Biodiversity
Map where life thrives, and notice where it has gone quiet.
A field instrument for a living planet.
Walk, look, listen and scan a place with a phone. TerraMesh turns what you record into evidence about that place, and asks for the visit that would teach the map the most.
Fog is what we don’t know yet.
Walk a place.
Record what lives there, and where you looked.
Time passes. The fog comes back.
So we go back.
- Sampling effort
- 0 min
- Tiles walked
- 0
- Map still in fog
- 100%
Move over the map to walk it
Base map: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel-2 data 2024 and Copernicus DEM.
Four missions
One place, every sphere
Life, rock, water and air are surveyed together, because a place is all of them at once.
Geology
Watch the ground itself shift, wear away and rebuild.
Ocean
Keep watch where the land meets the sea.
Sky
Read the sky that every living thing shares.
- Photos named on the phone, confirmed by a person
- Sound clips kept only around detections, never speech
- 3D scans from LiDAR, ARKit and printed scale cubes
- Effort for every minute, so absence means something
Gaia
A planetary data interpreter
Plain, deterministic statistics on saved records. Not a chatbot: the same records always give the same numbers. For every place and species it answers three questions.
- 1What do the records say?
- 2How sure are we?
- 3What would one more visit settle?
Interpretation makes asks. Asks make visits. Visits change the interpretation.
Honest absence
Not finding something is not proof it is gone. Gaia says how hard we looked.
“We looked and listened for 20 minutes. If a wren were here, we’d have found it 8 times in 10.”
Choosing where to look
Map error after the same number of visits, lower is better. Synthetic region, 8 seeds; bars start at 0.25.
About 1,380 asks checked per strategy, with zero breaks of the safety and privacy rules. Real-records scoring comes after the next field test, against predictions locked before each visit.
Review
Only people make a record count
The phone suggests a name. It never counts as a find. A record reaches research grade when two or more people review it and more than two thirds agree.
Privacy
Tiles, not pins
- Public maps show coarse hexagonal tiles, never exact points
- Sensitive species and private places never appear in public
- Faces are blurred before anything is shared
- Sound is kept only around detections, and speech never
- New features ship switched off, and turn on only after a field test proves them
How it is built
Phone, station, outward
Phone
SwiftUI app with ARKit and LiDAR capture, on-device species suggestions (BioCLIP, Perch, BirdNET) and counted effort for every survey.
Station
An append-only evidence vault. COLMAP photogrammetry with ARKit priors, sound ID, individual shark re-ID (MiewID, LightGlue) and face blurring.
Outward
Reviewed records in Darwin Core with effort and absence, on H3 tiles, through Cloudflare Workers, built for GBIF and public place pages.
SwiftSwiftUIARKitCore MLPythonCOLMAPOpenMVSH3Darwin CoreCloudflare WorkersWebGLBayesian occupancy
TerraMesh is young and says so. Most features are built and switched off until a field test proves them, and every number on this page is labeled with where it came from.