Many thanks to Schmidt Sciences and the organizers of the Shaping the Future of AI for Conservation workshop at Oxford, UK, for bringing us together and supporting this work. Great initiative 👏
#AI #LLM #Ecology
What would a 'Foundation Model' for ecology look like?
In our new preprint, we explore this emerging idea & outline a roadmap for foundation models in Ecology (ecoFMs)👇
Really great working with @rachelparkinson.bsky.social @hcerbone.bsky.social @polarprem.bsky.social et al
doi.org/10.32942/X2V...
6/6. EcoCast aims to support climate resilience and biodiversity protection across Africa by enabling timely, data-driven ecological forecasting.
👉The article can be downloaded:
arxiv.org/abs/2512.02260
5/n. Our pilot study in Africa shows promising improvements in forecasting distributions of selected bird species compared to a Random Forest baseline, highlighting EcoCast’s potential to inform targeted conservation policies.
4/n. We describe a three-phase approach: (1) constructing a large-scale, pre-trained spatio-temporal architecture, (2) continually fine-tuning with new data streams, and (3) developing interactive dashboards for conservation practitioners.
3/n.Utilizing multisource satellite imagery, climate data, and citizen science occurrence records, EcoCast predicts near-term shifts in species distributions.
2/n. In this work, co-authored with Abdulrauf A. Gidado. We proposed EcoCast, a novel spatio-temporal model designed for continual biodiversity and climate risk forecasting.
I’m excited to share that our paper, “EcoCast: A Spatio-Temporal Model for Continual Biodiversity and Climate Risk Forecasting,” was presented at the Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop at #NeurIPS2025 (One of the premier ML conferences).
www.climatechange.ai/papers/neuri...
Hammed A. Akande, Abdulrauf A. Gidado: EcoCast: A Spatio-Temporal Model for Continual Biodiversity and Climate Risk Forecasting https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02260 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02260 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.02260
We're excited to announce the next edition of our workshop "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning" at #ICLR2025 in Singapore!
▶️ Mentorship program deadline: Dec 27, 2024
▶️ Paper submission deadline: Jan 31, 2025
Learn more & submit: climatechange.ai/events/iclr2...
Congratulations 🎉!
I am delighted to announce that I have accepted the Miriam Rothschild Professorship of Conservation Biology in the Zoology Dept at the Univ of Cambridge!
I am thrilled for this next chapter & look forward to working with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative & the Conservation Research Institute.
