The Cambridge Conservation Initiative celebrated its ten year anniversary today, and what a day it was! Just a few weeks after his 100th birthday, Sir David Attenborough visited and narrated a video for us, and we had tons of visitors come by to look at all the projects we're working on.
I spent the afternoon demoing TESSERA and the Dash of Life along with Frank Feng, Sadiq Jaffer, Aland Chan and Shane Weisz. Before that, the day opened with a packed audience in the Babbage theatre to reflect on the past decade, and to set the scene for what's coming next for the CCI. When David Attenborough walked in, the standing ovation was absolutely deafening as everyone leapt to their feet!
For those that aren't familiar with it, the CCI brings together many conservation NGOs such as BirdLife, RSPB, IUCN, TRAFFIC, F&F, BTO, UNEP-WCMC, TBA along with many academics from the University of Cambridge. It's a pretty unique setup since we're all under the same physical roof despite being such different entities.
We heard an excellent set of talks about the origins of the David Attenborough Building which is the home of the CCI campus, and what makes this place work so effectively. It didn't just happen by coincidence; a huge amount of thought has gone into everything.
Sir David, who memorably opened the building by rappelling down the three storey living wall, also recorded a new video just after his 100th birthday to commemorate the work done here:
I really enjoyed all the talks but especially Mike Rands' which featured the live swift box with two chicks and momma swift feeding them! There is a real sense of community and friendship across the member organisations. Bill Sutherland always says that the DAB is the building where all the work gets done in the stairwell since you can't take a step up without running into someone you know. The common room is also the best anywhere in Cambridge, with plenty of comfy sofas and three coffee machines, and regular cake mysteriously showing up (and also, someone once showed me wombat poo dice).
I've been a member of the CCI since 2021 as one of the first computer scientists to join (along with Srinivasan Keshav when we co-founded 4C). In a strange coincidence, the conservation campus site is actually the old Arup building where Computer Science used to be for many years before moving to West Cambridge in 2001! I remember interviewing for my PhD here a long time ago before (or during) heading to the Eagle.
Once the formal talks were done, there were lots of visitors around, and so a bunch of CRI projects set up booths to explain what we're up to. I opened up tabs using TZE, the Swedish Lidar viewer by Michael Dales, the freshly renamed Dash of Life (our Enki dashboard) by Shane Weisz, and assorted change tracking and crop mapping visuals.Other big CCI projects were right on show as well of course; my other favourite David, David Coomes as seen in the next video, was representing the Centre for Landscape Regeneration, and Lynn Dicks and Bill Sutherland were over at the Conservation Evidence stand, and I managed to sneak down in a break to listen in on the IUCN and BirdLife stands too.
All the visitors were as inquisitive and as engaged as you might imagine. A number commented that it was refreshing to see AI being used for conservation, and also how the daunting scale of biodiversity mapping seems much more practical now than just a few years ago. And from our side, I'm really grateful to all of them for the encouragement and support.
I'm feeling really grateful, re-energised and excited for the future after hearing from Sir David today. "No single organisation, innovation or community can solve this crisis alone. This too requires connections. That is the idea at the heart of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative [...]". Here's to another decade of working together!
