# Assessing Conservation Action Suitability using Multimodal Representations *2026-01-01 — idea* This is a difficult project that will combine spatial evidence of conservation interventions with a geospatial foundation model (TESSERA): > Conservationists often consider whether a beneficial conservation action is likely to be suitable in a new location. The decision to carry out an investigation relies heavily on expert judgment, and conservationists lack a concrete tool to predict whether suitability is true beyond the original sites in which studies have been conducted. > > The Conservation Evidence (CE) database records actions that may impact biodiversity. Each action is assigned an overall “effectiveness category,” such as “beneficial,” by an expert panel based on the evidence provided by individual studies pertaining to that conservation action. Many of these studies are georeferenced, providing precise study locations that indicate where an action has been tested in practice. > > This project aims to build a pipeline that uses multimodal geospatial data sources, detailed below, to identify areas where conditions are similar to those at study sites, providing an indication of where the conservation action may also be suitable. > > The project will focus on the UK, for which a single land-based intervention with approximately 60 associated studies from the Conservation Evidence database will be selected. Each study location will be represented as a feature vector constructed by combining information from TESSERA embeddings (learned representations of satellite observational data), climate variables such as temperature and rainfall, and habitat information. > > By comparing different subsets of the available datasets, the project will first evaluate how well these representations support retrieval between study sites, and extend this by projecting these to generate a map of potential suitability across the UK. Evaluation will combine quantitative comparison against held-out sites and qualitative review with conservation experts. > [Radhika Iyer](mailto:ri301@cam.ac.uk), project proposal, Oct 2025 This project has been completed with great success, and is pending publication. Please contact us for a copy of the thesis until then. Status: Completed Level: PartII Year: 2026 Project: Conservation Evidence Copilots Supervisors: Sadiq Jaffer, Bill Sutherland, Anil Madhavapeddy Students: Radhika Iyer ## Related - [.plan-26-21: Pint of Science, OxCaml dissertations, and TESSERA 1.1 stirring](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w21) (note, 2026-05-24) --- Canonical: https://anil.recoil.org/ideas/assessing-conservation-actions-using-tessera Type: idea Tags: tessera, ce, evidence, spatial