Preserving the World'sDigital Memory

The most complex and biodiverse terrestrial ecosystem on earth, containing approximately 10 percent of all species on the planet within 5.5 million square kilometres of living forest, home to approximately 400 Indigenous nations speaking around 300 languages, holding an estimated 150 to 200 billion tonnes of carbon in its biomass and soils, and currently approaching a scientifically projected tipping point beyond which large areas may transition irreversibly toward savannah.

The most extensive low-density urban complex of the pre-industrial world — a religious and administrative capital of the Khmer Empire that at its twelfth-century peak may have supported a population of up to one million people across an urban footprint of roughly 1,000 square kilometres. At its core stands Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument on earth, alongside hundreds of temples, reservoirs, hydraulic works, and urban infrastructure distributed across a landscape that has only recently been mapped to its full extent by aerial LiDAR survey. The hydraulic systems that sustained the city's population are simultaneously its greatest engineering achievement and the focus of its most urgent conservation science.

For five centuries the intellectual and political capital of the Islamic world — a city of libraries, hospitals, observatories, and markets that drew scholars, merchants, and diplomats from across Eurasia. At its Abbasid height it was, by most estimates, the largest city on earth. Its House of Wisdom preserved Greek philosophy, advanced mathematics and astronomy, and produced original work in medicine and optics that would not be surpassed in Europe for centuries. Very little of that city survives. What does survive is concentrated in four historic areas — Old Rusafa, Al-Karkh, Al-Adhamiya, and Al-Kadhimiya — containing 132 formally listed monuments within a fragile urban fabric now threatened by conflict damage, institutional failure, infrastructure collapse, and climate change.