Can Technology Save Biodiversity?

While technological development has been a key driver of climate change and biodiversity loss, humans from high income countries continue their unbridled race for innovation and technological development. Throughout history, technological developments have allowed humans to exploit more and more natural resources. These technological developments have, themselves, consumed more and more natural resources and generated various types of pollution. This virtuous or vicious circle, depending on the point of view, culminates today with the advent of electronics and digital technology.

This Research Topic aims at examining the paradoxical relationship that has been established in recent years between the flagships of new technology such as embedded systems and artificial intelligence (AI), and the entities involved in the study and protection of life such as ecological research and conservation policies. Articles may include experimental studies, opinion pieces, systematic reviews and meta-analyses on advances in conservation biology as a result of new technologies, the limits of these approaches and their potentially harmful consequences for humans and other animals as well as cost-benefit analyses such as the trade-off between the potential gain in scientific knowledge and the generation of new forms of pollution.

We invite studies examining automated environmental monitoring, ecological impacts of environmental sensors and communication technology including new tools to evaluate carbon and biodiversity footprint of sensors at their different life stages. We also seek studies on ethical and societal impacts of technology on human-nature interactions (physical and psychological connections) and sensors’ deployment in preserved areas. We welcome contributions on human-biosphere-technology interactions that help prevent human-wildlife conflicts, such as: crop pest localization, the identification of zoonosis risk sites, law enforcement against environmental crimes, and biodiversity conservation with citizen science.

Keywords: artifical intelligence, automated monitoring, human-nature interactions, technology-based solutions, nature based-solution, environmental ethics, conservation biology, sensors, climate change, biodiversity

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.