Programs

the Nature Data Lab (NDL) team has funded or led more than 40 research and technical collaborations since 2019, bringing together leading experts across an array of disciplines to help solve the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Beyond our mandate to increase philanthropic funding for the nature data ecosystem more broadly, as described in Our Thesis, we have identified four critical knowledge gaps that need to be addressed in the near term to enhance and accelerate action for a nature-positive future. These can be posed as four central questions of inquiry:

• Where are the areas most essential for biodiversity conservation as governments develop their 30x30 targets, and of these areas which contain species most at risk of extinction in the near-term?
• Zooming out to the larger context, how much ‘natural’ land remains that can be designated as 'areas of importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services', and how can the accuracy of land cover maps be improved for classification tasks?
• What is the conservation status of natural lands and who are the key actors on the ground? What other modalities of conservation are taking place led by Indigenous peoples, local communities, private landowners, and small NGOs?
• What are the macroeconomic drivers that could shift the balance when it comes to protecting and conserving nature, channeling new resources to build a nature-positive economy that benefits everyone?

These four questions guide NDL’s four major programs – (I) Ecological Priorities, (II) Nature Mapping, (III) Conservation Justice, and (IV) Earth Economy. Fellows identify research efforts they deem critically important for supporting near-term decision making related to one or more of “three responses” to the biodiversity crisis:

1. Protecting intact species assemblages and the habitats that harbor them
2. Restoring degraded and underutilized lands to create biodiversity uplift
3. Supporting the transition away from business practices that cause harm

The outputs of these research efforts are published as peer-reviewed papers, white papers, or multimedia assets (slideshows, infographics, videos) and frequently result in open-source data sets that feed directly into our central initiative – the Global Safety Net v3 (GSN3) analytics platform:

The GSN3 project processes and integrates three distinct data streams generated by Programs I-III, delivering a comprehensive and unprecedented view of the world’s remaining areas of importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services (AIBES), indexed both by ecological function and land cover class, and the extent to which these areas are protected and conserved. Each program has a distinct mission:

The Ecological Priorities program (I) supports advanced scientific research to inform global and regional-scale prioritization efforts in line with Target 3 of the UN Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). This program builds upon the process developed in “A ‘Global Safety Net’ to reverse biodiversity loss and stabilize Earth’s climate” (Dinerstein et al. 2020), the first study to estimate the total extent of natural land globally grouped into five major ecological “clusters”. The first cluster is focused on the remaining terrestrial habitats harboring rare and threatened species, which inspired a series of additional papers, including “Conservation Imperatives: securing the last unprotected terrestrial sites harboring irreplaceable biodiversity” (Dinerstein et al. 2024). This program also supports research into specific ecological niches, for example dynamics of mature and old-growth forest, the function of mycorrhizal networks in grasslands, the role of keystone species in carbon cycling, and the prioritization of marine areas for biodiversity.

The Nature Mapping program (II) is focused on improving the availability of high-quality land cover maps. Our analysis of 14 leading global land cover/land use models makes it clear that we simply don’t yet have an agreed method to designate land as “natural”. None of the models, for example, are able to consistently distinguish between native grassland and cropland, natural forests and tree plantations, or freshwater and saline water. And even the best models achieve an accuracy of about 75% in detecting broad land classes such as “forest” with major models agreeing only 25% of the time. Three insights resulted from this analysis: (1) The Ecoregions Secretariat, housed at NDL, provides the most widely used biogeographical framework in academic literature and can be leveraged to develop cohesive “reference condition” benchmarks, useful in differentiating between natural and seminatural lands. (2) A Land Cover Breakthrough is needed to develop adequate training and validation data to power new AI models and large-scale taxonomic efforts like the Ecosystem Atlas. (3) Continued funding is needed to map patterns of human activity on the land, for example Global Human Modification (GHM), which can be used to infer 'naturalness' and predict future species extinctions.

The Conservation Justice program (III) is assembling the most comprehensive picture of conservation globally, well beyond the official protected areas currently registered by governments in the UN World Database on Protected Areas (Protected Planet). There are hundreds of thousands of conservation areas governed by non-State actors, including Indigenous peoples, local communities, private landowners, and small NGOs. These Documented Conservation Areas (DCAs) often provide outcomes far superior to the protected areas managed by governments, but they are critically underfunded. Worse, it can be in the interest of some governments to block the listing of these areas in the UN database in order to preserve the option to sell mining, oil & gas, or timber concessions in the future. NDL wants to put these areas “on the map”, supporting comprehensive global conservation planning efforts, improving corporate reporting methodologies, and ensuring that a public record exists for these community-led efforts to conserve nature. Ultimately the goal is to dramatically increase funding flows to these efforts.

Programs I-III provide inputs into the GSN3 analytics platform, which generates unique modeled data sets that inform our fourth program, Earth Economy (IV). This program explores approaches to “putting nature on the balance sheet” – both in the private sector and within a macroeconomic context – with the goal of scaling up finance for nature from $200B today to $1 trillion by 2030. Projects cover a wide array of topics:  from innovative carbon finance, for example pricing the value of seagrass or the role of wildlife in carbon cycling, to concepts like Conservation Basic Income (CBI) and commodity-specific biodiversity credits. A strong focus is how nature data, in particular harmonized ecosystem services metrics, can shift the macroeconomic outlook of sovereigns, what economist Ralph Chami calls ‘ReGDP’. By developing nature as an asset class, countries can be rewarded for their investments in conservation and restoration, improving their long-term lending rates and investability based on the improvement of ecosystem services. This program also works in the field of “computational allocation”, powering adaptive decision support systems (ADSS) for the equitable distribution of philanthropic capital through bioregional financing facilities (BFFs), Nature Development Finance Institutions (NDFI), pooled philanthropic funds, and other vehicles.

Explore the Nature Data Lab’s current Projects portfolio.