2024 update, thanks and happy holidays!

Dear valued community, customers, supporters and stakeholders,

Thank you for your support and contributions this year.

NatureMapr is only made possible due to the backing of our supporters, the work opportunities provided by our valued customers and the incredible community of contributors and expert moderators that invest so much of their time, effort and expertise.

NatureMapr is growing rapidly across Australia as word spreads about the importance of rigorous expert verification, sensitive data handling and our reputation for high quality data that can actually be trusted and ingested by decision makers.

We now receive a growing stream of records across every Australian state, but importantly, these records can actually be used by decision makers.

This growth has not been without challenges and growing pains.

We thank you for your patience while we continue to reengineer much of the platform to handle greater and greater demands and to seek sustainable, longer term financial investment through new major financial partnerships.

I have immense respect for our hard-working community of expert moderators who are the incredible engine room that makes NatureMapr tick – moderators, your contribution is immense and will have a nature positive impact for generations.

NatureMapr co-founder Michael Mulvaney is just about to reach a colossal 50,000 verifications. This represents 50,000 individual instances where Michael has been able to share his knowledge and expertise in his usual friendly and supportive manner that will benefit our community and important species for generations to come. Congratulations Dr M.

This supportive and inclusive environment is what defines the NatureMapr community and why people get so much out of participating and contributing. It is a friendly place where anyone can contribute, people are keen to learn from one another and where the expertise of our moderators is well and truly respected.

Thanks to ACT Government as NatureMapr’s important long term anchor investor who have helped incubate NatureMapr.

Thanks to ACT NRM and DCCEEW for the tremendous effort that went into administering critical commonwealth support for NatureMapr in 2024.

Thanks to financial supporters Capital Ecology and Albury Conservation Company.

Thank you, NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust, for the opportunity to partner on the now award-winning Land Libraries landholder program. Congratulations NSW BCT Education Team.

Thanks to our increasingly relevant trusted data partner - DCCEEW Biodiversity Data Repository – led by Kevin Thiele and Jane Black who are doing a sterling job on the new BDR.

A huge thanks to the talented team of people that support me directly: Lewis Choy (Citizen Science Officer), Matthew Frawley (Social Media / Marketing Manager), Helen Cross (Social Media Officer), Jen Smits (Geospatial LEGEND), Katarina Christenson (the equivalent of 10 individual testers rolled into one person) and Tim L (mobile app engineer). These are just some of the people that make NatureMapr run and I've been very fortunate to have their support.

2024 at a glance

• NatureMapr almost went under in February - rescued by the commonwealth
• Negotiated increase in ACT Government longer term baseline funding
• Attended DCCEEW global nature positive summit in Sydney
• Invested $150,000 in the development of the new NatureMapr Data Collection App (expected to hit the app stores any day - keep an eye out!)
• Invested $250,000 in the development of the new landholder hub platform
• Invested $70,000 in development of platform features for DCCEEW threatened species
• Tough decision to scrap formal survey functionality, simplify, consolidate, focus (formal surveys added 20% complexity, cost $50k to support and generated just $10k in revenue)
• NatureMapr data is approved for ingestion by the DCCEEW BDR
• NatureMapr attends NSW BioNet strategic roadmap / planning session
• NatureMapr to NSW BioNet data feed co-design kicks off
• NatureMapr adds sensitive data handling controls for government data
• NatureMapr delivers Land Libraries 1.0 for NSW BCT
• NatureMapr delivers Glossies in the Mist for NSW Government Save Our Species
• Plenty of powerful new features and capabilities developed with more planned
  (Lewis will elaborate in a separate announcement)
• Large parts of the platform redeveloped and optimised for extremely high traffic loads
• Preliminary talks with VIC and QLD governments re: establishing new decision maker data feeds
• NatureMapr actively seeks private investment/sponsorship from private sector (more on this soon)
• Large scale media exposure and significant new species and specimens discovered!
• 200,000 emails sent, 2m page impressions every month and climbing
• Expect to hit 1000 sightings / day in 2025

Longer term economics

We continue to provide a highly subsidised service where the adequate underlying market economics simply don’t exist at this point in time - think Ford and Holden in 2016.

There is simply no nature positive economic market for innovation in the environmental space - but we are optimistic that this is something we will start to see emerge.

As a result, a key priority for 2025 will be to secure greater long term investment commitment from a mix of major private and public sector partnerships to make NatureMapr sustainable and to get proper ongoing funding to where it needs to be to do citizen science properly at the national level.

We continue to consolidate and simplify platform capability by way of less bells and whistles so that we can reduce maintainance and operating costs.

Thanks for your support and for the role you played in making 2024 such an incredible year.