NewsPanda: Media Monitoring for Timely Conservation Action
This addresses the need for timely updates on infrastructure projects that impact conservation areas for non-governmental organizations like the World Wide Fund for Nature, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of time-consuming media monitoring for environmental conservation by introducing NewsPanda, a toolkit that automatically detects and analyzes online articles related to conservation and infrastructure construction, saving over 30 hours of human effort weekly and monitoring over 80,000 websites and 1,074 conservation sites in India and Nepal.
Non-governmental organizations for environmental conservation have a significant interest in monitoring conservation-related media and getting timely updates about infrastructure construction projects as they may cause massive impact to key conservation areas. Such monitoring, however, is difficult and time-consuming. We introduce NewsPanda, a toolkit which automatically detects and analyzes online articles related to environmental conservation and infrastructure construction. We fine-tune a BERT-based model using active learning methods and noise correction algorithms to identify articles that are relevant to conservation and infrastructure construction. For the identified articles, we perform further analysis, extracting keywords and finding potentially related sources. NewsPanda has been successfully deployed by the World Wide Fund for Nature teams in the UK, India, and Nepal since February 2022. It currently monitors over 80,000 websites and 1,074 conservation sites across India and Nepal, saving more than 30 hours of human efforts weekly. We have now scaled it up to cover 60,000 conservation sites globally.