News
Dispatches from the project. Every entry links through to the fuller story on the team's own sites.
Upcoming
Workshop
AI and rapid evidence reviews at the DEFRA data festival
Sam Reynolds leads a workshop at the DEFRA Group Data and Information Festival in London.
Recently
Paper
Principles for responsible AI in conservation
Sam Reynolds led a preprint with conservation-AI researchers worldwide. It has been submitted to Conservation Science and Practice.
Milestone
Evidence TAP takes shape
Project paperwork lands and regular meetings begin: Eleanor Toye Scott joins to organise the living evidence database design requirements, alongside the conservation and education teams.
Talk
Plenary panel at ECCB 2026
Sam joins the plenary panel on AI at the European Congress of Conservation Biology in Leiden, with live notes from the congress.
Talk
The Conservation Copilot demoed in Parliament
Alec Christie, Sam Reynolds and Sadiq Jaffer, with Bill Sutherland, demoed the Evidence TAP traceable AI pipeline at the Georgina Mace Centre for the Living Planet debate at the Houses of Parliament.
Talk
World Biodiversity Forum, Davos
Sam presented AI for reviewing conservation evidence at the forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Milestone
Evidence TAP kicks off
The project held its first meeting on broadening Conservation Evidence into education. Jenny Gibson and Mélanie Gréaux joined the team in Cambridge.
Milestone
Evidence for nature recovery briefed to Parliament
POSTnote 767 reports on a briefing that Bill Sutherland, Lynn Dicks and Anil Madhavapeddy gave to the UK Parliament. It sets out how systematic evidence supports the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025.
Talk
LLMs in government decision making
Sadiq Jaffer and Sam Reynolds spoke at the Digital Statecraft Academy on “The inevitable rise of Large Language Models in government decision making”, fielding practical questions from civil servants.
Milestone
Securing full-text access from publishers
The TAP's paper downloader needs full text for reproducible, human-in-the-loop annotation. Anil writes about navigating Springer's new premium API and Wiley's AI gateway, alongside evidence synthesis events at DESNZ and a Nature-hosted panel led by Sam.
Workshop
Evidence TAP at DEFRA's science conference
Sadiq Jaffer and Sam Reynolds ran an evidence-synthesis session for around 200 people at the DEFRA Science, Analysis and Data Professions Conference in London.
Media
Channel News Asia documentary airs
Sam features in “Can AI genuinely improve human health and the planet?”, talking about the Conservation Evidence work to an audience of around 150 million.
Milestone
Designing the TAP, in Lego
A facilitated Lego brainstorm brought together Computer Science, Zoology, Education, CSaP and CSER to plan the newly awarded next phase of the project.
Media
Nature: biodiversity's evidence problem
Nature reported from the Conservation Evidence conference on the plan for a constantly updated, AI-assisted evidence base with humans overseeing the process. A follow-up roundtable at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology came the same week.
Milestone
Evidence champions at Pembroke
The science leads of all five UK nature conservation bodies and the JNCC gathered in Cambridge to discuss evidence-led nature recovery.
Talk
Speaking at the AI4Nature launch
Anil Madhavapeddy spoke at the IET in London on how modern AI can help nature recovery, at the launch of the cross-sector AI4Nature initiative. He was invited by Sam, a founding member.
Workshop
Conservation Evidence conference, Cambridge
The community gathered at Pembroke College; Sam spoke on using AI to understand what works in conservation.
Paper
Is AI poisoning the scientific literature?
Our comment in Nature proposes federated living evidence databases with human-in-the-loop review.
Milestone
Summer intern cohort joins the evidence work
Radhika Agrawal and Kittson Hamill joined the summer intern cohort, working on a human-in-the-loop framework for evidence-synthesis inclusion criteria and on summarising threats in the conservation evidence literature.
Paper
Out-of-the-box LLMs are not ready for conservation decisions
Our evaluation of LLMs for conservation decision support appeared in PLOS One.
Media
AI for Nature: embrace with caution
The University of Cambridge published a feature on the horizon scan and the Conservation Evidence AI work.
Workshop
AI for evidence synthesis workshop
Anil shares notes from our Cambridge workshop, held in the week a fully AI-generated paper first passed peer review.
Paper
AI and conservation horizon scan published
The community horizon scan of AI opportunities and risks for conservation appeared in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
Paper
First preprint on LLMs for evidence-based decision support
The first results from evaluating LLMs against the Conservation Evidence literature became available as a preprint.
Talk
Conservation copilots at the CCI workshop
Anil spoke on copilots and embedding evidence into conservation decision-making at the Cambridge Conservation Initiative.
Media
Introducing the Conservation Evidence Copilots
Anil spoke to the AI@Cam team about the project's plan to accelerate a database built from over 1.6 million screened papers and 8,600 summarised conservation studies.
Milestone
Selected for the ai@cam challenge
The conservation evidence AI project was chosen as one of Cambridge's flagship AI research challenges.
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