Canberra conservationist and Canberra Businesswoman of the Year 2023 soars to success
Can an academic and conservationist also be good at business? Absolutely. Editor Serina Bird chatted with Dr Debbie Saunders, CEO and founder of Wildlife Drones and NatureHelm about how she embraced tech to help save endangered animals.
Canberra Businesswoman of the Year
Canberra conservationist Dr Debbie Saunders was named Businesswoman of the Year at the 2023 Canberra Women in Business Awards in October last year. It is an award Dr Saunders is especially proud of. ‘I’ve won lots of conservation awards, but never one for just being the overall best as a businessperson,’ she said. Dr Saunders concurrently won the Canberra Women in Business Innovation Award.
The awards are testimony to Saunders’ years of working in conservation, and not being shy to seek a tech solution when she realised none existed.
A love of the bush
‘I’ve always had an affinity with the bush,’ shared Saunders. While her parents weren’t conservation-minded, they did introduce her to the great outdoors from an early age.
“I’ve always had an affinity with the bush”
‘Growing up, my family didn’t have a lot of money,’ she said, explaining that family holidays were spent camping because it was cheap. By the time she was 16 years old, she became a wildlife carer. She knew she loved animals and wanted to work with them, but she didn’t want to become a vet. Instead, she studied a bachelor's degree in science followed by an honour's degree in zoology at the University of New South Wales.
After graduation, she couldn’t find a role in her field that would pay the bills. But she wanted to continue to be involved with animals, so she volunteered with her local environment centre running wildlife education courses. That led to her conducting a survey about local bandicoot populations. ‘I laid hair traps and monitored them on weekends and out of hours,’ she said.
Saunders also travelled overseas and volunteered for conservation roles in exotic places such as Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea – although she was out in the field rather than sitting by the pool at a luxury resort. And thus, she continued for several years, doing conservation work wherever she could until an opportunity to work on saving an endangered species came her way.
Parrot protection
From 2000-to 2005, Saunders ran a national recovery program for the swift parrot with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Her job was originally only for six months, but she has now worked on swift parrot conservation for 24 years. It led her to become an academic with a focus on conservation, completing a PhD on the conservation ecology of critically endangered swift parrots at the Australian National University in 2005. And it also led to the creation of her business, Wildlife Drones.
‘Swift parrots are a totally fascinating species,’ said Saunders. ‘They are a dynamic, migratory species that is facing extinction from the logging of their habitat here in Australia – possibly by the time my kids finish school.’
There are now less than 500 swift parrots left in the wild. The parrots breed in Eastern Tasmania during warmer months and then migrate to the Australian mainland over winter. Logging and loss of habitat throughout their breeding and wintering habitat, along with threats from invasive sugar gliders, have contributed to their demise.
National and international attention has focused on the parrot, with Guardian Australia naming the swift parrot the 2023 Australian bird of the year. And the parrot has a Hollywood advocate, with Leonardo di Caprio sharing the plight of the parrot on his Instagram account.
Need for tech that didn’t exist
Back in the field, Saunders had spent years manually tracking the movements of wildlife. The animals and birds were radio-tagged, released in the wild and then their movements were tracked using a very high frequency (VHF) radio receiver. This technology allowed researchers to track the movement of animals (and even insects). However it meant researchers such as Saunders had to trek through the bush while holding a large antenna in one hand for hours or days on end.
Crashing through the bush with an antenna one too many times led to Saunders thinking about a better way, perhaps one that involved flight to get up and above all the vegetation. ‘But when I was looking for a solution, I couldn’t find one so I got the idea to use drones to track the tagged animals. She worked with the University of Sydney to develop the world’s first robotic radio-tracking drones, and then she discovered that many other people working in conservation had the same problem – and wanted her solution.
But while she now had a prototype, the project had finished and she needed to find new technology partners, validate the market, and find funding to translate the research prototype into a product that anyone could use and to commercialise it.
Canberra Innovation Network
In 2016, Saunders attended a First Wednesday Connect event at the Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) which began to change the trajectory of her career. ‘
‘I went to the event with a mission,’ she said of her desire to meet mentors and investors who could join her journey as an entrepreneur. ‘I wanted to find people interested in new ideas and innovation, as well as those who could provide knowledge and insights into establishing a startup business.’ And she did, finding people who had ideas and potential resources that helped turn her dream into reality, as well as financial support and training.
Saunders went on to win $10,000 in an Innovation ACT Award, which she credits with the beginning of Wildlife Drones. She’s also an ICON Grant recipient, and has completed the Accelerating Commercialisation program. The ICON Grant enabled her to buy her first drone, complete her drone pilot training and become a commercial remote pilot not long after.
One of Saunders’ first pivotal mentors was angel investor Sylvia Tulloch, who she described as ‘awesome’. ‘I would go to her with one challenge, and come away with new knowledge on ten things’, she said. Tulloch remains instrumental in Wildlife Drones’ success in her role as a board member.
Embracing tech
Saunders did not let a lack of tech knowledge get in the way of her startup. Instead, she employed people who knew and understood the tech to translate her ideas into reality, including radio-frequency engineers, software engineers and marketing experts.
Wildlife Drones has had considerable commercial success – not just in Australia, but also overseas. Around half of its market is in the US, with state and federal government organisations and researchers as clients. Its technology is now used in seven countries including Vietnam, where it helps track pangolins in the wild.
Over time, the product is becoming more about the software and less about the hardware. ‘The latest product is really advanced in ways I never imagined when I started,’ said Saunders.
NatureHelm
Saunders has also recently launched a second product focused on biodiversity conservation called NatureHelm with two co-founders and aims to help companies navigate the complex world of biodiversity risks and opportunities. Unlike Wildlife Drones, no hardware is associated with this business – it is all software and data.
NatureHelm aggregates biodiversity on a platform to better understand and monitor biodiversity. It makes it easier for companies and suppliers to understand and report on biodiversity. New nature positive regulations mean environmental data reporting is becoming more important – and more complex. NatureHelm’s data functionality aims to make it easier for companies to monitor and report on biodiversity.
Saunders has come a long way as an ecologist who has gone on to found two successful tech companies – all while helping save animal species from extinction.
