Perspective · 21 Aug 2026
Human-wildlife conflict and coexistence, and the missing technology
Wolves and livestock, wild boar in a vineyard, otters at a fish farm. Wherever people and wild animals share a landscape, there's friction, and there's the work of living with it. The field has a name, and since 2023 a set of IUCN guidelines. What it doesn't have much of yet is technology built for it.
A field with a name
In 2023 the IUCN Species Survival Commission published its first guidelines on human-wildlife conflict and coexistence. They're deliberately broad: not tied to one species or one region, written for the people who actually deal with it, conservation practitioners, community leaders, government officers, researchers. The two words are paired on purpose. Conflict is the hard edge: crops eaten, stock taken, real losses. Coexistence is the goal: landscapes people and wildlife can share. Both sides need the same thing before anyone can decide what to do, which is to know what's actually happening on the ground.
The missing piece
Read the guidance and you notice something. It's about approaches, frameworks, and decisions: how to assess a conflict, who to involve, what to weigh. What's thin is the applied technology underneath, the part that tells you which animal was there, how often, when, and where, at a scale a person can act on. Camera traps have existed for years and produce the raw material by the truckload. Turning that into a record you can compare across seasons, share with a province, or bring to a claim is still, mostly, manual work on a pile of SD cards.
Where we fit, and where we don't
That gap is the reason Untamed Data exists. We don't resolve the conflict; software can't do that. What we build is the data layer under it: camera footage becomes recognized species and an auditable record you own, hosted in Europe. For a vineyard that's evidence of wild-boar pressure. For a fish farm it's an otter caught in the act. In the HERDER project we're pushing further, toward recognizing predators in hard field conditions, which is R&D, not a finished product, and we'll keep saying so until it's measured.
The honest position is that the technology for this field is early. The frameworks are there; the tools that feed them real, defensible data are mostly not. We think they should exist, and we're building our part of it.
If human-wildlife conflict and coexistence is your work, a reserve, a farm, a province, a research group, we'd like to hear how you're handling the data side. Get in touch.
