6th Science Policy Forum for Biodiversity COP 16 Cali S9

Description of the session

Despite decades of effort, we continue to lack sound scientific information on many species especially invertebrates. This critical shortcoming continues to block progress towards understanding, protecting, restoring ecosystems in a world dominated by climate change, biodiversity changes, and human activities. New technology, such as GPS, high-definition cameras, AI technology, UAVs, acoustic sensors, genotyping, and crowdsourcing, and high-resolution imagery through participatory/citizen science platforms are now producing massive data streams that could help to fill this gap but our ability to extract insight from these data lags substantially behind our ability to collect it. The key to unlocking the potential of these data will be new machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) methods, which are already beginning to have significant impacts on research across ecology and conservation.

Goal

The goal of this session is to synthesise the current state of technology and technology applications within biodiversity science, address key challenges that stand to gain from technology advancement, explore emerging technological developments that have the potential to meet those challenges, and to examine the impact of technology on biodiversity loss.