A trio of papers I read on biodiversity and forests this week / Feb 2025
This week I've been reading three really nice pieces of work by my colleagues, in the form of a review paper on biodiversity and AI, a benchmark for 3D forest reconstruction using laser scanners and a mobile app for measuring the width of tree trunks. A real bonanza for forest lovers! […793 words]
notesUpdated preprint on quantifying biodiversity cost of food consumption / Feb 2025
We've uploaded a revised preprint on our ongoing work on quantifying the biodiversity cost of global food consumption, lead by Thomas Ball. This is based on the recently published LIFE metric, combined with supply chain data and provenance modeling. […196 words]
papersDisentangling carbon credits and offsets with contributions / Feb 2025
The terms carbon credits and carbon offsets are often used interchangeably, but are in fact two distinct concepts. I've spent a nice Sunday morning reading up on some recent articles that Bhaskar Vira sent me which introduce a third term, known as "carbon contributions". Rather than this adding confusion, I found it helped me clarify my own thoughts on the matter, which I note down here in draft form. (Update 7th Feb: I've revised this several times after many discussions this week, especially with David A Coomes and Srinivasan Keshav, with full list of credits in the end) […3552 words]
Position paper on scientifically credible carbon credits (via 4C) / Jan 2025
My colleagues Thomas Swinfield and Eleanor Toye Scott lead the publication of a comprehensive report of the steps the voluntary carbon market needs to take to restore its scientific credibility, with input from many of us in 4C and beyond.
- establishing common standards for carbon quantification and accounting, to cover additionality, leakage and permanence.
- avoiding perverse incentives and align the motivations of all stakeholders with high-integrity outcomes. [...]
- issuing all carbon credits based on trusted primary observations.
- making all the data needed to reproduce carbon calculations available in standard file formats.
- [...] reporting social and biodiversity dimensions of projects separately from carbon calculations.
- integrating DMRV methods into carbon and biodiversity accounting standards to reduce the financial and administrative burdens on nature-based projects and the local communities participating in or affected by them. […186 words]
Updated preprint on LLMs for evidence-based decision support / Jan 2025
We have just updated our preprint on using LLMs for evidence decision support with more evaluation results and corrections from peer review.
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.
See also the fantastic EEG seminar talk that the student group who worked on this over the summer gave towards the end of last year.
Radhika Iyer, Alec Christie, Anil Madhavapeddy, Sam Reynolds, Bill Sutherland and Sadiq Jaffer.
Working paper at Research Square.
LIFE metric published in Royal Society Phil Trans B / Jan 2025
After some years of hard work, our Mapping LIFE on Earth biodiversity metric was published today in a special issue of the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B! The idea behind LIFE is that although human-driven habitat loss is known to be the greatest cause of the biodiversity crisis, we do not yet have robust spatially explicit metrics that quantify the relative impacts of human actions on species extinctions. And that's what LIFE provides: a way to compare the relative impacts of some landuse anywhere in the world, in a manner that is globally applicable. […409 words]
LIFE: A metric for mapping the impact of land-cover change on global extinctions
Alison Eyres, Thomas Ball, Michael Dales, Thomas Swinfield, Andy Arnell, Daniele Baisero, América Paz Durán, Jonathan Green, Rhys Green, Anil Madhavapeddy and Andrew Balmford.
Journal paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (vol 380 issue 1917).
Affordable digitisation of insect collections using photogrammetry / Jan 2025
This is an idea proposed as a Cambrige Computer Science Part III or MPhil project, and is available for being worked on. It will be supervised by Tiffany Ki, Edgar Turner and Anil Madhavapeddy.
Insects dominate animal biodiversity and are sometimes called "the little things that run the world". They play a disproportionate role in ecosystem functioning, are highly sensitive to environmental change and often considered to be early indicators of responses in other taxa. There is widespread concern about global insect declines[^1] yet the evidence behind such declines is highly biassed towards the Global North and much is drawn from short-term biodiversity datasets[^2] [^3].
The Insect Collection at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge holds over 1.2 million specimens. These include specimens collected from the early 19th century to the present day. Most specimens remain undocumented and unavailable for analysis. However, they contain data that are critical to understanding long-term species and community responses to anthropogenic change, and vital to evaluating whether short-term declines are representative of longer-term trends[^4] [^5]. As such, unlocking these insect collections is of paramount importance, and the large-scale nature of these collections necessitates the development of an efficient and effective digitisation process.
The 3D digitisation of specimens using current methods is either highly time-intensive or expensive, rendering it impossible to achieve across the collection in a reasonable time-frame. Yet, 3D models of specimens have huge potential for investigating species morphological responses to anthropogenic changes over time and identification of trade-offs in morphological responses within a 3D morphospace. […540 words]
ideasHorizon scan on AI and conservation published / Dec 2024
Back in July 2024, a large group of conservation and computer scientists got together in the CCI to prioritise the storm of AI-related projects that have been kicking off around the world. Our key goal was to harness AI to accelerate the positive impact of conservation efforts, while minimising harm caused through either the direct or indirect use of AI technologies.
The first horizon scan resulting from this has just been published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. If you're looking for a gentle introduction to some of the terms in AI from a non-experts perspective, the first section does a good job of defining a glossary as well. […118 words]
The potential for AI to revolutionize conservation: a horizon scan
Sam Reynolds, Sara Beery, Neil Burgess, Mark Burgman, Stuart Butchart, Steven J. Cooke, David A Coomes, Finn Danielsen, Enrico Di Minin, América Paz Durán, Francis Gassert, Amy Hinsley, Sadiq Jaffer, Julia P.G. Jones, Binbin V. Li, Oisin Mac Aodha, Anil Madhavapeddy, Stephanie O'Donnell, Bill Oxbury, Lloyd Peck, Nathalie Pettorelli, Jon Paul Rodríguez, Emily Shuckburgh, Bernardo Strassburg, Hiromi Yamashita, Zhongqi Miao and Bill Sutherland.
Journal paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
Published a legal perspective on high integrity forest carbon credits / Nov 2024
Sophie Chapman lead an effort to explore a novel legal framework for forest carbon credits that separates carbon tenure (i.e. title and associated property rights to the land and trees which store the carbon) from the carbon rights (i.e. title and associated rights to monetise and manage the credits which symbolically represent the carbon stored in the trees), while also specifying the relationship between the carbon tenure and the carbon rights.
The resulting paper has just been published in the Climate and Carbon Law Review journal, and is available as open access for your perusal.
A Legal Perspective on Supply-side Integrity Issues in the Forest Carbon Market
Sophie Chapman, Eleanor Toye Scott, Thomas Swinfield, Robin Daniels and Anil Madhavapeddy.
Journal paper in Carbon & Climate Law Review (vol 18 issue 3).
Preprint on using LLMs to for evidence-based decision support / Nov 2024
We have just uploaded a preprint on using LLMs for conservation evidence, based on our work on large-scale crawling of the academic literature. Well done in particular to Radhika Iyer for having done the bulk of the evaluation on this as part of a very productive summer internship with us!
Radhika Iyer, Alec Christie, Anil Madhavapeddy, Sam Reynolds, Bill Sutherland and Sadiq Jaffer.
Working paper at Research Square.
Mapping greener futures with planetary computing / Oct 2024
I got invited by Sertaç Sehlikoglu to deliver a lecture to the Masters students down at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity. I talked about the recent work on planetary computing, with an overview of the LIFE and FOOD papers.
talksRoyal Society meeting on ecological/commercial risks / Oct 2024
I'm at the Royal Society this morning for the 2 day programme on "How does ecological risk related to commercial risk?", and am reporting on the morning session. The full program is being livestreamed so please do dial in if the below notes seem interesting to you. I put this note up almost live, so any errors below are my own. (Update: partial day 2 notes now available below) […6736 words]
Mitigating credit reversal risks in nature-based solutions / Sep 2024
Many of the questions around our recent Nature Sustainability commentary on NbS credits revolve around how to finance new projects if credible credits need to be ex-post. Our latest paper published in Carbon Management on "Mitigating risk of credit reversal in nature-based climate solutions by optimally anticipating carbon release" tries to address this.
The problem with selling ex-ante (future) carbon credits for (e.g.) a deforestation avoidance scheme is that project reversals can happen in the future ("deforestation has increased") thus rendering any credits issued previously useless. On the flip side though, an overly conservative view of the future ("the entire forest will disappear overnight!") is clearly so conservative that it doesn't serve the best interests of the project developer. So ideally, a project would make realistic but conservative ex-ante predictions that is safe for both project developer (who gets more funds upfront) and a carbon credit purchasers (who needs to account for impermanence of nature credits).
Our paper shows how to do this by calculating a "release schedule" to predict future drawdowns, and then issuing extra credits when the release at some future date is less than predicted by the release schedule. We use verified ex-post observations to construct these release schedules, and design them to bound the risk of the project becoming negative overall (that is, net drawdown is negative) and thus failing. […355 words]
Building species models of the planet / Sep 2024
I don't normally announce funded grants (preferring to focus on outcomes), but I'm really excited by this one and couldn't resist! Myself and my colleagues Srinivasan Keshav (from computer science), David A Coomes (from Plant Sciences), Andrew Balmford (from Zoology) and Neil Burgess (the Head of Science at UNEP-WCMC) have just received a £1.2m grant from the UKRI to work on building foundation models for planetary intelligence.
Now, normally a grant isn't news, but I wanted to highlight the scheme that it came under. UKRI announced an interdisciplinary program specifically for projects that don't normally get funded by just one research council. In our case, this work usually falls between the cracks of EPSRC ("too much nature") or NERC ("too much engineering") or STFC ("not enough satellites"). But this interdisciplinary program expressly assembled a panel across all these areas, and collectively gave us a shot. I really hope this scheme continues to gather steam within the UKRI.
As to what we're doing? There'll be the evolution of the work described in Remote Sensing of Nature and Mapping LIFE on Earth, with lots of domain knowledge that we're pulling together with our partners at UNEP-WCMC (especially Neil Burgess and Ian Ondo) on plant and animal species distributions across the globe. […339 words]
PACT Tropical Moist Forest Accreditation Methodology / Aug 2024
We have just released the Tropical Moist Forest v2.1 specification, to follow up the now-expired v2.0 from six months ago. The key updates are a new high-level explainer, as well as clarifiations for buffer zones and base tiles.
PACT Tropical Moist Forest Accreditation Methodology v2.1
Andrew Balmford, David A Coomes, Michael Dales, Patrick Ferris, James Hartup, Sadiq Jaffer, Srinivasan Keshav, Miranda Lam, Anil Madhavapeddy, Robin Message, E.-Ping Rau, Thomas Swinfield, Charlotte Wheeler and Abby Williams.
Working paper at Cambridge Open Engage.
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