Tracking Trends is a new project launched by ICCROM, which aims to gather strategic data on sector capacity, knowledge production, and emerging issues of concern to support data informed policies for heritage conservation; and provide evidence of its capacity to contribute to sustainable development. This meeting is a first exploratory think tank on the topic of the strategic use of data for heritage conservation, to help design the scope and focus of a two-year pilot project (2018-19). An interdisciplinary group of experts from the fields of cultural heritage, conservation, digital humanities, and data science will share their perspective onto a number of issues, including the type of strategic data to be collected; alternative approaches to data gathering; and opportunities arising from publicly available open source data.