The Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data into a Video Game
Summary
The article profiles Raffael Hickisch, a conservationist who turned 40 terabytes of public data into interactive tools, including a video game, by leveraging exe.dev’s cloud infrastructure. It details how he orchestrated 100 virtual machines in parallel to process large geospatial datasets (LIDAR, GPX, etc.) and built a map-driven application and a settlers-style game to bring conservation data to life. The piece highlights open data pipelines, ML-driven classification, and the potential for governments to adopt data-driven conservation tools.