The Rufford Maurice Laing Foundation provided a grant of £50,000 towards the costs of ARKive in 2007/08.
ARKive is the world’s centralised and permanent storehouse for the most important films and photographs of endangered species and habitats - freely accessible to all via the internet. It has the vitally important objective of raising public awareness of the need for biodiversity conservation by using wildlife imagery. It also provides an educational and research resource for a wide variety of people ranging from schoolchildren to scientists and conservationists acting to protect endangered species.
Images and recordings are one of the most emotive and powerful means of raising public awareness, helping to ignite the very first spark of interest in natural history. With growing extinction rates, they are also providing an increasingly important historical and scientific record of the planet’s endangered plants and animals.
ARKive is being created by the Wildscreen Charity, whose mission is to “promote the conservation of nature through the power of wildlife imagery”. Since 1982 it has run the Wildscreen Festival - the world’s biggest and most prestigious wildlife film and television festival.
The grant from The Rufford Maurice Laing Foundation has been used to contribute towards the costs of the ARKive media team. They research and track down the films and photographs from all the individual media donors around the world, and also manage the tape transfers, out of house digitisation of the images, together with the editing of the moving images for playout on the web.
Visit the Wildscreen Trust website.