Living systems
Living systems: habitats, species, reefs, forests and the models that follow them over time.
mandates
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Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity: by 2030 at least 30 per cent of land, inland waters and coastal and marine areas effectively conserved through protected areas and other area-based measures.
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The global biodiversity agreement adopted by the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in December 2022: four goals for 2050 and twenty-three targets for 2030, which each Party committed to turn into national targets.
tools
Open platform from the GeoSense group at the University of Freiburg, with GFZ and partner institutes, where researchers upload laser scans of forests, have them processed into segmented trees, inspect them in the browser and download them.
Living systems partly open dataopen participation
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The Amazon Conservation Team and the AARIMO network use Vantor satellite imagery to find and track illegal gold-mining dredges along the Puré River in the Colombian Amazon and pass the findings to enforcement agencies.
Living systemsPeople & society closed source
Geospatial foundation models from Google DeepMind (AlphaEarth Foundations, released as an embeddings dataset in Google Earth Engine) and from NASA with IBM (Prithvi Geospatial, open source on Hugging Face), for mapping and land-change tasks.
Cities & placesLiving systems partly open sourcepartly open data
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Open-source program that borrows algorithms from electronic circuit theory to predict how animals, plants and genes move across a landscape, treating every possible path at once; written in Julia.
Living systems open sourceopen participation
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Open single-class fish detector built by Filippo Varini and a group of contributors, trained on seventeen open datasets pooled into one; finds fish in underwater images and video from any camera or habitat.
Living systemsWater open sourceopen dataopen participation
Open-source pipeline from EPFL's ECEO lab that turns handheld underwater video of coral reefs into labelled 3D point clouds, orthomosaics and benthic cover statistics.
Living systemsWater open source
Project hosted at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to build digital twins of coral reefs, so that the people who manage, conserve and restore reefs can explore a reef in 3D over time and test management options; a low-fidelity prototype exists.
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Open object detector from the ConservationDronesAI group, built on RF-DETR, that finds people, mammals and vehicles in drone imagery for wildlife surveys and counts.
Living systemsSensory landscape open source
Molecular atlas that links microbial genes and transcripts from wetland and coastal sediments to field measurements of methane, nitrous oxide and sulfur, as evidence for blue-carbon projects; contacts are at Ecosphere Blue, whose MethaNet product is built on it.
Living systemsWaterWeather & climate partly open data
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Prototype web app by Hannah Nisonson of Esri's Applications Prototype Lab that links a 3D map of species observations in the San Bernardino National Forest with a 3D food-web graph, and shows what else is affected when a species is removed.
Pilot by The Nature Conservancy Argentina and the startup ReForest Latam that seeds native trees from drones on degraded farmland in Argentina's Gran Chaco.
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Open-source detector from the Microsoft AI for Good Lab that finds wildlife in aerial and drone survey imagery; ships the OWL model family and extends MegaDetector from camera traps to overhead views.
Living systems open sourcepartly open data
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Ecosphere Blue's planned assessment service for blue-carbon projects, rating project performance with methane-risk projections drawn from microbial genomic evidence in mangrove sediment.
Mycosoft's hosted 3D globe inside its NatureOS platform; it shows environmental layers, the positions of the company's field sensors, historical playback and forecast context, drawing on its MINDEX database of species and observation records.
Open-source family of wildlife detection models and tools from Microsoft's AI for Good Lab; MegaDetector finds animals, people and vehicles in camera-trap images, and PyTorch-Wildlife is the framework that runs it and its siblings for aerial and acoustic data.
Living systemsSensory landscape open sourcepartly open data
Open-source, solar-powered edge device from Microsoft's AI for Good Lab that runs camera-trap and bioacoustic AI models on site and sends the results out by satellite or GSM, for biodiversity monitoring in remote places.
Living systems open source
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Caribbean project testing whether dense restored stands of elkhorn coral reduce wave energy and sediment movement along coasts, with sites in Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua & Barbuda; funded by the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund.
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Wildflow's platform for coral reefs, where divers upload footage and get georeferenced 3D models, orthomosaics and bathymetry for tracking a reef over time, with the stated aim of a digital twin of any reef.
Living systems open sourcepartly open data
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Robotic surface vehicle from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, built by Peter Traykovski and adapted for Anne Cohen's reef work, that photographs shallow coral reefs along GPS-tagged tracks so the same colonies can be checked again after each heat wave.
articles
- A 73% average decline in wildlife populations: an overview of the 2026 Living Planet Index report article draft
Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data explains what the 2026 Living Planet Index's headline figure measures and what it does not, and shows that about half of the studied wildlife populations are declining while the rest are stable or increasing.
A just world on a safe planet: Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations article draftA 2024 report in The Lancet Planetary Health by Gupta and colleagues for the Earth Commission, on Earth-system boundaries, their translations and transformations. The Commission's safe and just boundaries cover Earth systems including biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrients, climate and air pollution.
- Mapping coastal forest retreat using convolutional neural networks and different satellite imagery article draft
2026 PLOS One paper by Titilayo Tajudeen and colleagues at North Carolina State University that classifies Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery with convolutional neural networks to track forest turning into ghost forest and marsh on the North Carolina coastal plain between 1985 and 2021.
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A 2021 paper in Earth System Dynamics by Donges and colleagues that proposes three taxa of modelled subsystems, biophysical, socio-cultural and socio-metabolic, and a scheme for classifying the interactions between them.
Weather & climateLiving systems open source
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Annual update of sixteen planetary vital signs by William Ripple, Christopher Wolf and colleagues in BioScience; in 2026 seven of the sixteen are at record extremes.
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Recent reports, from a creek in Kentucky to the Strait of Hormuz, each read for the question someone there would put to a model of their place, and the kind of model that would answer it.
organizations
Multi-partner initiative, launching in 2026 with founding support from the Bezos Earth Fund, that combines field sensors, environmental DNA and satellite data with AI to report on biodiversity and ecosystem condition across the Amazon.
Coastal Assembly, a public benefit company out of MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, models how sand moves along a shoreline from satellite, wave, current and seabed data, then places engineered reef structures so that waves rebuild the beach.
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Long-term monitoring network that resurveys permanent plots on European mountain summits; its 21 years of data underpin a 2026 Science study reporting rising local extinctions of alpine plants.
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Platform from Blue Green Future and Global Resilience Partners that helps governments count living nature as part of sovereign wealth; Tonga and Panama are its first partner countries.
digital twins
A layered portrait of San Francisco Bay that explains a digital twin as four shared geographic layers: earth and seabed, natural forces, living systems and the built world.
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The Chesapeake Bay Program's web-based watershed model of the Chesapeake Bay, United States; a planner picks an area and management practices and it estimates the resulting nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment loads and their cost.
WaterLiving systems open datapartly open participation
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A modelling and monitoring system for the Great Barrier Reef built by CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Queensland Government with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation; it simulates water movement, sediment, waves and biogeochemistry from the catchments to the open ocean.
WaterLiving systems open sourceopen dataAPI
The European Commission's digital replica of the ocean, built and run by Mercator Ocean International and the Flanders Marine Institute; a public platform that joins Copernicus Marine and EMODnet data with ocean models and what-if scenario applications.
WaterLiving systemsWeather & climate open dataopen participation
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A Horizon 2020 project of 56 partners that builds virtual representations of the sea from earth observation, models and digital infrastructure, and runs a marketplace where digital twins, models and their components are listed and shared.
WaterLiving systems partly open datapartly open participation
A sustainability simulator of the island of Moorea, French Polynesia, led by the IDEA Consortium from the University of California's Gump South Pacific Research Station; it models links between climate, environment, biodiversity and human activity across the island and its lagoon.
terms
The idea that a bioregion should be organised around the relationships that sustain life in a place, such as a shared water system, rather than around a boundary drawn on a map; argued by Indy Johar and related to the rights-of-nature movement for rivers.
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The aim of predictive models of land, water, law and policy that ordinary people can run, question and argue with, rather than tools reserved for planners, companies and agencies.
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A biodiversity-credit protocol from Ecosystem Regeneration Associates (ERA) in Brazil that pays landholders for keeping an umbrella species and its habitat in good condition, checked by monitoring and external audit.
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A proposal for a foundation model trained on observations of the Earth itself, estimating the planet's current state and simulating how it responds to intervention.
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Framework from the ecological design firm Biohabitats for asking, before a data center is designed, whether it belongs in a landscape at all, and how it relates to the watershed, habitat and community around it.
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African Parks' unit of conservation performance, one square kilometre in which ecological integrity has been kept or improved over a year, used as the basis for outcomes-based funding.
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A proposed social-science counterpart to Earth System Science, set out in The Anthropocene Crisis (Cambridge University Press), edited by Mathias Albert and Barry Buzan.
data sources
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Public knowledge base from Andrea Farias and the worker cooperative Motiu, with r3.0, that maps organizations doing bioregional and regenerative work around the world, with a shared vocabulary of themes and tags and a bibliography of sources.
Living systemsCities & places open participation
Densely annotated underwater image datasets of Red Sea coral reefs from EPFL and partners for training segmentation models; V2 adds panoptic labels, 95 classes and fish instances, and is the training data behind DeepReefMap.
Living systemsSensory landscape open data
Lidar-derived model from CTrees of forest fire fuels as one-metre voxels carrying canopy, ladder and ground fuel properties, demonstrated at three US sites and published as open 3D arrays for fire models to read.
FireLiving systems open data
Online platform from the World Resources Institute, until 2026 called Global Forest Watch, that publishes free global data, maps and alerts on forests and is widening its coverage to grasslands, farmland and trees outside forests.
Living systems open data
Global map from One Earth and Nature Data Lab of lands and inland waters important for biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate, with land cover and conservation status, designed to be updated every year; launched September 2026 as a free web viewer.
Living systemsCities & places partly open data
Community platform where people photograph plants, animals and fungi and others identify them; the observations are published as open biodiversity data for research and conservation.
Living systemsPeople & society open dataopen participation
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Esri feature service in ArcGIS Living Atlas that serves iNaturalist's research-grade observations worldwide, refreshed monthly, with hexagon summaries at small scales.
Living systemsCities & places partly open dataAPI
Map and dataset from Cornell researchers of about 1.8 million individual tree crowns in New York City classified to genus from PlanetScope satellite imagery and airborne lidar, including trees on private land and in natural areas; published August 2026.
Living systemsWeather & climate open sourceopen data
Web map of orca and other whale sightings in the Salish Sea, placed on the map from the narrative reports in Orca Network newsletters.
Living systems open dataAPI
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UNEP-WCMC's record of the world's protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, the World Database on Protected Areas, updated monthly from government and other submissions and downloadable from the site.
Living systemsCities & places open datapartly open participation
Web map from WWF and partners of whale migration routes built from pooled satellite telemetry, with threat and protection layers alongside; free to browse at bluecorridors.org.
Living systems partly open datapartly open participation
events
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Call for papers from Leonardo/ISAST for a focus section of the journal Leonardo on art, science and technology work about climate, environmental justice and ecological repair; manuscripts due 15 December 2026.
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Scenario session at the Public Vitality Camp Berlin 2026, moderated by Dark Matter Labs, BiberAmt Berlin and nextlearning e.V., on governing the Berlin–Brandenburg water system across jurisdictions using measures from Berlin's Masterplan Wasser.
Symbol: "biodiversity" by Ali Khamdan, Noun Project, CC BY 3.0.