For naturalists today, the last frontier is data.

Robert Guralnick, the biodiversity informatics curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, says data science approaches, particularly machine learning, can help with the critical challenge of extracting the best data generated by an ever-more-closely monitored environment and using it to save global biodiversity.

“We really need to be able to do this and do it well,” says Guralnick, “and relatively quickly. Data limitations are perhaps the key impediment in understanding just how quickly the planet is changing and the consequences of those changes.”

Naturalists and scientists still use field notebooks, but to those analog tools they are adding the tools of artificial intelligence:

• From space, satellites monitor Earth around the clock.
• Closer to ground, drones provide surveillance of any terrain.
• Some sensors record readings such as temperature and moisture, while others record the sounds of birds and insects.
• Camera traps record the behaviors of animals when humans are not around or seasonal changes in plants.
• And environmental DNA can be collected and analyzed with the latest sequencing equipment.

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