Company of emergenCITY Alumni Honored with Hessian Founder Award

trackIT Systems offers digital technologies to monitor wildlife in real time.

10,000 animal species are endangered in Germany according to the current “Biodiversity Fact Check”, a study by 150 scientists. Three percent are already extinct. Researchers and nature conservationists can barely keep up with the present methods of measuring the loss of biodiversity. They are cost-intensive and time-consuming. That is why the spin-off trackIT Systems, founded in 2023 from the LOEWE research project “Nature 4.0 - Sensing Biodiversity” at Philipps-Universität Marburg, has developed new and easy-to-use methods for automatically recording wildlife in real time.

On November 1, emergenCITY alumni Jonas Höchst and Patrick Lampe and his co-founders Jannis Gottwald from trackIT Systems won the Hessian Founder Award in Marburg in the “Social Impact” category. A jury consisting of representatives of the Hessian start-up scene and an online vote decided on the award. The patron was the Hessian Minister of Economics Kaweh Mansoori. A total of twelve companies received the award. No cash prize was awarded. Instead, the winners benefit from networking, experts training and workshops as well as a professional company video.

“For us, the Hessian Founder Award is recognition of the huge problem we have in species conservation. We have been losing valuable species for decades without being fully aware of the consequences. We urgently need to systematically record biodiversity over a large area in order to take countermeasures and preserve our livelihoods. The Hessian Founder Award helps us to draw attention to this problem and to finally use the possibilities of modern algorithms and systems in this area,” Jonas Höchst said .

Position data in seconds and real-time detection of animal voices

The methods developed by trackIT Systems include automatic radio telemetry. The system provides high-resolution position data that is available in seconds and shows where animals are located. This can help in nature conservation, for example, to protect small chicks of meadow breeders from tractors or to monitor the use of space by bats in planned wind farms or in road construction.

Der “audio:tracker” von trackIT Systems wird zur Echtzeiterkennung von Tierstimmen eingesetzt. Foto: trackIT Systems

Another method is the real-time recognition of animal sounds: With the help of solar-powered sensor stations and AI algorithms, the sounds of birds and bats are analyzed directly at the location, species are assigned and the data is visually processed in real time.

The company’s customers and project partners include nature conservation associations as well as authorities such as the Hessian State Agency for Nature Conservation, Environment and Geology (HLNUG) and planning offices.

Funding from the Digital Ministry of Hesse

On November 18, the company from Cölbe also received around 160,000 euros from the Distr@l funding program of the Hessian Ministry of Digital Affairs. The funding program is aimed at research and development projects that significantly improve the state of the art.

More Information

Website TrackIT Sytems
Hessian Founder Award

Company video