Conserving with code: How data is helping to save our planet

Over the last two decades, the University of Cambridge-based project Conservation Evidence has screened more than 1.5 million scientific papers on conservation, as well as manually summarising 8,600+ studies relating to conservation actions. It has taken an estimated 75-person years for a team of highly skilled and highly trained researchers to manually curate the current database, which is used by a wide range of organisations to help inform decisions that are increasingly vital to the future of our planet and biodiversity conservation. Using the current manual system, only a few hundred new papers can be added to the open access database each year. AI has opened up new possibilities.