Mapping nature
The living world keeps a quiet record of itself — leaf chemistry, soil moisture, river flow, fish sounds, atmospheric chemistry, animal movement, the slow language of a forest seen from orbit. Most of that record never reaches the people who could act on it, because it sits in incompatible places.
Our work on mapping nature is about turning that scattered record into open, comparable layers — from oceans to orbit, from rivers to soils, across instruments and across institutions.
What we study
- From oceans to orbit. Coastal waters, rivers and lakes, forests and woodlands, soils, atmosphere, and the view from satellites. Each has its own way of being measured; we study where they meet.
- Bringing instruments together. Combining satellite imagery with sound recordings, environmental DNA, in-situ sensors, and the observations of people on the ground — so a single ecological question is not held hostage to a single instrument.
- Data infrastructure as a public good. What it takes to publish a map of the living world that is genuinely usable by a researcher, a ranger, and a regulator — not only by the institution that produced it.
- Where the map is thin. Where the planet is undersampled, and how AI can help close gaps without inventing observations that were never made.
How we approach it
Mapping the living world is not a one-time act. It is an ongoing practice — reconciled, versioned, and re-opened to scrutiny. We treat data infrastructure as something the people closest to the ground should be able to inspect, extend, and challenge — not only consume.
Read next
- Monitoring ecosystems — turning maps into time-series.
- Open data and open collaboration — how the layers are stewarded.