The Aim of Developing an App
to Protect Biodiversity

Motivation Behind Developing the App

As the CEO of Biome, you are gaining a lot of attention for developing its user-participation species tagging app. First, could you tell us what led to establishing the company and your objective?

During my undergraduate and postgraduate years studying agriculture and forest management at Kyoto University, I worked on developing technologies to quantify biodiversity. In particular, I spent a lot of energy on technology to quantitatively assess species richness within a specific area using images from satellites, planes and drones. For example, with a satellite image, we could assess and visualize biodiversity in an area around the size of Tokyo at once.

My motivation for pursuing this sort of research came from my desire to conserve biodiversity. As a student, I camped in the wilds of Borneo to collect and analyze ecological data. The island is on the so-called frontlines of environmental destruction and the speed of destruction was beyond anything I had imagined. One day, I found myself standing in a place where I couldn't see a single tree left, all the way to the horizon. It made me acutely aware that something terrifying was happening to the Earth right now, and that an enormous amount of energy was being put into it.

Where does that energy come from? The answer is very simple: destroying the environment ties directly into economic profit. In that case, I realized research wasn't going to solve anything. If I wanted to fundamentally change the world, I needed to create something that would change this system. In other words, to stop the destruction, we need a society in which protecting the environment leads to economic profit.
That is why I decided to leave the research lab and start a company to connect environmental conservation with for-profit activities. This led me to establish Biome in 2017.

How His Studies Led to
the Business

You mentioned that you used still images, such as satellite images, in your research as an undergraduate and graduate student. How did you estimate biodiversity from satellite images?

If we take a satellite image of a tropical rainforest, for example, we can basically only see trees. But the crucial point is how we define richness of biodiversity. First, we must recognize that environmental stability, and not simply the number of species, is most important. Building on that, we define untouched nature as the most stable state. This is because we can safely assume an environment with native flora maintained for tens of thousands of years is stable. We give untouched native forests a provisional value of 100 and then index how similar the bio-community of the photographed forest is to that state. For example, an area where only oil palms are grown for palm oil would have an index of 0. Native forests have a unique pattern of sunlight reflection, so I based my modeling on that.

After establishing the company, you released the Biome app and also began offering biological monitoring and data analysis services.

Yes. But releasing the app and launching the data analysis service were pretty much integrated. Particularly, we are aiming to visualize the biodiversity.

The fields of global warming and climate change are complex, but being able to express CO₂, for example, in units of tons allows us to set reduction goals and rules and engage in countermeasures. In biodiversity, on the other hand, we don't have that sort of method yet. That's why I wanted to create a platform that could quantify biodiversity, and that led to developing a system of collecting data through an app and using that data to offer services.

In the app, users take and post photos, and the locations are identified using GPS information. How is that data connected to the conservation of species?

While in graduate school, I thought about how to collect the large-scale data that I would need to analyze data through remote sensing^*1. In the end, I conceived an idea that I should encourage local people to collect the data. When I was in Borneo and living in a village to conduct surveys, I noticed that the people there didn’t have TV or fridges, but everyone had a smartphone. The smartphone is the only tool that can collect data, such as images and location information, in places like that, and deep in nature. That’s why an app is effective.

The app is only available in Japan now, but we already have over 3,000,000 real-time data entries. On weekends and holidays, we get around 10,000 updates or additional entries per day across the country. In terms of the number of real-time biological data, we most likely already have the largest database in Japan. This database is used as the basis for research and for the control of invasive alien species and the protection of rare species, thereby helping to conserve biodiversity.

*1 Remote sensing: Technology using artificial satellites to remotely measure, analyze and image electromagnetic waves that are emitted or reflected off the Earth’s surface.

What Japan’s Largest Wildlife
Community Aims to Do

The Use of Gamification in Pest Control

You also partner with local municipalities to hold initiatives aimed at removing non-native species.

Yes. The key to removing non-native species is a swift initial response. We are holding a joint public-participation biological survey with Kobe City by immediately providing information when non-native species are sighted so that they can be removed^*2. Specifically, app users get to clear quest stages by taking and posting photos of insects, such as the non-native Asian long-horned beetle, in the app.

Our initiative with the ministry of the environment, which has been going on for three years, enables users to record how global warming is affecting wildlife, such as how far north cicadas and migratory birds go and when cherry blossoms bloom. The data is then tied into decarbonization efforts^*3. Until now, this sort of research could only be done by hiring surveyors across the country, but by using a smartphone app and making it into an event, new sighting reports come flooding in.

*2 Kobe City × Biome "Summer Holiday Wildlife Quest: Search for Summer Insects in Kobe" (press release)
*3 Ministry of the Environment × Biome “Grand Survey on Climate Change and Wildlife” (press release)

So you raise motivation among participating users by adding gamification.

Yes. We set up a quest to target harmful insects that we want to control or remove. Users earn badges when they find them.
Money is the most obvious way to raise motivation, but I think it should generally be avoided. This is because it can lead to fake information lowering the data quality, and if we give out money once, people won't participate without it again. We also want children to participate and have fun.

On the other end of the spectrum, it's difficult to motivate users through ethical or moral persuasions, such as by saying: "Lets all do this because it's good for the environment." This will only resonate with people with high awareness and in certain groups in developed nations. For all other contexts, the systems that rely only on people's awareness risk being weak. Awareness and ethics evolve, but the system can’t keep up with those changes. I believe that if I wanted to create a system that will last 100 years, I needed to create services that would stimulate people’s more innate qualities – like get them to have fun and feel excited, fire up their hunting instincts, or tickle their desire to create collections.

How do you feel about the responses you have received so far?

It's been around three years since the app's release and the number of users has grown steadily to over 1,000,000. It's growing into Japan's largest wildlife community, so even if the AI can't automatically identify a particular image, a person can post a question and other users will usually be able to provide an answer. But we're still only halfway to our goal of reaching one million users in Japan. We hope to eventually gather real-time biological information from across the globe so that people will be able to visualize biodiversity in various parts of the world.

The Conservation of Biodiversity as the Highest Priority

When I go to a river for fishing, I can open the app and see what sort of fish I might get here or check the map to see what sort of flowers are growing nearby. I enjoy the various features of the app a lot.

Thank you. Plants are the most commonly made posts, followed by insects. But we should be considerate for making localities public: when it comes to river fish, we make the location information of regular species available, but for rare species, we take into consideration the possibility of overfishing and do not publicize their locations.

With the map, we wanted users to be able to see what sort of organisms were nearby, but we made a point not to include a search function. It wouldn't be good for people to think, "Let's go there and hunt for this organism because it lives there." The goal, after all, is to protect wildlife and the ecosystem and not fan users' impulses.

We also haven’t included a function for users to follow each other’s accounts. This is because we handle location information, and since we want children to be able to use the app as well, we want to ensure the users' psychological safety. Above all, it is because we want to prioritize the conservation of biodiversity. By first focusing on organisms and having people connect by posting comments on them, we want to raise interest in wildlife. We consider this app’s functions to be for that purpose.

Enhancing Data and Awareness
by Having Fun

One of the themes we pursue in the DESIGN VISION research is to break away from conventional human-centered design (HCD) and attempt to incorporate knowledge from multispecies anthropology, which perceives humans from a species-transcending perspective^*4. However, multispecies is a superordinate concept, so we were looking for a concept that would connect it to practical methodologies. In that sense, I felt there was a lot to learn from the Biome app design, which purposefully limits human-centric functions and enhances entertainment elements from a biodiversity perspective.

Our app doesn't have advertisements and the business is supported by cooperation from other companies and municipalities, so it may take an unusual stance for a company. But what comes before anything else is the idea that wildlife is interesting. In Japan alone, there are nearly 100,000 species, and it’s such a vast world that it would be hard to learn about it all in one lifetime.

That's why we want to provide an opportunity for people to see how fun it is. The app receives many reports of new cases, such as first sightings in certain regions, and we send that information to researchers to write research papers. For example, the Cissites cephalotes (a type of blister beetle) was originally found in Shikoku but spread to the Kinki region. A third-grade elementary school student then discovered the insect in Shiga Prefecture. This means that with this app, even elementary school children can make discoveries that get turned into research papers.

*4 Multispecies anthropology: A new concept of anthropology that is founded on living in harmony with the ecosystem and attempts to perceive humans from a relationship that transcends all species, from plants and animals to micro-organisms such as gut microbiota.

One of Sony's strengths is the image sensors. It would be wonderful if we could work together on future projects and contribute to the conservation of biodiversity in some way.

Photo quality is definitely a very important element in creating species survey records and collecting data. The app only supports still images at the moment, but we plan to add videos going forward. I believe videos will enhance the accuracy of identification, and some creatures, such as wild birds, can be identified by their calls even if their bodies aren’t visible. There is so much that can be made possible with technological advancement.

In terms of future projects, we're in the middle of planning initiatives like bringing out differences based on regional characteristics. Another challenge we need to pursue is that users' interests are piqued based on what organisms they like. For example, users who like birds have started taking an interest in moths. One of the reasons is because more people started to pay closer attention to the environment around them during the pandemic, and moths are easier to find than birds. Just turn on a light outside the house and they'll come gathering.
That goes to show how close the world of wildlife is to us, and how deep and vast it is. I hope this app will get more people to step into this world and join the movement to conserve biodiversity.

(Interview held at Biome Inc. on June 22, 2022)

Interviewer's commentShigeki Ohno, General Manager, Planning and Promotion Group, Creative Center, Sony Group Corporation

Mr, Fujiki's decision-making is consistently and singularly based on his beliefs around and desire to protect biodiversity.
His efforts have presented us with a new business ideology that is in opposition to overly human-centric designs and businesses.
I believe the efforts surrounding Biome go beyond the realm of being sustainable to being regenerative, regenerating the natural environment into something better than it was before. Sony's Purpose is to "fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology". If the Earth is not sustainable, our business is not viable, because we are not able to share this emotion with the world. We as a company will take action to maintain balance between human society and the natural world, while protecting the structures of natural ecosystems.