April 13-17, 2010
Denver, Colorado, USA

Demonstrations: Description

ARKive: The Digital Noah's Ark

Merove Heifetz, Wildscreen USA, USA

With species extinction now occurring at a faster rate than at any time in Earth's history, effective awareness raising and education programs are ever more vital. Powerful wildlife imagery is an emotive and effective means of building environmental awareness and engagement, and quick and easy access to this imagery is essential in the digital mass communications society we live in today.

However, until now, this valuable imagery has been scattered throughout the world, in a wide variety of private, commercial and specialist collections, with no centralized collection, restricted public access, limited educational use, and no coordinated strategy for its long term preservation.

ARKive is now putting that right, gathering together the very best films and photographs of the world's species into one centralized digital museum, to create a unique audio-visual record of life on Earth, prioritizing those species at most risk of extinction. Preserved and maintained for future generations, ARKive is making this key resource accessible to all, from scientists and conservationists to the general public and school children, via its award-winning website -

The ARKive project has unique access to the very best of the world's wildlife films and photographs, with more than 3,500 of the world's leading filmmakers and photographers actively contributing to the project giving ARKive unprecedented access to their materials. Contributors include the most famous names in natural history broadcasting, commercial film and picture agencies, leading academic institutions and international conservation organizations, as well as myriad individual filmmakers, photographers, scientists and conservationists.

In 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, we have set ourselves the ambitious task of tracking down images of each of the 17,000 most endangered species on the planet, from the aardwolf to the zorilla. We’ve already catalogued 3,000 species online, including many of our most charismatic and familiar animals: gorillas and lions, tigers and elephants. Now we’re delving deeper into the weird and wonderful world of rodents, reptiles, bats and bugs to unmask the mysterious life forms that hide behind names like the Dinagat moonrat, the thorny devil, Fernandez’s sword-nosed bat and the Magazine Mountain middle-toothed snail. By revealing what they actually look like, we hope to shine the spotlight on thousands of relatively obscure and largely neglected species, thereby raising their public profile and, ultimately, ensuring their conservation.

Demonstration: Demonstrations II [Close Up]

Keywords: audio, visual, media, endangered, species, conservation