“Harnessing AI to Accelerate Solutions for Biodiversity in Crisis”
Ecology is a crisis discipline at the forefront of the fight against global biodiversity loss and subsequent disruption of ecosystem services, which are essential to human wellbeing and critically linked to climate change mitigation. Traditionally limited by data, new technologies for high resolution remote data collection at scale are shifting the bottleneck away from data availability, and instead towards the capacity for humans to extract, process and interpret those data rapidly enough to keep pace with accelerating environmental change. As AI advances toward multimodal, explainable, and real-time systems, its interface with ecology offers significant opportunities to fast-track these processes. We believe this alliance of disciplines will unlock both new fundamental scientific understanding and innovative applications for conservation, supporting uncertainty aware decision-making. The complex, non-linear, multimodal and often high dimensional nature of ecological data also offers a problem-led challenge to inspire and test new developments at the forefront of AI.
Our research hub brings together researchers across disciplines from Lancaster University’s Environment Centre (LEC), Data Science Institute (DSI) and Mathematics for Real-World Systems research centre (MARS) with UKCEH. We aim to find new ways to quantify biodiversity status and threats, and to generate innovative solutions. Our priority areas include:
-
Automated species identification
-
Use of citizen science data
-
Automated dissemination of biodiversity information and advice using AI
-
AI-driven decision support tools
-
Understanding biological colour
-
Quantifying animal behaviour and its consequences
-
Handling and analysing electronic tracking data
-
AI-driven synthesis of biodiversity data and information
Tom August
Alex Bush
Hannah Risser
David Jacoby
Sara Wasson