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 supervised by Anil Madhavapeddy and 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 This includes reports from NGOs, government agencies, and other organisations that are not peer-reviewed, but can still contain valuable information.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.
ideasRelated News
Conservation Evidence Copilots / Jan 2024
The Conservation Evidence team at the University of Cambridge has spent years screening 1.6m+ scientific papers on conservation, as well as manually summarising 8600+ studies relating to conservation actions. However, progress is limited by the specialised skills needed to screen and summarise relevant studies -- it took more than 75 person years to manually curate the current database and only a few 100 papers can be added each year! We are working on AI-driven techniques to accelerate addition of robust evidence to the CE database via automated literature scanning, LLM-based copilots and scanning of grey literature. We aim to provide co-pilots that augment human decision making to figure out how to categorise interventions much more quickly and accurately, and ultimately accelerate the positive impact of conservation actions. […618 words]
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