

196.434 € for the development of a database for private wildlife keepers

In Germany alone, tens of thousands of private aquariums, terrariums and aviaries care for animals that can be of great importance for species conservation. For many species, private keepers have great expertise in keeping and breeding. The aim is to sustainably maintain the populations in captivity. But the effort for this is high: communication, retrieval and management of data, documentation of relationships … Anyone who has ever tried this knows how much time and nerves it costs.

Managing species via email and Excel spreadsheets is Sisyphean work

The wildlife management tool Wild at Home aims to remedy this situation. At its core, it is about decentralized self-coordination. Keepers register themselves and their animals, receive a user profile to manage their stock and network, exchange knowledge and join together to form communities for species or species groups. In this manner, the foundations for conservation breeding can be laid at a low level.

Multi-stage development until 2023

What sounds simple is complex in practice. Development will take just under two years in a multi-stage process. In close cooperation with the technical developers at Marmalade GmbH, which is supporting the project with an additional 50,000 euros, participants will be invited at each stage of development to test the platform and contribute their specific needs.

A step towards the future of wildlife management

Wild at Home is intended to point the way to how numerous individual husbandries can be bundled together for the benefit of species conservation. A compelling challenge in the age of biodiversity collapse. The exchange of experiences leads to an improvement of husbandry in compliance with animal welfare, the coordination of husbandry forms a contribution to species conservation on a civil society level. The broader the use of such a platform, the greater the transparency with regards to the species kept and the social acceptance for their keeping. That is our conviction.