AI Saves UK Peatlands: You Won't Believe the Time Savings!

Natural England has two main objectives. One is thriving nature for people and planet, and the other is building partnerships for nature's recovery. And I think the AI for peatland project fits nicely into both of those objectives.

We're building partnerships across government with Defra and Natural England. Defra is a Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. We're also joined up with lots of private organizations like Databricks, >> [music] >> and we're building towards restoring the peatlands, which ticks the boxes for thriving nature and nature recovery.

Peatlands are a huge wetland habitat which are present around the world. Peatlands hold a quarter of the UK's drinking water, and they're really important for rare plants and animal species, species such as sphagnum moss and grouse. We're mapping peatlands over

the whole of England. AI is allowing us to map nationally. An area the size of, say, the West Pennines would take us about a week to manually digitize, and [music] the Databricks platform's Dash

enabled us to run that area in less than a day. We're talking about time savings of many weeks, maybe months in a year. That's what wouldn't be possible without all of these AI algorithms and the compute that Databricks provides us with. Stuff that's been done manually, so like

with the peatlands project, we were previously drawing these things out by hand, and now we've been working with Databricks together to solve this problem to automate doing that work. There's currently no national map of

where all of the peatland [music] features are. There's no national map of where the peat dams are. Peat dams are really important because they're the things that are helping us to restore the peatlands and holding back the water. Peatlands hold more carbon than

all of the other vegetation types in the world combined. When they're in poor condition, [music] that all of that carbon's being released into the atmosphere. So, instead of absorbing it, they're releasing it. It's really exciting that we're using

this new innovative AI which is fantastic and we're pushing all this innovation but at the same time we're using [music] the profile of the project to raise awareness of wetlands and how important they are as well.