Digitising wildlife conservation and hunting management across Cyprus

The Cyprus Game and Fauna Department, operating under the Ministry of Interior, manages hunting regulation and wildlife conservation across the entire island. With over 15,000 active hunters and a diverse ecosystem of endemic and migratory species, the department was responsible for issuing hunting licences, enforcing seasonal regulations, tracking wildlife populations, and coordinating conservation programmes — all through paper-based processes and manual field inspections that had remained largely unchanged for decades.

The lack of a digital infrastructure meant that field officers had no efficient way to verify licence compliance in real time, wildlife sighting data was fragmented across handwritten logs and spreadsheets, and there was no centralised view of population trends or conservation outcomes. Hunters themselves had limited access to up-to-date regulation information, leading to inadvertent violations and strained relations between the hunting community and regulatory authorities. Conservation education efforts relied on printed pamphlets and occasional workshops, reaching only a fraction of the community.

Critically, any digital solution had to work in the remote mountainous terrain and rural areas of Cyprus where hunters and conservationists operate — locations with little or no cellular coverage. The department needed an app that would function fully offline, synchronise data when connectivity resumed, and provide a seamless experience whether the user was in Nicosia or deep in the Troodos Mountains.