Charlotte H. Chang

Is the public actually talking about biodiversity? 🐾

Our new #OA paper in @ConBiology introduces an automated NLP pipeline to measure wildlife saliency and attitudes from digital media

Essential for tracking GBF targets! 📈

conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

#ConservationScience #AI

Looking for collaborators, testers, and skeptics to help shape this work and our products. H/t to my collaborators, Adam Pearson, Jingyi Li, DataKind, Caitlin Augustin, and others -- really excited to see where this work takes us all!

We're also training the next generation and running practitioner workshops through our @cu-esiil.bsky.social working group. If you work in conservation evidence synthesis, environmental policy, or just have strong opinions about AI and NLP in ecology, we’re keen to hear from you.

We aim to have every output trace back to source documents so users can evaluate credibility themselves. No black boxes that falsely claim they can replace human judgment.

To that end, we're tackling this problem with practitioners, ethicists, and data sovereignty experts to figure out how we can best use AI to help augment (not replace!) expert opinions.

I know that many of us in ecology, climate, & the environment are skeptical of "AI", and for good reason (water and energy footprints, plagiarism machines,...the list goes on).

We plan to build open-source AI and NLP tools that can link evidence across scientific papers, gray literature, and project reports (e.g., connecting specific agroforestry practices to carbon outcomes, or restoration approaches to species recovery).

Happy to share that we have received funding from the Seaver Institute to tackle an increasingly urgent problem in #conservation and #climateaction: how do you synthesize mountains of research when decisions need to happen rapidly?

Bluesky has genuinely revived my love for science communication online. After watching the same posts go nowhere on Twitter, seeing them resonate here has been such a good reminder of why I do this. Thanks for being here 🖤

Introduce yourself with 5 animals you’ve seen in the wild:

Giant Ibis
Dhole
White-throated babbler
Diademed sifaka
Spoon-billed sandpiper

Funny to me that our paper on the mismatch between venture capital and climate impact is getting the most engagement on LinkedIn.

Maybe because everything else on there is AI slop?

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

This is a fascinating study showing how misaligned venture capital can be when it comes to climate. Instead of chasing high-impact carbon solutions, it tends to chase fads.

We need to do a better job aligning our money with a more substantial climate impact.

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Thank you @globalecoguy.bsky.social for the important work you've done to advance environmental stewardship! I routinely teach your papers on food security & climate in my classes. Makes for a great interactive coding session for the students too, using @ourworldindata.org and R/Python.

#climate #paperskygest #conservation #naturebasedsolutions #naturalclimatesolutions

Home Project Drawdown drives meaningful climate action by advancing science-based solutions and strategies.

This research builds on exceptional datasets from Project Drawdown (drawdown.org) and Vibrant Data Labs. H/t to @pomonacollege.bsky.social for funding & Paul Hawken, @globalecoguy.bsky.social, & Eric Berlow for making these data available. 🧵 9/9

📄 Read the full paper here (no paywall!): doi.org/10.1088/2753... 🧵 8/9

Public finance, strategic investors, and conservation organizations can lead where traditional VC has failed. There's substantial potential to improve climate finance outcomes, and much more to explore. 🧵 7/9

As Rohan notes: VC is optimizing for market familiarity and short-term returns, **not climate outcomes**. But this misalignment reveals an opportunity: nature-based solutions and other high-mitigation technologies are 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗱 and 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱. 🧵 6/9

Swarm plot of investment by company stage (pre-seed/seed through more mature stages such as scaling).

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗗𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘀: Only 4.6% of companies reached middle-stage funding, with median capital far below what's needed for scaling and commercialization. 🧵 5/9

𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁: No statistical relationship between investment dollars and carbon mitigation potential or technological maturity—the metrics that should drive deployment. 🧵 4/9

Table 1 from the manuscript, showing ROI results in percentages for different mitigation sectors.

𝗡𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲-𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹: Food, agriculture, land use, and ecosystem restoration received minimal investment despite high sequestration potential. Early ROI data suggests promise, though the sample remains small and companies are still maturing. 🧵 3/9

Bar chart of funding distribution by Project Drawdown climate solution category

𝗪𝗲'𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗿 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝘀, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀: 71% of funding went to three sectors with existing private market incumbents, with the bulk of funding directed toward EVs (over 40%), even though such solutions represent just 3.5% of mitigation potential. 🧵 2/9

Incredibly proud of my former student, Rohan Gowda Thanh Quang. His new paper in 𝘌𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩: 𝘌𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘺 analyzed $128B in US climate investments & finds that 𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗲𝘀𝘁-𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 - especially nature-based solutions. Results in 🧵: 1/9

Absolutely! So many friends have been struggling with housing affordability trying to rent in Southern California after the Eaton fire. They may be moving locally, but they are still climate refugees!

I wonder if this marks a broader shift from participation in content creation to passive content consumption, or if it simply reflects how online social behavior has moved off of legacy social media platforms (“public square”) into group chats (“private salons”)

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

By this definition an eBird checklist is a digital twin #eBird

this, to me, is art

I feel like a larger-scale replication study of this important topic ("a good life for all within planetary boundaries") would be really empowering for my students. So I would be keen to hear from anyone who knows about useful resources or has done something similar in their classes! #DSLC