New AI-Powered General Model Better Explains Ecology of an Island
Written by AZoRoboticsDec 14 2020
Ecology involves the interaction of millions of species in billions of distinct ways, both with their environment and between them. Usually, ecosystems appear chaotic, or at least startling for someone making efforts to understand them and make predictions for the future.
Native forest at Santa Barbara, Terceira, where many Azorean endemic species survive. Image Credit: University of Helsinki.
Both artificial intelligence and machine learning have the ability to identify patterns and estimate results in ways that often mimic human reasoning. They open the door for increasingly robust cooperation between humans and computers.
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In ecology, millions of species interact in billions of different ways between them and with their environment. Ecosystems often seem chaotic, or at least overwhelming for someone trying to understand them and make predictions for the future.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are able to detect patterns and predict outcomes in ways that often resemble human reasoning. They pave the way to increasingly powerful cooperation between humans and computers.
Within AI, evolutionary computation methods replicate in some sense the processes of evolution of species in the natural world. A particular method called symbolic regression allows the evolution of human-interpretable formulas that explain natural laws.
Credit: Image courtesy of C. Albano
Tropical regions contain many of the world s species and scientists consider them hotspots due to their immense biological diversity. However, due to limited sampling our knowledge of tropical diversity remains incomplete, making it difficult for researchers to answer the fundamental questions of the mechanisms that drive and maintain diversity.
In a paper published December 10 in
Science, an international team of scientists has produced the first complete, species-level phylogeny of a major group of tropical birds known as the suboscine passerines. Passerines are the largest order of birds and among the most diverse orders of terrestrial vertebrates. The suboscine group includes more than 1,306 species and in the Neotropics they make up roughly one-third of the total avian population.