Keynote Talk 5: Dr. Nathan Jacobs

From Social Media to Sanderlings: Multimodal Tools for Understanding and Mapping Biodiversity

Understanding biodiversity across large spatial and taxonomic scales is limited by sparse labeled data, heterogeneous sensing modalities, and the need for models that operate reliably in data-scarce environments. These challenges constrain our ability to map species distributions, capture fine-grained taxonomic structure, and integrate information from imagery, audio, and environmental context. This talk will highlight our recent work in multimodal representation learning for ecology, including hierarchical and entailment-aware embedding spaces for natural-world imagery, unified models that combine visual, acoustic, and geospatial information, and probabilistic approaches that handle missing modalities and quantify uncertainty. Together, these tools enable more flexible, scalable, and biologically grounded approaches to understanding and mapping biodiversity.