Data Study Group Final Report: WWF

Data Study Groups are week-long events at The Alan Turing Institute bringing together some of the country’s top talent from data science, artificial intelligence, and wider fields, to analyse real-world data science challenges.

Smart monitoring for conservation areas

WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) monitors over 250,000 protected areas (e.g. national parks and nature reserves) and thousands of other sites and critical habitats. These sites are the foundation of global natural assets and are central to the preservation of biodiversity and human well-being. Unfortunately, they face increasing pressures from human development.

In this challenge, we explore various data science techniques to automatically detect news articles that report emerging threats to key protected areas. We describe a system that identifies such news stories near real-time. This is vital to enable the wider machinery of WWF and the conservation community to engage with governments, companies, shareholders, insurers, and others to help halt the degradation or destruction of key habitats.