One of our members is helping operate a 550 acre restoration project in Mexico. They have a proven method from 3km away by Dr. Lopez Portillo. One of their major challenges is how to measure biodiversity to assess their results as the restoration progresses.  They are not just targeting carbon - but biodiversity, ecosystem services, and community integration.

Alma Grande is a Holistic project looking to generate awareness of the importance of mangroves in Mexico. It is led by a group of young people, scientists, private-land owners, and local communities who are gravely concerned about climate change and the biodiversity loss crisis.

Endangered Wildlife OÜ has developed a database which can measure the worth of most animals by their location and multiply factors from aesthetics, to ecosystem services. This Biodiversity Valuation process which tries to take into account species value, hedge value, carbon value, aesthetic value, environment value, cultural value, etc to calculate a credible data-backed value which can be used to show the (negative) tradeoff of economic development.

They seem to have had some success consulting and convincing companies to make a difference to conserve biodiversity too.

The interplay of earth processes and people. A little bit of ecology, a little bit of longtermism, a lot of research into how things happen. It traces water, carbon, nitrogen, and our own atoms through the biosphere and into the geosphere. Written by Fin Moorhouse.

From farmed animal welfare to biodiversity, the graduates of the Global Innovation Exchange, a partnership between   University of Washington and China’s Tsinghua University, have developed some impressive technology to make the world a better place.

"A smart motion-sensing camera dubbed Diversita that uses machine learning on the edge (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-enables-a-new-wave-of-edge-computing-here-s-how/) to photograph and identify different wildlife species. The camera, which can identify 5,000 species within the device, integrates with an online platform that analyzes data in real time and notifies the user when animals are detected, eliminating the time-consuming process of manually poring over huge numbers of images to spot animals.

The device uses a species-classification model developed under Microsoft’s AI for Earth (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai-for-earth) initiative, which harnesses the Microsoft cloud and AI tools to address global environmental challenges. Team member Benjamin Keller says the device has potential for a broad range of uses by researchers and conservationists, including invasive species removal, enclosure monitoring, genetic sampling and protected area management."

Thoroughly researched talk on energy principles that may indicate a different trajectory for our energy-hungry economy.

Erle Ellis investigates the ecology of human landscapes to inform sustainable stewardship of the biosphere. He is a Lead Author of the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment and Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute.

Jorn Dallinga: Programme Manager at WWF Netherlands, Jorn heads the Forest Foresight initiative which is using AI and large spatial datasets to predict and prevent areas most vulnerable to illegal deforestation.

Fiona Korwin-Pawlowski: Chief Strategy Officer at Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), an interdisciplinary nonprofit organisation and TED Audacious Project using machine learning to help translate the communication of whales off the island of Dominica.

Jeremy Epstein: Head of Growth at Open Forest Protocol, a scalable open platform that allows forest projects of any size around the world to Measure, Report, and Verify (MRV) their forestation data using blockchain technology.

Section 3: Ecosystem Collapse is particularly relevant, but the article also goes into overpopulation and resource depletion.

 Kaiho suggests that if we continue to reduce our GHG emissions (leading to a 3°C warming by 2100), the average animal species loss will reach 10-15 % between the years 2060-2080 or a maximum of 33 % in the worst case. The author suggests this would be sufficient to avert an ecosystem collapse with catastrophic impacts, that could happen if we continued burning fossil fuels or engaged in a nuclear war. However, "ecosystem collapse" is only operationalized as the extinction of 20-50 % of animal species. Although it's a common meme that e.g. keeping the biodiversity loss under 10 % is necessary for civilization, the aforementioned reviews haven't found evidence such a tipping point exists.

Biodiversity targets may be harder than previously thought due to the time delay of environmental  repercussions according to this article by the BBC.

"Ambitious targets to halt the decline in nature may already be slipping out of reach, a study suggests.

Scientists say the effects of climate change and habitat loss on animal populations have been underestimated.
...
The scientists found that past modelling work had largely ignored time lags of decades before the effects of drivers such as climate change and habitat loss kick in.

This means we may be further down the line towards biodiversity loss than we thought."