Towards ecologically meaningful foundation models

Ross Gardiner , Henry Cerbone , Hammed Adedamola Akande , Carly Batist, Amber Cowans, Stella Felsinger, Premdeep Gill, Taniya Kapoor, Eliot Miller, Rodrigo Oyanedel, Steven Reece, Yan Ying Tan, Jonas Antony, Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo, Amy Hinsley, Micah Bowles, Sebastian Heilpern, Rachel Parkinson 

Ecology aims to explain and predict how organisms interact with each other and their environments across space and time. Yet both ecological data and theory are fragmented, leading to models that generalise poorly beyond specific systems or scales. Empirical evidence spans diverse modalities, resolutions and contexts, while theory is distributed across partially overlapping frameworks that are rarely integrated within a single predictive model. We argue that ecological foundation models (ecoFMs), trained on large, multimodal ecological datasets, offer a route toward unifying data and theory within a common framework. Beyond their ecological value, ecoFMs present a challenging and consequential testbed for machine learning, demanding advances in multimodal representation learning, theory-guided modelling, and uncertainty-aware inference. By learning shared representations of organisms, environments and interactions, ecoFMs could improve generalisation, link pattern to process, and enable synthesis across ecological sub-disciplines. We outline a roadmap for developing ecoFMs, including requirements for data infrastructure, model architectures, evaluation strategies and governance, and assess where current machine learning and ecological approaches fall short. If developed responsibly and collaboratively with ecological practitioners and other actors, ecoFMs could enable new modes of analysis and strengthen ecological forecasting, while simultaneously driving advances in machine learning for multimodal integration, theory-guided learning, and generalisation in complex, data-limited systems.