HOME / NEWS /

CRCS held AI-Assisted Decision-Making for Conservation Workshop

October 21, 2022
Photo of participants from the AI-Assisted Decision-Making for Conservation Workshop
In Oct, 2022, the AI-Assisted Decision-Making for Conservation workshop convened to explore the opportunities to expand the breadth of AI methods — particularly for optimization, planning, and evaluation — that are being developed for and applied to conservation. In this workshop, we discussed the challenges raised during the workshop in conservation area management; methods discussed in AI, earth observation, and causality; and limitations in the application of AI for conservation.
 
After hearing from experts on these topics, we as a group discussed the state of the field, including opportunities, and limitations, and of using current methods for AI for conservation. For example, toward developing new methods and frameworks for AI-assisted conservation, we developed the following set of guiding questions:
  • what questions in conservation are answerable and what decisions are supportable with AI (what is AI-able?),
  • the associated costs of the development and deployment of AI for conservation,
  • how these AI approaches can contribute to/assist decision making and prioritization.
  • how can AI help assess/measure impacts
One of the goals of this workshop is to share the outcome of these process with the broader research communities overlapping these questions. To that end, we'll soon be sharing a document summarizing our meeting, collaboratively written by our participants - stay tuned for that in the near future!
See also: Harvard news