We are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction, losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate and scale. In many cases we do not even have basic counts of the species we are losing, a knowledge gap that limits our ability to understand the drivers of biodiversity loss, anticipate cascading ecosystem effects, implement effective policy, and evaluate whether interventions are working. The ecosystems most at risk are in the places hardest to reach, hardest to monitor, and hardest to protect. What we have done so far has not been enough.
Meeting this challenge requires a step change in how we generate and use knowledge about the natural world. Over the past two decades, new technologies such as autonomous vehicles, acoustic sensors, camera traps, environmental DNA, GPS, and citizen science platforms, have transformed our capacity to sense nature at a richness and scale previously impossible. AI can now turn these massive, heterogeneous data streams into actionable knowledge, identifying species, tracking populations, mapping habitats, and detecting ecological change across landscapes and over time.
But data collection and species identification, however fast, are not enough. The frontier that matters is moving AI from a tool that processes data to one that gets us closer to the why and the how of ecological processes, understanding how species interact, how ecosystems respond to pressure, and how proposed interventions are likely to play out, and delivering that understanding to the people who need it, in the field, in real time.
The talk will explore how AI can help bridge the knowledge gap about living organisms, enabling scientific inquiry, conservation action, and evidence-based policy. It will present the frontier of large-scale and interpretable AI for biodiversity, show how AI solutions can be deployed in real field conditions, and offer a vision of AI as a trusted partner in a fundamentally human endeavour of understanding and protecting nature.
How to cite: Berger-Wolf, T.: AI for Nature: from Science to Impact, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-1040, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-1040, 2026.
