Enki, a Dashboard of Life on Earth

Organising the world's species information requires us to pull together lots and lots of information. This includes data about the natural world, ranging from GBIF to iNaturalist to the IUCN's databases. It also needs information about what humans are doing, via OpenStreetMap and other maps.

Then, it also needs observational models of the planet such as TESSERA derived from remote sensing data, in order to figure out habitat information.

And after all that, we need to pull together literature with information not yet captured in models, and also derived statistical models such as LIFE.

Enki's our codename for a new project to work on this, beginning with a dashboard for bringing the IUCN Red List to life. Tune in for more in 2026 as this develops!

1 Update: 2026

The project now has a real name as Shane Weisz has released it as Dash for Life! It has had a lot of improvements through the year, including accumulating data sources while keeping the ergonomics of the original dashboard.

To keep us from putting undue load on public services, we are currently miirroring the iNaturalist and OpenStreetMap databases onto our own infrastructure in Cambridge, with a view to running an internal API server against them. The Evidence TAP literature database should eventually feed in here too.

Ideas

Can agentic LLMs use local field guides to improve identification of rare species?2026 · Part II
Available, with Shane Weisz
A Living IUCN Red List of the World's Species2025 · PhD
Ongoing with Shane Weisz

Activity

.plan-26-31: Sorting out Tessera and Evidence TAP infrastructureAug 2026
A petabyte of TESSERA embeddings moves to Source Cooperative, and Taposaur's GROBID metadata index and capability-based downloader take shape for Evidence TAP, while Eio gets some native Windows support.
Can agentic LLMs use local field guides to improve identification of rare species?Aug 2026
Available · Part II
.plan-26-25: Planetary scale plans, Windows file-descriptor scale problemsJun 2026
Ten years of the CCI with Sir David Attenborough, Andrew's Royal Society Environment Medal lecture, and the third PROPL at PLDI, while wrapping a local DeepSeek agent in OCaml and a first stab at getting Eio fleshed out on Windows.
Sir David Attenborough joins us to celebrate the Cambridge Conservation InitiativeJun 2026
Sir David Attenborough drops by for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative's tenth birthday in the DAB, and I spend the afternoon demoing TESSERA and the Dash of Life to a campus packed with visitors.
What happens when a hedgehog story prickles its way into the BBCMay 2026
Behind the scenes of a week of BBC/ITV news and radio appearances about hedgehogs and TESSERA, but also what to expect when a research story catches the news cycle.
.plan-26-19: Ancient oaks, parliamentary evidence, and TESSERA in the CityMay 2026
Celebrating David Attenborough's 100th birthday at a Conservation Research Institute retreat in Norwich, a Parliament POST briefing on Evidence for Nature Recovery lands, and a TESSERA talk at the Cambridge Ring alumni evening at Jane Street.
.plan-26-17: Unwedging kernels, dogfood deployments, and managing beef leakageApr 2026
Welcoming Akshay to Cambridge, TESSERA AWS sync done, oi now self-hosts this site, and a new 4C forest leakage preprint appears.
.plan-26-16: Chennai, Cambridge, Belfast: a week on the wingApr 2026
A week of hops between Chennai, Cambridge and Belfast for the FP Launchpad takeoff at IIT Madras, a surprise Publication of the Year at the Cambridge Ring Hall of Fame, meeting the VC on the upcoming Rokos School of Governance, mirroring half a petabyte of TESSERA tiles and hacking on oi
.plan-26-11: Bins, bollards, bots and biodiversity boffinsMar 2026
Evidence synthesis at the DEFRA science conference, TESSERA transcoding and building a new SPA, OpenStreetMap/DuckDB bindings in OxCaml, and early thoughts on vibecoding etiquette.
.plan-26-07: Storage, Lego, Echo, and the IUCNFeb 2026
Growing the Ceph cluster for TESSERA embeddings, a Lego brainstorming session for the Evidence TAP, hosting Echo Labs from ARIA, and Shane's IUCN Red List seminar.
Nine changes needed to deliver a radical transformation in biodiversity measurementJan 2026
William J. Sutherland, Neil D. Burgess et al. — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
From data to decisions: Toward a Biodiversity Monitoring Standards FrameworkJan 2026
Andrew Gonzalez, Tom August et al. — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
A Living IUCN Red List of the World's SpeciesSep 2025
Ongoing · PhD
TESSERA, a pixelwise geospatial foundation modelJan 2025
Conservation Evidence CopilotsJan 2024