Crawling grey literature for conservation evidence

This is an idea proposed in 2024 as a good starter project, and has been completed by Shrey Biswas and Kacper Michalik. It was co-supervised with Sadiq Jaffer.

At the Conservation Evidence Copilots project, we are interested in finding and synthesising evidence for conservation interventions. Much of this evidence is published in academic journals, but there is a large body of grey literature that is not indexed in academic databases. This includes reports from NGOs, government agencies, and other organisations that are not peer-reviewed, but can still contain valuable information.

This project involved developing a web crawler to search for grey literature on conservation interventions, tracking the provenance and license information, and extracting relevant information from these documents. The goal is to make this information more accessible to researchers and practitioners in the field of conservation.

Status: Paper in preparation, contact me for more details about followups.