About ABC Center

(NSF OISE-2330423 and NSERC 585136)

OVERVIEW

The world is witnessing a precipitous decline in biodiversity and ecosystem health. Environmental changes play a major role in biodiversity loss, with severe consequences for already-threatened species, accelerated dynamics of ecosystem change, and potentially catastrophic threats from extreme events. As policymakers, land managers, and local communities struggle to protect species and preserve or restore ecosystems, there has been an urgent need for data on how species abundances and distributions are changing and tools to propose and assess policy and actions. Currently, these data and tools are limited by insufficient interdisciplinary expertise, the fast pace of ecological change, and resource imbalances across geographies, taxa, and communities. Moreover, much of the collected biodiversity data remains unused due to the time and cost of manual data processing. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have opened up new opportunities for data collection, processing, and analysis at global scale, high resolution, and across taxonomic groups. However, fundamental research advances are still needed in both AI and Biodiversity Science to build systems that can be deployed to reliably and efficiently monitor biodiversity change, and reverse its loss.

MISSION

To establish a community-engaged and multi-sector stakeholder co-designed framework for monitoring, analyzing, and assessing the impact of environmental changes on biodiversity through AI-enabled, data supported approaches at large scale and high resolution across space, time, and units of life.

VISION

We envision harnessing AI-driven biodiversity monitoring at unprecedented scales to understand and address the profound impact of environmental changes. Our dynamic cycle integrates goal-setting, metric definition, environment-focused metric assessment, trend analysis, and informed action. This collaborative effort engages multi-sector stakeholders, from researchers and policymakers to local communities and citizen scientists, fostering connections across sectors like agriculture and public health. Our vision promotes a holistic approach to mitigate the intricate challenges posed by environmental changes on biodiversity.

RATIONALE

Environmental changes affect all life on Earth. Biodiversity, the variety of living organisms on earth, is key to maintaining the healthy functioning of ecosystems and human societies, as well as a good in and of itself. There is increasing evidence that environmental changes are impacting biodiversity and we are losing species at an unprecedented rate and scale. We are in the middle of what has been termed “the 6th extinction” with nearly one million of the world's species facing extinction. Moreover, environmental changes affect biodiversity at every scale as life is striving to adapt to new conditions: from changing characteristics of individual organisms, to timings of seasonal events, to shifting species ranges, and ecosystems’ struggling to recover from fires, floods, and other catastrophic events.

Biodiversity has a data problem, with insufficient or unavailable data not only impeding our understanding of biodiversity changes but stifling our ability to respond and evaluate whether our interventions are working.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are well positioned to not only help fill the information gap, but to enable a new paradigm of biodiversity change monitoring and understanding at large scale and high resolution over time, space, and units of life. Recent developments in sensing technology, together with computational approaches to process and extract information from data, have built the foundation for AI for biodiversity. To truly address the challenge of understanding and mitigating the impact of environmental changes on biodiversity we need to work together - ecologists and AI researchers with the community and stakeholders - to co-design and deploy AI-enabled solutions for biodiversity. Moreover, we need to build the capacity of this community to leverage the new technology to support decision-making and action.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse