Scientists around the world are in agreement: global biodiversity is in crisis. University of Georgia researchers are exploring how new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) could boost efforts to protect species and restore habitats in the future.
Kickstarted by the Data Science and AI cluster hiring initiative in 2023, and beginning with initial ideas from the Odum School of Ecology Dean, Dr. Mark Hunter, an effort to explore the uses of environmental “Big Data” and artificial intelligence in biodiversity conservation has grown quickly at UGA. Dr. Charles van Rees, an IRIS affiliate and faculty member at the Odum School, was tapped to lead the new team.
“Given the record of interdisciplinary scholarship at UGA and around the School of Ecology, we figured that Odum might be a perfect place to act as a catalyst,” van Rees said. He began recruiting interested researchers from across campus; an array of interdisciplinary faculty jumped at the opportunity.
A core group of UGA faculty applied for a Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grant in 2023 to begin more detailed project discussions. Although they didn’t receive a full grant, the review board was supportive of the proposal and encouraged van Rees and his colleagues to instead apply for a Pre-Seed Grant to continue to develop their ideas, ultimately forming the beginnings of the AI for Conservation Cluster, or AI4C2.
The planned cluster’s goal is to provide “practical, feasible, and evidence-based approaches” that address environmental health challenges. Throughout 2024, the team convened in a series of meetings that drew an increasingly diverse crowd of UGA researchers from across a diverse collection of colleges, centers and institutes. They broke down their goals into several interacting Focus Groups based on UGA’s strengths, as well as three major research steps: Interrogate, Inform and Implement.
“The flow became, very naturally: reviewing what’s out there, taking a critical lens on what people are currently doing: ‘Interrogate.’ Finding a system or a problem to work within: ‘Inform.’ Then applying those findings and expertise to each of these systems, finding real conservation opportunities to take this knowledge and apply it: ‘Implement.’”
Van Rees and colleagues held a workshop on Monday, April 28, hosted by the Odum School of Ecology at the Delta Innovation Hub at UGA. Invitees included interested faculty and postdoctoral scholars representing a dozen UGA units. The goal of this larger workshop was to identify new focal themes and target actionable and high-impact projects and sources of funding to support ongoing innovative and interdisciplinary conservation work..
“We wanted to have a proposal incubator, a think-tank setting where we brought these people back together, assessed where they were at and discussed emergent ideas since the last time we met,” van Rees explained, “and we certainly got that.”
The workshop began with core discussion groups, but one surprising aspect of the day’s conversations emerged almost immediately:
“Attendees were immediately very focused on nature-based solutions,” van Rees said. Nature-based solutions, or NbS, are an emerging field of transdisciplinary research, meeting societal needs using natural processes and ecosystem services to create infrastructure systems that restore and utilize ecosystem functions, and which may support large-scale restoration of native species and their habitats.
Several UGA departments, including the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems, have made NbS a major focus of their research, and a number of external funding organizations, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), have introduced funding opportunities specifically for NbS projects.
“The excitement around NbS topics was tangible in the room,” said van Rees, “to see experts from so many disciplines firing off ideas and linkages between concepts, theories, and AI applications was energizing. We wrapped up with several leads for paper ideas, working groups, and planned proposals to support larger projects.”
To learn more about AI4C2 and keep up with their future work, visit their UGA Office of Research page.
AI4C2 Pre-Seed team members:
- Charles van Rees, Odum School of Ecology
- Mark Hunter, Odum School of Ecology
- Tamika Lunn, Odum School of Ecology
- Jimmy Nelson, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Marine Sciences
- Laura German, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Anthropology
- Elizabeth King, Odum School of Ecology & Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources
- Anna Harper, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Geography