Background, funding, and contact information for the habitat mapping research programme.
Global efforts to address nature-related risks and achieve ambitious conservation targets are being hampered by a fundamental data gap: there is still no accurate, fine-grained, globally consistent map of the world’s remaining natural and human-modified habitats, classified by a robust ecological typology. There is also no reliable system for tracking habitat change.
These shortfalls affect a wide range of stakeholders — conservationists cannot track species ranges accurately, companies struggle to report on nature-related risks, governments lack credible datasets to guide their 30×30 conservation commitments under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and NGOs are unable to prioritise ecosystem investments with confidence, or evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions.
Recent advances in geospatial foundation models, including Tessera and AlphaEarth, offer a transformative opportunity to overcome these challenges. These models learn rich, information-dense representations from massive satellite archives that can be efficiently adapted to a wide range of ecological downstream tasks with minimal labelled data. Our research programme evaluates and applies these models to deliver accurate, scalable habitat maps from regional to global scales.
Funds the core postdoctoral research on geospatial foundation models for habitat mapping, supporting the Trentino species mapping project and Latin America vegetation mapping work.
A £10M programme funding UK-focused habitat mapping and landscape restoration monitoring work in Cumbria, the Cairngorms, the Fens, and national-scale habitat condition mapping.
Supports PhD studentships contributing to the change detection and global habitat mapping components of the research programme.
Provides institutional support through the Department of Plant Sciences and the Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Professor of Forest Ecology