Contact Us
AI Data

AI Powered Workflows Without Writing Code

About the project

Getting Public Conservation Data to Excel, Fast and Cheap

Sometimes your work depends on accurate, up-to-date information from multiple sources, but collecting it can be painful and time consuming. You’d love to automate the process, but you don’t have the budget or time to build and host custom software.

Often, there may be fast, inexpensive “no code” or “low code” solutions using off-the-shelf tools. These are becoming particularly effective when combined with “agents” running large language models which can complete complex data gathering tasks reliably without human supervision.

For this case study we needed regular updates on bird species living on public conservation land. Some of that data was tucked away in public databases and reports online. Other details, like recent sightings, had to come from people in the field. We wanted to avoid hours of downloading, copying, and reformatting before seeing useful insights.

Our solution: an AI-powered end-to-end process that automatically pulls in bird species data from both web sources and mobile forms, feeds it into one central spreadsheet, and keeps it all up to date in real time.

Mockup of bird species data website where the mouse is selecting an area of a data table.
An illustration of three different documents of various data being sent into a computer.
Challenge

Scattered and Inconsistent Data

Public conservation data is scattered across multiple websites and reports, often hidden behind search tools or locked in complex HTML tables. On top of that, valuable field observations from volunteers, rangers, or tourists are rarely captured in a consistent way.

The traditional approach is slow and error-prone:

  • Search for each dataset online
  • Copy/paste or manually reformat tables or use legacy, error prone web scraping tools
  • Collect field notes by email, text message, or paper forms
  • Spend hours compiling everything into one spreadsheet

We wanted to spend that time studying bird population trends, not wrangling spreadsheets.

Solving the Problem

Technologies In Action

  • Claude 4-powered browser agent
    • We used an AI-assisted browser agent to navigate public conservation websites, copy datasets, and intelligently extract the required inform information directly from HTML tables to our spreadsheet with a simple prompt.
    • The process can be scheduled to run regularly, reducing the need for repetitive manual lookups. It’s also smart enough to deal with changes to the source website and can report problems in the event the expected data isn’t available.
  • Mobile form submissions
    • Field professionals or volunteers can use a simple app to log sightings created from a “drag and drop” form builder. In this case we used Clappia. It’s free for small numbers of users plus the forms work offline and support multimedia capture.
    • Any form submissions were configured to flow instantly into our central Google Sheet.
  • Google Sheets as the hub
    • Both the web-scraped data and the app submissions land in Google Sheets spreadsheets, and are automatically cleaned and standardised.
    • No more juggling multiple file formats. Everything lives in one place, ready for analysis.
  • Zapier integration with Excel
    • For the final reporting and analysis we wanted to utilise the power of Excel. Using Zapier we configured a connector to sync Google Sheets automatically with Excel, updating without manual imports.
An illustration showing various data being imported to Google Sheets through AI Agents and manual data entry apps.
A graphic showing data being imported to Google Sheets and then exported to Microsoft Excel. There are three steps listed: Collect, Centralise, and Analyse.
Solution

Automated Pipeline

With this automated pipeline:

  • Data from the web arrives automatically on a daily schedule.
  • Field data from people is captured consistently and is instantly available to the whole team.
  • Excel Reports update in real time, letting conservationists focus on protecting wildlife, not formatting spreadsheets.

Impact

This approach using modern automation tools and AI can dramatically reduce the time it takes to get actionable insights from multiple data sources. For this case study we were able to get near real-time bird species data without having to develop custom code or pay for any cloud services.

A similar approach could be used across different domains for any organisation that needs to collate and analyse data from multiple sources.

There are many different automation tools available, from AI-powered categorisation and formatting to workflow platforms that can streamline repetitive tasks. Conveniently, many of these can plug directly into the tools and services you already rely on, making it easier to integrate automation without overhauling existing systems.

If you’d like to explore what this could look like for your organisation, reach out to us to discuss how we can help.

A simple monochromatic illustration showing a love heart above a clipboard. The paper on the clipboard has icons implying data and a report.

Let's work together

Ready to take your project to the next level? Get in touch with our team to get expert feedback and project estimates.

Get in touch