A research lab for lost, rare, and understudied species.
RARElab is a non-profit biodiversity research organisation, founded in 2025 in Starnberg, Bavaria. We are a team of researchers studying lost, understudied, and endangered species, with partners across Europe and the tropics.
What we work on
We work on lost, rare, endangered, and understudied species. The four overlap heavily: rare often means both endangered and understudied, and a lost species is usually all four at once.
How we work depends on the project. Our methods span field surveys, bioacoustics, environmental DNA, animal tracking, and machine learning. We have our own scientists on the team, and we work alongside academic institutions, local communities, and citizen scientists. This work doesn't happen alone.
Why this work
Most conservation research and funding goes to a handful of species. One analysis of 14,600 conservation projects over 25 years found that 82.9% of funding ($1.6 billion) went to vertebrates, and within that, nearly half of all resources went to just 47 species, mostly large mammals and marine turtles. Amphibians, one of the most threatened groups on the planet, got less than 3%. Most other groups get almost nothing.
The species we work on sit on the wrong side of that gap. Some are small and easily overlooked. Others are well-known by name but barely studied in practice. What ties them together is that they are rare, understudied, or already slipping toward lost. The work needed for them is unglamorous and slow: searching for animals that may be gone, doing basic ecology nobody has done yet, building the first decent population estimates. It doesn't win headlines. It also doesn't happen on its own.
How RARElab started
RARElab was founded out of the realisation that academic funding wasn't going to fund the necessary work. The idea started in 2021, when Andrew was helping out on a paper about lost species and came across the concept for the first time. Animals not reliably seen in a decade or more, sitting in limbo, neither extinct nor extant in many cases because nobody was looking. That stuck with him. The work to resolve them is expensive, slow, and may never yield results. That's why universities and research councils are unlikely to fund it. A non-profit, funded privately, can do what public research money often can't or won't.
While lost species are where it started, our scope is wider. Plenty of common species are also understudied. Their movements, population dynamics, and basic ecology aren't well understood, even for animals charismatic enough to attract public attention. Closing those gaps matters as much as finding the lost ones.
Taking RARElab from idea to reality took a few years, but it became an if-not-now-then-when moment. Andrew, Annika, and Auguste came together in 2025 to pursue research and conservation of the species too often left behind. Andrew has a background in ecology and conservation technology, Annika in behavioural and chemical ecology, Auguste in comparative cognition at the Max Planck Institute. The team page lists everyone, including the advisory board and regional advisors.
Working with us
We work with researchers, organisations, and supporters who care about nature and biodiversity as much as we do. There are several ways to get involved: partnerships, funding, fieldwork, citizen science. If you can help on the ground, we particularly want to hear from you.
