Over the last 5 years of expeditions in Angola and Botswana, we have developed FieldKit: a joint hardware/software platform and architecture that fuses the best of open science and open storytelling. We will discuss how big data/IoT formed the foundation for live-data expeditions, and how its helping to protect one of the last untouched places on earth. This will include stories about fieldwork in Okavango, Banff National Park, and the Peruvian Amazon (including a story about a tweet from space)