There’s a grass fire burning behind Raffael Hickisch when we speak on a video call on Tuesday. He’s not worried—fires like this are part of everyday life in Sub-Saharan Africa, where people burn off the tall growth as they move their cattle toward greener land.
Hickisch, a conservationist, cofounded the Chinko Nature Reserve in 2014. Like many reserves, the land is managed via a public-private partnership between a nonprofit and the government—in this case, the Central African Republic. Fire data helps Hickisch track where people are moving and informs policies related to how they can use the land.
Historically, Hickisch’s challenge has been cobbling together information from different sources and assembling it in a way that people can use. He’d download human settlement data, deforestation data, fire data from NASA, and use a desktop program to visualize how all the pieces worked together. "I hardly ever simulate it because it's just a lot of work and my computer doesn’t even support it,” he says.
That challenge has real-life implications—protected areas may have designated zones where people can graze livestock seasonally and zones that are completely off-limits, but enforcing those rules requires knowing what's happening across tens of thousands of square kilometers. "It could be that there's deforestation happening and the government doesn't see it because they have not learned how to access the satellite-derived deforestation information,” Hickisch says.
‘It Just Works’
In January, Hickisch came across exe.dev. “A friend said, ‘look, there’s this new service. It is crazy. You can build things with it and it just works,’" Hickisch recalls.
For years, he’d had a list of ideas—apps he wanted to build, tools he felt could make his work significantly easier—but he’d never had the budget to actually do it. One—a tool for monitoring protected areas—would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create and required the work of a professional developer. He’d sketched out what the app would do in a note to himself in 2022. Now, Hickisch gave an expanded version of the note to exe.dev’s AI agent Shelley, and asked it to get to work:
Make an app 5mp.globe that displays global nature conservation effort based on GPS Exchange Format (GPX) files representing tracks of movement of park rangers, vehicles and aircraft that survey protected areas. Aggregate this over time (daily, monthly, annually) at 100 sq km pixels globally and display a zoomable global map, that reveals global conservation effort. The logic is explained in the text file "Five Megapixels of Global Conservation.txt". Registered protected area managers, governments and non-profits can upload their data. Monthly and annual reports per protected area as outlined on protectedplanet.org are prepared, the megapixel map can be downloaded at daily resolution.
Shelley was able to connect to the APIs of various public datasets, pulling the feeds into one place. Within a few hours, the first prototype of Five Megapixel Conservation was born. (Getting the app to its current state took Hickisch about 300 hours.)
Seeing it live for the first time, to Hickisch, was surreal. “I was super excited. I was like, 'Oh, this is crazy. Now I can do those things that I have proposed years before, but I don't need the budget, just my time.'”
100 VMs Running In Parallel
Hickisch’s home country of Austria publishes a LIDAR scan of the whole country every year, including the height of every object on the ground, along with high-resolution aerial photos. The files are huge—up to 15 gigabytes each—so as a general rule, nobody downloads them.
After the success of the Five Megapixel Conservation app, Hickisch asked Shelley if there was a way to download a fraction of the file. There was. Using vsicurl—a feature of his mapping software—Shelley could read one slice of the data at a time. Hickisch built an app that uses 100 VMs running in parallel, each assigned to a different part of Austria, then uses a standard machine learning model to classify the objects in each photo. The height of a tree, combined with altitude, is a good proxy for age, allowing Hickisch to identify areas with the oldest forests, and those most in need of protection.
Three months in, he's covered about 30 percent of the country and processed about 40 terabytes of raw data. The results are stored on Zenodo, an open-access repository run by CERN, a European lab best known for the Large Hadron Collider.
A Settlers-Style Game
To help bring this data to life, Hickisch built a simple settlers-style game where players can buy parcels of land, reforest them, and find treasures as they go. When a player clicks on a parcel, they’re shown real data from the LIDAR study, including the heights of the tallest trees on the property. "It’s a stupid game, but the powerful thing is the two terabytes of data that are underlying it," Hickisch says.
Before exe, Hickisch felt like he was at a disadvantage. As a conservationist, he lacked the resources of developers and other industries vying to use the land. "Think about oil exploration,” he says. “Those people have huge budgets for their analysis. Nature conservation doesn't have that. So it's a nice moment to use that as leverage and say, actually, we now have the same tools."
The apps are open source, and Hickisch doesn't expect to make money from them anytime soon. What he wants is adoption—two countries using Five Megapixel Conservation to monitor their parks within the next few years. The larger goal is to get more people building custom software. "You can now show somebody in the Central African Republic how to build a web app," he says, "and they will be the first member of the ministry to be able to do that."