Artificial intelligence approaches for mapping the nexus of biodiversity, climate change and human society

We face closely intertwined crises related to biodiversity, climate change, global health andinequality. Unfortunately, the knowledge that could help overcome these existential crises isscattered across millions of scientific articles, reports, policy documents, databases, andindividual datasets, far exceeding human processing capabilities. This hinders evidence-basedresearch, innovation and policymaking that would enable a sustainable transformation.Artificial intelligence (AI) can help overcome this problem by rapidly identifying andsynthesizing information on a large scale. We have developed an easy-to-use customizable AItool that extracts information about key entities such as species, habitats, chemicals,environmental processes, genes/proteins and diseases from any large text collections. We usethis to extract information from large scientific literature databases, which is then visualizedin intuitive interaction graphs (“nexus knowledge graphs”) and further enriched withinformation from databases and datasets. This helps reveal the intricate interplay betweenecosystems and human society from molecular pathways to complex systems leading toactionable insights. For example, we can reveal links and feedback loops connecting individual pollutants and environmental processes with various species and habitats oridentify research biases and knowledge gaps. Thereby, our tools can support decision-makingrelated to biodiversity, climate change, medicine, human society in various contexts andenable meaningful transformative change.