Digital conservation: An introduction

In the last two decades, the World Wide Web and subsequent associated developments (e.g., widely available computers, broadband, Web 2.0, the Internet of Things) have shaped old and created new modes of business, management, communication and governance. The implications for modern societies are deemed so important that some sociologists dub the current era the Digital Age (e.g., Orton-Johnson and Prior 2013). While the attributes and the dynamics of the Digital Age are subject to study in several domains, they have received relatively little attention from scholars focussing on environmental management in general and nature conservation in particular. Here, we introduce a body of work representing a new concept, ‘digital conservation,’ to start the quest for better understanding the impacts of digital innovation on nature conservation. Nature conservation is mission driven and therefore susceptible to change over time (Haila 2012; Mace 2014). Yet, an inspection of contemporary key objectives in six international policy and practice frameworks and the mission statements of six of the largest, internationally operating non-governmental organisations and networks in nature conservation suggest the following common aims: