Lukim Gather Marine

Data Friendly Space

Lukim Gather Marine

DFS will expand Lukim Gather's proven environmental monitoring app from inland to coastal areas, adding marine-specific features for PNG communities.

Virginia, MN, USA

United States

Nonprofit

Papua New Guinea's coastal communities currently lack effective systems to document marine threats and contribute to conservation, resulting in continued ecosystem degradation and knowledge gaps that hinder evidence-based policies. Community members, especially in isolated areas, have limited means to report illegal fishing or coral damage when offline, and valuable traditional ecological knowledge often goes undocumented. The desired outcome is a comprehensive, accessible documentation system that empowers local communities to actively participate in marine conservation, bridges data gaps, enables offline reporting of environmental threats, and systematically incorporates traditional knowledge—ultimately creating the evidence base needed for effective marine ecosystem protection and management.

Lukim Gather is an already-implemented mobile application that bridges the gap between communities and environmental decision-making in Papua New Guinea, focusing on protected area management. The app enables communities, protected area managers, environmental organizations, and government agencies to effectively track and monitor environmental conditions at the ground level, generating valuable insights for planning and conservation efforts. The platform's core functionality allows users to easily collect offline, geo-located ecological data. Data points are automatically uploaded to a centralized database when users come within cell phone range, where users can interact with maps and visualizations. Lukim Gather was initially designed by UNDP in collaboration with the PNG government, with ongoing development by DFS. The platform has evolved through two successful phases, one focused on training park rangers in conservation monitoring and one focused on community leaders to increase field data collection capacity. The second phase has already engaged approximately 500 active users. DFS now proposes a third phase focused on scaling the platform beyond its current growth stage. With particular emphasis on strengthening low-carbon blue economies, we aim to expand Lukim Gather's toolkit to include more marine conservation features and extend its usage to coastal conservation systems, complementing its current predominantly inland applications.

The Lukim Gather project has already identified different key conservation partners in PNG and engaged them in the project. In Papua New Guinea, environmental degradation due to resource overexploitation has led to cascading problems including increased landslides from deforestation, fish kills from pollution, and coastal erosion from mangrove clearance. While scientific information exists in some protected areas and project sites, many community-based and non-governmental organizations lack effective ways to communicate this data for advocacy and education. No comprehensive national baseline of Papua New Guinea's rich natural and cultural heritage currently exists. The first phase equipped park rangers with tools for streamlined incident reporting (e.g., poaching, logging) and conservation monitoring through simplified METT surveys, with over 2,000 users trained across two pilot sites. The second phase targeted Protected Area community leaders and members, focusing on METT digitization and specialized field-level data collection. This phase has successfully engaged approximately 500 active users across Papua New Guinea. The proposed third phase of LG, with the help of MIT Solve, will target community stakeholders in marine and coastal environments across PNG with the goal of increasing ecological monitoring from a local level.