The future of ecosystem assessments is automation, collaboration, and artificial intelligence

Abstract

Robust and routine ecosystem assessments will be fundamental to track progress towards achieving this decade’s global environmental and sustainability goals. Here we examine four needs that address common failure points of ecosystem assessments. These are (1) developing rapid, reproducible, and repeatable ecological data workflows, (2) harmonizing in situ and remotely sensed data, (3) integrating socioeconomic and biophysical data, and (4) increasing access to the digital resources and cyberinfrastructure needed to perform assessments. These four needs have profound potential to help us achieve our environmental objectives through cross-sector collaborations that leverage advancements in digital resources, remote data streams, and data science.

Expanding the E in ESG with high-resolution global mapping of ecosystem services and corporate physical assets

“…At the same time, data availability remains a challenge: asset-level data is available primarily for publicly traded companies, which represent only a fraction of corporate activities, and even for these companies, data is incomplete [38][39][40] . Satellite imagery can capture or be used to infer many important asset-level characteristics 41,42 and is continuing to drive advances in ecosystem service modeling at global and local levels 43 . Even so, these approaches cannot be expected to fully capture all impacts or values, and on-the-ground information will remain an important complement, especially for understanding local values.…”

The Effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence Systems in improving The Quality of Sustainability Reports in Light of GRI-G4

“…The world is facing tremendous environmental change, a global biodiversity crisis, and an urgent need for sustainable human development, so, International and national bodies have developed ambitious plans to help overcome these environmental challenges, such as the United Nations (UN) Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (García et al, 2023), Digital transformation is characterized by the integration of physical and digital processes into decentralized systems, which represents a major change in the social and organizational environment which in turn affects all aspects of people's lives, as companies and society changed their structures (Gonçalves et al, 2022).…”

Automating an insect biodiversity metric using distributed optical sensors: an evaluation across Kansas, USA cropping systems

“…While many automated insect monitoring tools are available for agricultural pest monitoring (Bick et al, 2023;Silva et al, 2013), overall, these approaches are not suitable for assessing biodiversity as they focus on the identification of indicator species, not communities (J. G. Lundgren & Fausti, 2015a). The automatic quantification of invertebrate biodiversity could improve the data available for monitoring and evaluation of conservation efforts but currently, no method exists at scale (Wägele et al, 2022), despite calls for such data and analytics to inform the assessment and management of ecosystems (García et al, 2023).…”