Protecting Species & Ecosystems

Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) 

Underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi sustain nearly all plant life on Earth and are crucial for global climate regulation due to their carbon capture capabilities. Their collapse would be disastrous and yet we know very little about them or their status as a critical ecosystem. Documenting threats to the existence of these fungi will inform the actions needed to protect this underground network and will represent a leap forward in managing our global ecosystems and their biodiversity.   

Mycorrhizal fungi, otherwise known as plant root fungi, create underground networks that assist approximately 90% of plants with nutrient and water absorption, protect plants from pathogens, and influence the rate at which plants absorb carbon from the air, thus helping to regulate the Earth’s climate. The SPUN project is funding 80 “underground explorers” around the world to sample soil using new genetic techniques in under-explored and hard-to-reach places, develop an open-source threat map, and better understand the ecosystem functions of these important underground organisms. 

“Protecting our planet’s fungal network—a major global carbon pool—is essential to fight climate change. Along with our collaborators around the world, we’re unearthing data to understand the mycorrhizal fungi that draw carbon underground. It’s a race against time. We’re losing fungal communities before we even learn what species they contain or what exactly they do.” 

- Toby Kiers, Executive Director & Chief Scientist, SPUN 

Earth Species Project

We’re in the midst of a computation revolution, but the conservation community has yet to embrace its power. Environmentalists lack access to high-powered computational tools to make sense of their huge pool of unanalyzed data, yet climate change requires urgent action. To address this, Earth Species Project (ESP) curates datasets, creates benchmarks, and publishes practical open-source AI tools for scientists and conservation practitioners. ESP is focused on the nexus of technology and animal behavior and is using artificial intelligence to advance our understanding of animal communication.

Our grant will extend its ability to potentially decode animal communication, thus opening additional research in ecology and advancements in conservation efforts.  By aggregating existing datasets and using them to train foundation models, ESP builds powerful tools for conservationists to automatically detect animals, categorize behavior, and generate meaningful acoustic signals that together help understand and protect species.

Global FinPrint 2.0

A recent landmark study found sharks are in severe decline globally, but they are more often observed in marine protected areas (MPAs) than in unprotected areas. Yet, most MPAs are not designed with the needs of large mobile predators like reef sharks in mind, so it remains unknown whether reef shark populations are robust and stable or simply recovering in these areas. It is possible that reef sharks are simply declining more slowly in many MPAs than in unprotected areas around the world, with extinction being delayed rather than averted. Given recent commitments to protect sharks and scale MPAs, there is a significant opportunity to rigorously assess and understand whether and how MPAs can be designed for effective reef shark conservation, which would also ultimately benefit the health of the broader marine ecosystem. 

The Global Finprint 2 project, under the leadership of our grantee the Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium, will resurvey 50 MPAs and 50 control sites to assess changes in reef shark abundance over time and will estimate the causal relationship between MPA design features and shark abundance and trends. The team will do so by building in-country capacity for reef shark monitoring in the world’s MPAs to ensure they are effective and build the foundation for tracking future recovery, as well as working with local decision-makers to build on commitments for 30 x 30 and CITES to build or improve existing MPAs.