Threatened Australians: Find threatened species near you

What would Australia look like if our federal politicians felt a responsibility towards all species within their electorates, and not just homo sapiens? This project is a partnership between conservation scientists and interaction designers to try and encourage democratic actions. It is developing a platform that is powered by a number of scientific databases about Australia’s threatened species, both animals and plants. It uses this data to craft a succinct and targeted interaction for laypeople to have an online experience of a threatened species near their home. The platform invites them to take certain actions, with a mission geared towards promoting long-term relationships between people and their local threatened species. The unit of analysis is the Australian federal electorate, where every electorate has multiple threatened species, and where 44% of all threatened species are endemic to just one electorate. The broader aims of the project are to seek long-term changes to federal political rhetoric around threatened species: it looks towards ways that elected officials might be pressured to hold deep responsibility to all species within their electorate as a part of the job; as opposed to the present situation of reactive responses where legislated protections require it. The project will research the public’s engagement with threatened species through the platform to understand the drivers of their behaviour changes.

Website

Project Overview

PUBLICATIONS

The Conversation: Find out what threatened plants and animals live in your electorate (and what your MP can do about it)