All your questions - answered!

The Australian Conservation Foundation’s Investigations Unit uncovers unethical, illegal and damaging behaviour, working to protect our environment and the places we love. Our work has exposed polluters, advocated for policy change to preserve habitat, and more. You can see more of our work here.

ACF Investigates is a digital community of people just like you, working together to uncover threats to our nature and climate by using devices to gather and classify data. After an extremely successful inaugural investigation in 2023, we are excited to be back in 2024.

No! Lots of people all over the world love our wildlife and precious places. Everyone is welcome to join.

Nope. All you need is a mobile or computer. This tool is designed to work on most devices and browsers.

Registering makes your contribution count. By being able to identify each volunteer as unique, we can make sure we don’t show you the same image twice. It also means you can discuss images in our forum and keep track of your stats. Your personal details won’t be shared with other investigators —the only thing they’ll see is your display name, which you choose.

No worries! Give us a call anytime between 9am to 5pm Australian Eastern time on 1800 223 669 (free within Australia) or +61 3 9345 1111.

Absolutely! Before we ask you to gather any data, we’ll take you through an interactive tutorial. You’ll then get a few practice runs and some feedback. Once you’re nailing the practice tasks, you can start on real images.

While the image is visible on your screen, please look for the button underneath that says “something’s wrong”. We’ll receive a report and look into the issue.

While the image is visible on your screen, please look for the button underneath that says “something’s wrong”. We’ll receive a report and look into the issue.

If you see any content that goes against ACF community standards or is otherwise unhelpful, please flag that post so that one of our moderators can deal with it.

Nature in Australia is in trouble – and so are we. The food we eat, the water we drink and the places we love are under threat like never before. Our health, our economy and our livelihoods depend on thriving nature, and so does a safe climate. The nature crisis threatens food and fibre production more than almost any other livelihood, and we advocate for a future in which our farmers' livelihoods can thrive too. Unsustainable practices, such as the clearing of critical habitat, threaten nature and the future of farming enterprises. We all have a stake and a role to play to fix this – from governments to communities, and from agribusiness to family farms.

No. Wildlife protection laws - and exemptions - are many and complex, and international, federal, state and local rules and permit systems are difficult to navigate. We’ve narrowed down our search to areas where clearing events are more likely to be unlawful, or at least have significant impacts on rare and threatened wildlife and ecosystems of national public interest.

Don’t worry if you’re not 100% sure - every image will be shown to multiple volunteer investigators to build consensus (i.e. multiple people have told us they can see clearing). If in doubt, err on the side of clicking the square.

When selecting the areas, we’ve tried to avoid bushfires and cloud cover. However, some images might have snuck through. Check out the Help section for guidance on telling the difference between clearing by people, and bushfires.

If there are clouds obscuring the image, just click the squares where you see clearing, and don’t worry about the land that you can’t see.

Where there’s clouds, there’s shadows. Sometimes shadows can look like a burned or cleared patch. If there are clouds around, check if the shadows seem to correspond with any of the clouds.

We want to know if you can see habitat clearing at this level of detail, without extra information about the location, habitat type, or exact date(s) the satellite imagery was taken. Once you’ve detected possible land clearing, our team of experienced investigators will begin a detailed investigation.

Once we have consensus on whether land clearing has occurred, we’ll use the data to build evidence-based briefs on habitat destruction events, including the location, size and date(s) of clearing, what rare and threatened species lived there, any clearing permits that were approved, filed or should have been filed, any EPBC referrals that exist for that clearing, legal exemptions, land zones and ownership, and potential culprits. It’s a lot, we know! We’ll then hand that brief over to the parties best able to action that information, including federal, state and local government authorities, compliance officers, and the media. The briefs will include the fact that this clearing was identified by volunteers as part of this project, but that’s it—they won’t contain any user IDs, display names or personal information.

Amazing! The more people we have on board, the faster we can complete investigations in future. Let them know!

We hope so! This is our second year running ACF Investigates and we’re hoping for many more in the future.

Like everything we do at ACF, we can’t build more projects without help from people like you. Donate now to power this crucial work.