A massive new computing platform from Microsoft, which the company calls a “planetary computer,” will gather trillions of data points about nature—and give conservation organizations new tools to quickly analyze that information as they race to solve the world’s biodiversity crisis.The new computing platform will help organizations working on biodiversity to work more quickly by providing better data and machine learning to analyze it. Major global assessments typically take a very long time to create; the UN report last year came 15 years after the previous such report and was 1,700 pages long. In many cases, tech can better help gather data. Instead of doing an on-the-ground survey of a forest, for example, a forest manager will be able to use the platform to estimate tree density and forest size with satellite images and machine learning tools.