GAIA Initiative @ Leibniz-IZW — a research, conservation and technology cluster

The GAIA Initiative’s vision is to advance our understanding of selected carnivore and scavenger species in human-impacted ecosystems and to utilize this knowledge to solve real-world conservation problems ­— by using sentinel animals in early-warning systems for environmental change and critical ecological incidents. To achieve this, GAIA harnesses the full potential of technology to enable rapid and reliable wildlife research for conservation, using and developing high-throughput telemetry, biologging, and machine learning to form a globe-spanning network of animal, human, and artificial intelligence. GAIA implements these systems directly with partners to maximise conservation impact.

Human activity is acutely threatening biodiversity and the functioning of ecosystems all over the world. On the one hand, rapidly accelerating environmental change poses significant challenges to species communities, for example through biodiversity loss or climate change; on the other hand, individual human activities, such as environmental crime or the effects of human-wildlife conflicts, directly threaten the populations of certain species. What both processes have in common is that, in terms of speed and intensity, they far exceed natural changes in ecosystems – meaning that affected species have scarcely developed the evolutionary capacity to respond to this change and adapt to new conditions. Furthermore, the rapidly accelerating environmental change also presents new challenges for environmental research, and wildlife research in particular, as well as for conservation: there is an urgent need to monitor and understand the changing environment, as well as direct and indirect challenges for wildlife, much more quickly and thoroughly, in order to be able to develop and implement effective, science-based species conservation measures.

The biodiversity crisis correlates with technological advances and increases in prosperity over the past 100 to 150 years, yet GAIA sees the new scientific and technological possibilities also as a key to addressing these enormous challenges. High-tech offers the opportunity to quickly and thoroughly detect, record and analyse processes of environmental change and critical incidents in ecosystems, and to develop and directly implement effective countermeasures. To achieve this, GAIA brings together expertise from three domains:

• wildlife research for conservation, drawing on decades of experience in the study of cheetahs and other carnivores and their natural habitats, as well as veterinary practice and research in southern Africa;
• the development and use of high-tech applications such as microelectronics, camera technology, artificial intelligence and satellite communication, as well as their application for high-throughput telemetry and biologging;
• and from collaboration with organisations in environmental and wildlife management, as well as with politicians, administrators, the business sector and other stakeholders, to ensure the immediate practical application of the knowledge gained and the technology developed.

This alliance of excellent research, innovative development and effective application harnesses the outstanding sensory capabilities and evolutionary intelligence of certain animal species, forming a global network of animal, human and artificial intelligence. Sentinel species, such as vultures or ravens, possess outstanding sensory abilities and evolutionary intelligence. They quickly and reliably detect key indicators of environmental change and critical events in their habitats – for example, in the form of the carcasses of dead or killed animals. GAIA’s research and development aims to use high-tech methods to view ecosystems through the eyes of these sentinel species, utilize their intelligence and skills, and make their valuable knowledge about nature accessible for humans with the aid of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The GAIA initiative is, on the one hand, a cluster for research, development and technology at the Leibniz-IZW, and on the other, a consortium of research institutes, conservation organisations and companies that has been collaborating in all three areas since 2020 through a number of third-party funded projects. Its aim is to create a global high-tech early warning system for ecological changes and critical environmental incidents, and to gain all the necessary knowledge about animal species and their habitats, as well as to develop all the necessary technical processes and devices. This includes a new generation of animal tags featuring sensor-based artificial intelligence, a camera, energy-efficient electronics and satellite-based communication technology. These innovative tags detect and transmit animal behaviour in real time and are therefore core components of the global network combining animal, human and artificial intelligence. It also includes artificial intelligence algorithms for behaviour recognition based on data from animal tags and for image recognition, concepts for digital swarm intelligence in ad hoc networks of microprocessors, and a fleet of small satellites in low Earth orbit.

Finally, the integration of research and development with practical conservation work forms the third pillar of GAIA’s work. The systems and methods developed are continuously evaluated with application partners and deployed for conservation purposes. To this end, GAIA at the IZW develops practical pipelines that, for example, give rangers in national parks access to the analysis data and results. Last but not least, GAIA is in constant dialogue with stakeholders from politics, administration, government agencies, business, conservation and civil society.

Rast W, Götz T, Cloete C, Berger A, Chamaillé-Jammes S, Krofel M, Portas R, Aschenborn OHK, Melzheimer J (2026): Did U hear that? Working with mixed behaviours when classifying animal behaviour from acceleration data using a U-Net. Ecological Informatics 95, 2026, 103761. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoinf.2026.103761

Curk T, Santangeli A, Rast W, Portas R, Shatumbu G, Cloete C, Beytell P, Aschenborn O, Melzheimer J (2025): Using animal tracking for early detection of mass poisoning events. Journal of Applied Ecology Volume 62, Issue 8 (2025). DOI: 10.1111/1365-2664.70128

Curk Te, Rast W, Portas R, Kohles J, Shatumbu G, Cloete C, Curk Ti, Radchuk V, Aschenborn OHK, Melzheimer J (2025): Advantages and disadvantages of using social information for carcass detection–A case study using white-backed vultures. Ecological Modelling 499 (2025) 110941. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2024.110941

Rast W, Portas R, Shatumbu GI, Berger A, Cloete C, Curk T, Götz T, Aschenborn OHK, Melzheimer J (2024): Death detector: Using vultures as sentinels to detect carcasses by combining bio-logging and machine learning. Journal of Applied Ecology. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2664.14810

Kane A, Monadjem A, Aschenborn OHK, Bildstein K, Botha A, Bracebridge C, Buechley ER, Buij R, Davies JP, Diekmann M, Downs CT, Farwig N, Galligan T, Kaltenecker G, Kelly C, Kemp R, Kolberg H, MacKenzie ML, Mendelsohn J, Mgumba M, Nathan R, Nicholas A, Ogada D, Pfeiffer MB, Phipps WL, Pretorius MD, Rösner S, Schabo DG, Shatumbu GL, Spiegel O, Thompson LJ, Venter JA, Virani M, Wolter K, Kendall CJ (2022): Understanding continent-wide variation in vulture ranging behavior to assess feasibility of Vulture Safe Zones in Africa: Challenges and possibilities. Biological Conservation 268 (2022) 109516. DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109516