Designing Multi-Modal Ecosystem Monitoring Technologies: A Network of Networks Approach

Christopher Benjamin Anderson 

The central promise of ecosystem monitoring technologies — like bioacoustic, camera trap, citizen science, eDNA, and satellite data — is to reveal changes in the structure and composition of the Earth’s ecological systems to facilitate timely and effective conservation action. Following the evolution and maturation of these technology systems, the fusion of multimodal observation systems — where data from multiple sources are combined to provide novel and emerging insights — is developing as a key research frontier.

A new generation of multi-modal monitoring networks is likely to emerge as system-scale shifts, from systems that manage a linear flow of information to complex flows of information through networks. The emergent properties of ecosystems themselves might illuminate the principles for how such networks can evolve from rapidly growing, highly uncertain products to stable, specialized, and interconnected components within larger systems.

This essay describes how insights from succession dynamics, resilience, and alternative stable states in ecology that can guide the development of the next generation of ecosystem monitoring networks. How can new technology systems be built to mirror the processes and patterns of the ecological systems they monitor? How should these principles be translated from metaphor to mechanism?