New digital solutions will stand up for nature protection

The hackathon online platform is going to bring together schoolchildren, students and seasoned IT experts to exchange experiences and find modern technological solutions for wildlife conservation together. Employees of the Kronotsky Nature Reserve will be in touch with the teams during the entire working time of the IT hackathon.

"The development of digital solutions is sometimes a long, expensive process, and therefore it may often be inaccessible to an average Russian nature reserve or national park. So a hackathon is a unique opportunity for us to get effective modern technologies developed specifically for our environmental tasks here and now," said Roman Korchigin, Deputy Director for Science and Ecological Tourism of the Kronotsky Nature Reserve.

We expect the participants to help in such areas as animal recognition on frames from camera traps, automated counting of salmon entering the spawning ground, monitoring of landslide danger in the Valley of geysers, creation of databases of the Koryak Nature Reserve wildlife, classification of garbage on our sea coasts, creatihg a chronology of environmental events in Kamchatka, etc.

Along with the Kronotsky Nature Reserve, the largest Russian universities will also become partners of the WildHack hackathon.

One can take part in WildHack with a team of three to five people in one of three age categories:

— Schoolchildren (14-18 years old);

— Students (18-22 years old);

— IT specialists (over 23 years old).

The main prize for the best IT solutions will be a trip to Kamchatka for three winning teams. All participants of the hackathon will receive memorable prizes, and winners may also get a job offer.