The Reality Capture Playbook for Conservation: what's inside and why we built it

Conservation teams have always worked with too little data and too little time. Field surveys take days. Ecosystems change between visits. Grant reporting relies on a handful of photos and a lot of narrative written from memory.

That gap between what teams observe in the field and what they can actually document is where impact gets lost – and where funding cases fall apart.

We partnered with The Nature Conservancy to build the Reality Capture Playbook: Conservation Edition – a practical guide to drone and 360 camera workflows across every stage of conservation work, developed with and tested by one of the world's leading conservation organizations.

Why this matters now

The core problem isn't motivation or scientific expertise. It's visibility. Most conservation organizations are managing vast landscapes with small field teams, limited budgets and no systematic way to track ecological change at scale.

A single site visit produces snapshots. What conservation science needs is a continuous, verifiable record – one that holds up to scrutiny from funders, partners and land managers alike.

Reality capture gives teams that record. Capture your site with a drone, 360 camera, ground robot or smartphone, and every image is automatically mapped by date and location. The result is a virtual field site your whole team can access, analyze and share – without another trip into the field.

What the playbook covers

The guide walks through practical workflows across eight use cases:

• Conservation planning: Document baseline site conditions with landcover maps, habitat assessments and plant health analysis to support grant proposals and adaptive management decisions.
• Fire management: Use aerial ignition systems and real-time monitoring to run prescribed burns more safely, replacing high-risk manual tasks with automated drone missions.
• Wildlife monitoring: Count species from aerial imagery with minimal habitat disturbance, and use AI-enabled annotation to analyze spatial landscape use at a scale manual surveys can't match.
• Habitat restoration: Track percent cover, species richness and vegetation health season over season to see where restoration is working and where intervention is needed.
• Biodiversity mapping: Measure above-ground biomass, run temporal analysis and ground-truth satellite data — including automated façade flights for steep terrain that would otherwise require days of manual fieldwork.
• Communications and outreach: Give funders and stakeholders 360 panoramas, time-lapse comparisons and 3D models that make restoration progress concrete and defensible.
• AI analysis: Automatically detect and map trees, shrubs, wetlands and other natural features using built-in models, custom-trained datasets or Magic AI for habitat delineation.
• Climate mitigation: Apply aerial data already collected for other purposes to sea-level rise modeling, forest health monitoring, carbon stock accounting and urban heat mapping.

Closing the historic data gap

One of the deepest structural problems in conservation is the absence of baseline data. Without a documented starting point, it's nearly impossible to measure ecological change — or demonstrate it to a funder.

Reality capture solves this by creating a timestamped, georeferenced record of a site from day one. Every subsequent survey adds to that record. Teams can compare habitat conditions year over year, isolate where restoration is gaining ground and share that evidence directly with grant managers — instead of asking them to take your word for it.

Jason Hanlon, Northern Great Plains Land Steward at TNC, said it best: "We are able to look at data we never had before and answer brand new questions about the world around us."

The Nature Conservancy was recognized as DroneDeploy's Steward of Sustainability at the 2025 DroneDeploy Awards. Their work shaped every workflow in this playbook.

[Download the Reality Capture Playbook: Conservation Edition]

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