Monitoring ecosystems in real time

A map is a moment. Monitoring is what turns a moment into a story — loss and recovery, drought and bloom, the slow rearrangement of a coastline, the sudden disappearance of a species from a forest at dawn.

Some of these stories play out over decades. Some play out in days, or in hours. Our research is about reading both — honestly, at the cadence the question actually needs.

What we study

• Real-time signals. Streaming acoustics, near-real-time satellite alerts, sensor networks, river gauges, fishing-vessel activity. The work of making fast signals trustworthy — not just fast.
• Indicators. Working with established families — Species Habitat Index, Species Protection Index, Living Planet Index, ocean health indicators, forest integrity — and what it takes to compute them openly at scale.
• Change detection. Methods that distinguish real ecological shifts from instrument drift, seasonal noise, and observation gaps.
• Cadence honesty. Some ecosystems move in days, some in decades. We study how to monitor each at its own pace without flattening one into the other — and how to avoid the false confidence of fast data on slow questions.
• Knowledge gaps. Where indicators systematically miss — small species, cryptic habitats, undersampled regions — and the methods that can responsibly extend coverage.

How we approach it

We treat indicators as instruments that need calibration, not as final scores. Every monitoring result we publish should be reproducible, dated, and accompanied by what it cannot tell you. Real-time does not excuse uncertainty — it makes it more important to surface.

Read next

• Mapping nature — the substrate that makes monitoring possible.
• Analysis, prediction, and autonomous systems — methods for reading the signal.