This is an idea proposed in 2024 as a Cambridge Computer Science Part II project, and is available for being worked on. It will be supervised by Sadiq Jaffer, Tom Worthington and Anil Madhavapeddy as part of my Conservation Evidence Copilots project.
At the Conservation Evidence Copilots project, we are interested in finding and synthesising evidence for conservation interventions. Mangrove forests are one of the most threatened ecosystems in the world, and there is a large body of literature on the topic. However, this literature is spread across a wide range of sources, including academic journals, reports, and grey literature, and it can be difficult to identify and synthesise the key findings. Moreover, there is a need to assess the quality of the evidence, perhaps from remote sensing data or field studies, to inform policy and practice.
At the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, there are in-house experts such as Tom Worthington developing a platform integrate evidence on mangrove preservation and restoration. This project will involve assessing the literature found by this project to identify key sources, extract relevant information, and evaluate the quality of the resulting evidence. The goal is to develop a set of best practices for using mangrove literature in the context of conservation evidence, to validate it from the databases collated by domain experts, and to make recommendations for future work in this area.