Inventors: Rebecca Smith, Sam Reynolds, William Morgan, Conservation Evidence
Conservation Evidence is a free, authoritative information resource designed to support decisions about how to maintain and restore global biodiversity. Their thesis is that use of evidence is vital to maximise benefits and reduce costs to people and nature. However, time and a lack of customised information are major barriers to informing practice with evidence. They therefore summarise evidence from the scientific literature (studies) about the effects of conservation actions such as methods of habitat or species management. Since 2004, they have manually scanned over 1.2 million papers in 17 languages and summarised the outcomes of ~9,000 of these studies for biodiversity in plain language. In the last year they have created pipelines of Large Language Models that allow them to gather and filter more evidence, more quickly, while also developing a ‘ChatBot’ which allows users to engage with the database in a more intuitive manner.
Conservation Evidence is building the world’s first Conservation Copilot to help decision-makers make informed and evidence-based decisions for achieving Biodiversity Net Gain in the UK, as well as to achieve improvements for biodiversity more widely. The Conservation Co-pilot will help users to access and interpret a living, global database of evidence on conservation solutions in addition to guidance on action implementation and monitoring.
As Conservation Evidence looks to aid decision makers in achieving Biodiversity Net Gain, and improve biodiversity, the challenge for i-Teams is to explore how a Conservation Co-pilot can be adapted to support users. Would this be useful for organisations looking to achieve Biodiversity Net Gain? Are there potential users in other countries who have to meet biodiversity requirements that would use this tool?