Global Centers Track 1: AI and Biodiversity Change (ABC)

The world is witnessing a precipitous decline in biodiversity and ecosystem health, with severe consequences for 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 is an urgent need for data on how species abundances and distributions are changing and tools to assess policy and actions.

The Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change (ABC) brings together a team of researchers from ecology and computer science to develop new approaches for understanding the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. Rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) offer innovative approaches to collect data on the abundance and distributions of plants and animals over time and over space and allow faster and better analyses of biodiversity data at all scales.

The Center will contribute tools and analyses that describe impacts of climate change on species and habitats, and which can assess how they respond to policy and management interventions. The Center includes partnerships with a global network of collaborators from the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, Africa, India, Central America, and the EU, including representatives from academic institutions, multi-institution research collaborations, governmental agencies, NGOs, and industry.

This Global Center will establish a framework for monitoring, analyzing, and assessing the global impact of climate change on biodiversity through AI-enabled, data-supported approaches over space and time. The Global Center will develop AI-based tools for integrating biodiversity data from a variety of sources, including remote sensing imagery from satellite and low-flying aircraft, in-situ visual and audio sensors, DNA sequences, and citizen science efforts.

The project will focus on four major biological themes: 1) elucidating drivers of species boundaries for hard-to-detect species, 2) understanding change in functional diversity while including under-surveyed species, 3) detecting early warning signals of range shifts, and 4) quantifying changes in species interactions. The Center will also advance AI research and methods, including 1) few-shot learning and fine-grained categories, 2) domain shift, and 3) learning across diverse data modalities.

These AI advances will improve our understanding of population dynamics of rare and threatened species, hard-to-detect species, and hard-to-study species and are likely to have applications beyond conservation. This information is critical to understanding how climate change is driving changes in species interactions and community composition, and how that affects functional diversity of ecosystems.

This Center is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative partnership with funding agencies in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, to jointly support use-inspired research addressing global challenges in climate change and clean energy. Partnerships with the Commonwealth Science and Innovation Research Organisation (CSIRO), Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) leverage resources to tackle challenges at a larger scale than would be possible for one funding agency alone.

This award is jointly supported by NSF and NSERC. The NSF award is co-funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Directorate for Biological Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.