Audubon's $2M Boost Helps ABC Global Center Collaborator Take Bird Conservation Higher

The National Audubon Society received $2 million from the Bezos Earth Fund to use artificial intelligence (AI) and bioacoustics to monitor birds across Latin America—a model that lines up directly with the AI-for-nature work underway in the ABC Global Center and the Imageomics Institute.

The award, announced Oct. 23, 2025, supports Audubon, the University of Pittsburgh’s Justin Kitzes laboratory, and partners such as WildMon as they build an AI pipeline to automatically detect bird species from sound recordings. The team will deploy small, field-ready listening devices in countries including Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, capturing round-the-clock “soundscapes” in some of the world’s most biodiverse regions. AI models will then identify which species are present, how often they occur and how that changes over time.

The new funding is important because rapid biodiversity loss in the Americas is outpacing traditional field surveys. AI and autonomous sensors can help fill those data gaps fast enough for conservation, community planning and even climate finance tools requiring trustworthy biodiversity baselines.

“This is exactly the kind of real-world, community-centered application of AI we’ve been talking about," Kitzes said. "Local partners collect the data, AI helps make sense of it, and conservation groups can act sooner."

For ABC and Imageomics, the project is another signal that their approach — combining multimodal data (acoustics, images, remote sensing), open science and local capacity is gaining traction with major funders. It also aligns with the broader Conserva Aves effort to protect millions of acres of habitat across the Tropical Andes.

Moving forward, the team will begin deploying recorders, adapting the AI models to Latin American soundscapes and sharing results with local conservation organizations so they can protect birds where they live.