Conference: BIO-AI: Cyberinfrastructure and AI for Ecological Research at NEON and Beyond Workshop

About This Grant

Biological research across scales from genes to ecosystems increasingly relies on distributed sensors and other physical infrastructure to measure and sample biological variables of interest. Such measurements are informing analyses related to fundamental biological questions, species conservation, ecosystem response to extreme events, and related topics. This trend towards sensor-based biology is exemplified by NSF’s National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), which is collecting and making freely available massive quantities of biological data. Combined with satellite observations, biologists are presented with the unique challenge of synthesizing these data while advancing basic and applied research. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have the potential to greatly accelerate this work, but the community still faces pressing questions related to short- and long-term priorities and the most appropriate applications of cyberinfrastructure. This award will fund an interdisciplinary workshop, bringing together scientists to discuss priorities and chart a path forward. This workshop will specifically foster new cross-disciplinary collaborations across ecological research, AI-enabled cyberinfrastructure, and physical infrastructure. By identifying short- and long-term research priorities with both ecologists and infrastructure developers, as well as related next steps, the workshop will lead to new knowledge, research roadmaps, interdisciplinary teams, pilot projects, and frontier ecological science research proposals. These will address critical knowledge gaps across the ecological and environmental sciences, as well as help to define community-wide needs for next-generation infrastructure to support transformative research breakthroughs. This workshop will help to accelerate innovation and translate discoveries into scalable, real-world applications to solve societal challenges such as ecological resilience, biodiversity loss, and sustainability. Cross-training researchers in AI and infrastructure will help to build a broad AI-capable national workforce across applied fields such as agriculture, forestry, land management, and environmental science. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.