Yirgacheffe: A Declarative Approach to Geospatial Data / Oct 2025
papersDo not rule out nature from climate action; an open letter / Sep 2025
A world without nature feels rather impermanent, doesn't it? It's difficult to imagine a healthy future without clean air, fresh water and diverse wildlife. Yet important policy is being decided at the moment that will sideline "nature-based solutions" for net-zero carbon targets. While it is true that anything involving nature is fundamentally less predictable than human edifice, it is not true that it can't be quantified through science-based methods! Advances in remote sensing mean we have better resolution views into nature than ever before in human history, and we can leverage those towards protecting what's left. The wrong economic incentives are pushing us into a dangerous crossroads where several policy paths effectively abandon nature.
Back in January 2024, I hosted a workshop on permanence and durability at Pembroke College attended by sixty experts in this topic, with their recommendation reflected in the continuous improvement report on permanence from the ICVCM in May this year. I now join 40 other colleagues today in signing an open letter to the UN Article 6.4 supervisory body strongly calling out the scientific imperative to incentivise natural climate solutions on the path to net zero.
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notesExploring the biodiversity impacts of what we choose to eat / Sep 2025
Choosing where we source the food that we eat makes a difference to the environment, but by how much? After churning through around 100 petabytes of data, beginning with our LIFE metric and moving onto food provenance maps and import/export data for the world, we now know the answer can vary by three orders of magnitude for species extinction risks.
Our paper in Nature Food came out today with all the tasty details and implications for food policies worldwide. In order to make the data easier to explore, I knocked up an interactive global explorer using the data that the team (lead by Thomas Ball) generated.
Informing Conservation Problems and Actions Using an Indicator of Extinction Risk / Jul 2025
Informing Conservation Problems and Actions Using an Indicator of Extinction Risk
Alison Eyres, Andy Arnell, Richard Cuthbert, Thomas Ball, Michael Dales, Alejandro Guizar-Coutiño, Jody Holland, Emilio Luz-Ricca, Anil Madhavapeddy, Leila Pain, Thomas Swinfield, Thomas White, and Andrew Balmford.
Working paper at SSRN.
BIOMASS launches to measure forest carbon flux from space / Jun 2025
The BIOMASS forest mission satellite was successfully boosted into space a couple of days ago, after decades of development from just down the road in Stevenage. I'm excited by this because it's the first global-scale P-band SAR instrument that can penetrate forest canopys to look underneath. This, when combined with hyperspectral mapping will give us a lot more insight into global tree health.
Weirdly, the whole thing almost never happened because permission to use the P-band was blocked because it might interfere with US nuclear missile warning radars back in 2013.
Meeting in Graz, Austria, to select the the 7th Earth Explorer mission to be flown by the 20-nation European Space Agency (ESA), backers of the Biomass mission were pelted with questions about how badly the U.S. network of missile warning and space-tracking radars in North America, Greenland and Europe would undermine Biomass’ global carbon-monitoring objectives.
Europe's Earth observation satellite system may be the world's most dynamic, but as it pushes its operating envelope into new areas, it is learning a lesson long ago taught to satellite telecommunications operators: Radio frequency is scarce, and once users have a piece of it they hold fast. -- Spacenews (2013)
Luckily, all this got sorted by international frequency negotiators, and after being built by Airbus in Stevenage (and Germany and France, as it's a complex instrument!) it took off without a hitch. Looking forward to getting my hands on the first results later in the year over at the Centre for Earth Observation.
Check out this cool ESA video about the instrument to learn more, and congratulations to the team at ESA. Looking forward to the next BIOSPACE where there will no doubt be initial buzz about this.
Update 28th June 2025: See also this beautiful BBC article about the satellite, via David Coomes.
Steps towards an ecology of the Internet / Jun 2025
Every ten years, the city of Aarhus throws a giant conference to discuss new agendas for critical action and theory in computing. Back in 2016, Hamed Haddadi, Jon Crowcroft and I posited the idea of personal data stores, a topic that is just now becoming hot due to agentic AI. Well, time flies, and I'm pleased to report that our second dicennial thought experiment on "Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet" will appear at the 2025 edition of Aarhus this August!
This time around, we projected our imaginations forward a decade to imagine an optimistic future for the Internet, when it has exceeded a trillion nodes. After deciding in the pub that this many nodes was too many for us to handle, we turned to our newfound buddies in conservation to get inspiration from nature. We asked Sam Reynolds, Alec Christie, David Coomes and Bill Sutherland first year undergraduate questions about how natural ecosystems operate across all levels of scale: from DNA through to cells through to whole populations. We spent hours discussing the strange correspondences between the seeming chaos in the low-level interactions between cells through to the extraordinary emergent discipline through which biological development typically takes place.
Then, going back to the computer scientists in our group and more widely (like Cyrus Omar who I ran into at Bellairs), it turns out that this fosters some really wild ideas for how the Internet itself could evolve into the future. We could adopti biological process models within the heart of the end-to-end principle that has driven the Internet architecture for decades!
[…623 words]Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet
Anil Madhavapeddy, Sam Reynolds, Alec Christie, David Coomes, Michael Dales, Patrick Ferris, Ryan Gibb, Hamed Haddadi, Sadiq Jaffer, Josh Millar, Cyrus Omar, Bill Sutherland, and Jon Crowcroft.
Paper in the proceedings of the sixth decennial Aarhus conference: Computing X Crisis.
Visiting National Geographic HQ and the Urban Exploration Project / Jun 2025
I stayed on for a few days extra in Washington DC after the biodiversity extravaganza to attend a workshop at legendary National Geographic Basecamp. While I've been to several NatGeo Explorers meetups in California, I've never had the chance to visit their HQ. The purpose of this was to attend a workshop organised by Christian Rutz from St Andrews about the "Urban Exploration Project":
[The UEP is a...] global-scale, community-driven initiative will collaboratively track animals across gradients of urbanization worldwide, to produce a holistic understanding of animal behaviour in human-modified landscapes that can, in turn, be used to develop evidence-based approaches to achieving sustainable human-wildlife coexistence. -- Christian Rutz's homepage
This immediately grabbed my interest, since it's a very different angle of biodiversity measurements to my usual. I've so far been mainly involved in efforts that use remote sensing or expert range maps, but the UEP program is more concerned with the dynamic movements of species. Wildlife movements are extremely relevant to conservation efforts since there is a large tension between human/wildlife coexistence in areas where both communities are under spatial pressure. Tom Ratsakatika for example did his AI4ER project on the tensions in the Romanian Carpathian mountains, and elephant/human conflicts and tiger/human conflicts are also well known.
[…1155 words]What I learnt at the National Academy of Sciences US-UK Forum on Biodiversity / Jun 2025
I spent a couple of days at the National Academy of Sciences in the USA at the invitation of the Royal Society, who held a forum on "Measuring Biodiversity for Addressing the Global Crisis". It was a packed program for those working in evidence-driven conservation:
Assessing biodiversity is fundamental to understanding the distribution of biodiversity, the changes that are occurring and, crucially, the effectiveness of actions to address the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Such assessments face multiple challenges, not least the great complexity of natural systems, but also a lack of standardized approaches to measurement, a plethora of measurement technologies with their own strengths and weaknesses, and different data needs depending on the purpose for which the information is being gathered.
Other sectors have faced similar challenges, and the forum will look to learn from these precedents with a view to building momentum toward standardized methods for using environmental monitoring technologies, including new technologies, for particular purposes. -- NAS/Royal Society US-UK Scientific Forum on Measuring Biodiversity
I was honoured to talk about our work on using AI to "connect the dots" between disparate data like the academic literature and remote observations at scale. But before that, here's some of the bigger picture stuff I learnt...
[…2343 words]Mapping urban and rural British hedgehogs / Jun 2025
This is an idea proposed as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Gabriel Mahler. It is co-supervised with Silviu Petrovan.
The National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme aims to provide robust population estimates for the beloved hedgehog.
Despite being the nation’s favourite mammal, there's a lot more to learn about hedgehog populations across the country. We do know that, although urban populations are faring better than their rural counterparts, overall hedgehogs are declining across Britain, so much so that they’re now categorised as Vulnerable to extinction. -- NHMP
The People's Trust for Endangered Species has been coordinating the programme. For the purposes of this project, we have access to:
- GPS data from over 100 tagged hedgehogs collected by Lauren Moore during her PhD to build predictive movement models.
- OpenStreetMap data about where hedgehogs probably shouldn't be (e.g. middle of a road) to help with species distribution modelling
- PTES also run the Hedgehog Street program which has the mapped locations of hedgehog highways across the UK to assess how effective they are.
- A new high-res map of the UK's hedgerows and stonewalls from Google DeepMind and Drew Purves.
Our initial efforts in the summer of 2025 will be to put together a high res map of UK hedgehog habitats, specifically brambles and likely urban habitats. Once that works, the plan is to apply some spatially explicit modeling, still focussing on the UK. This will involving exciting collaborating with the PTES who I'm looking forward to meeting!
ideasOut-of-the-box LLMs are not ready for conservation decision making / May 2025
Our paper on how the careful design of LLMs is crucial for expert-level evidence retrieval has been published today in PLOS One and is available fully open access!
Our findings suggest that, with careful domain-specific design, LLMs could potentially be powerful tools for enabling expert-level use of evidence syntheses and databases. However, general LLMs used "out-of-the-box" are likely to perform poorly and misinform decision-makers. By establishing that LLMs exhibit comparable performance with human synthesis experts on providing restricted responses to queries of evidence syntheses and databases, future work can build on our approach to quantify LLM performance in providing open-ended responses.
In a nutshell, we tested 10 LLMs with six different retrieval strategies on their ability to answer questions related to conservation, benchmarked against the Conservation Evidence database that has been hand-assembled by experts over the last two decades. In some of the retrieval scenarios, models were only allowed to use their pretrained knowledge, whereas in others they had access to the relevant parts of the hand-curated database.
We found that language models had very varying results when relying only on their pretrained data, and were particularly bad at answering questions about reptile conservation. However, given some extra training with the CE database, their performance improved dramatically. When we put these models head to head with human experts (from the conservation evidence team), with a set of questions and with RAG access to the database, we found that the models were just as good as our experts, but answered the questions much much much faster (near instant).
Essentially, LLMs without extra training are likely to perform poorly and misinform decision-makers. This is crucial when considering how to build AI infrastructure for public policymaking.
[…377 words]Radhika Iyer, Alec Christie, Anil Madhavapeddy, Sam Reynolds, Bill Sutherland, and Sadiq Jaffer.
Journal paper in PLOS ONE (vol 20 issue 5).
Learnings from the Cambridge Environmental Sustainability Committee / May 2025
I joined Cambridge's loftily named Environment Sustainability Strategy Committee this academic year, and have attended a couple of meetings with the latest one being held today. While a lot of what goes on is intricately tied into the University's rather special governance structure and the complexity of the College system, there has been significant progress on making all of this more visible more widely.
Sally Pidgeon, our wonderful head of Enviromental Sustainaibility, has been redeveloping the public website and has put a lot of interesting data online. There is now a new Environmental Sustainability website that tracks the University committment structure more closely, with the areas broken up into Carbon & Energy, Travel & Transport, Waste & Circular Economy, Biodiversity, and Water usage.
[…842 words]Humans are the ones that will save nature, helped by AI / May 2025
In my earlier note about how AI should unite conservation, I talked about the robust debate ongoing within Cambridge about whether or not we're too "AI obsessed" and are losing track of our goals in the rush to adopt learning algorithms. Jacqueline Garget has written a brilliant roundup about how colleages like Sam Reynolds, Chris Sandbrook and Sadiq Jaffer in the CCI are leading conversations to make sure we advance with eyes wide open.
[…537 words]Technology needs to unite conservation, not divide it / Apr 2025
I had a tremendous time participating in last year's horizon scan of AI and Conservation, which laid out the opportunities that technological progress from AI (a catchall phrase here) could bring to hard-working conservation practitioners. Since then, there's been a lot of corridor conversations about future projects (and even dinner with the Wildlife Trusts). However, there has also been discussion about the potential harms of our work, most notably in a response letter to our paper written by Katie Murray and colleagues.
Murray et al make two really important points:
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- [...] importance of ecological expertise must be recognised as much more than just the expert annotation of training data
- [...] effort should be made to build capacity for AI development in the Global South, so that the rewards of successful research can be shared -- The potential for AI to divide conservation
ESA's first BioSpace conference seems a huge success / Apr 2025
The European Space Agency organised the first conference on Biodiversity Insights from Space (BioSpace) in February this year, and it seems like it was a huge success. The conference itself sold out within days, and the program was so packed that the organisers had to split it into multiple chunks during the week to cope with everyone. I've only just gotten around to fully browsing the schedule, and it's incredible to see so much variety of work happening in biodiversity and remote sensing. Here's hoping that ESA makes this an annual event in Italy!
[…793 words]Cooperative Sensor Networks for Long-Term Biodiversity Monitoring / Apr 2025
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