WildNeighbor
An AI-powered app that tells you which federally protected species live within 20 miles of your home, alerts you the moment a habitat protection rule changes, and gives you one concrete action you can take this week — vote, plant native, donate, or contact your representative.
Suburban homeowners and outdoor enthusiasts in the US who care about local wildlife but don't know where to start
- Reverse geocoder that maps your zip code to nearby threatened/endangered species using USFWS data
- Real-time policy tracker that flags new habitat designation changes and explains the impact in plain English
- Personalized action recommender ('plant milkweed this weekend', 'attend this hearing Tuesday') with calendar reminders
- One-tap donation routing to vetted local land trusts protecting species in your area
Federal habitat protections are being actively rewritten right now, and most people have no way to find out which species in their literal neighborhood are losing legal cover — news drives them to the trend, app converts anxiety into action.
Google Trends shows modest ~100+ searches for 'endangered species' (CA); general nature-ID apps like iNaturalist pull huge engagement (366M observations, 2.2M/week) but the specific 'anxious homeowner converting to civic action' niche is smaller and not directly validated.A Community for Naturalists · iNaturalist ↗Wildlife Sighting Citizen Science App Market Research Report 2033 ↗
No direct competitor combines protected-species-near-you + rule-change alerts + civic action routing; however USFWS IPaC already serves federally listed species by location for free, and Wildscope/Seek/Merlin cover the wildlife discovery layer, narrowing the truly open whitespace.Wildscope - AI Wildlife Identification & Nature Exploration App ↗Seek by iNaturalist ↗
Leading wildlife apps (Seek, iNaturalist, Merlin, Wildscope) are free; endangered-species alerts and civic-action routing are low-monetization civic utilities — donation routing gives no app revenue, and consumer WTP for habitat-protection alerts is unproven.Seek by iNaturalist ↗Wildscope: Identify & Explore on the App Store ↗
Federal ESA regulations are actively being rewritten in 2025–2026 (FWS + NOAA proposed rules on listing/critical habitat, finalized habitat-protection rollbacks), creating a real multi-year news-driven tailwind, though engagement may spike-and-fade with election cycles.2025 Proposed Rules to Revise Endangered Species Act Regulations ↗Administration Revises Endangered Species Act Regulations to Strengthen... ↗
Buildable on top of existing free public sources (USFWS IPaC, Federal Register API, iNaturalist taxa) plus reverse-geocoding/radius queries; main costs are legal-disclaimer curation for rule interpretations and maintaining timely Federal Register monitoring.Eroding the Federal Endangered Species Act: New Proposals Lessen... ↗