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The rapidly growing nature tech sector is offering unprecedented solutions to help protect and restore the natural environment, with satellite imagery, drones, and sensors all used to monitor, manage, and improve biodiversity.
Ecologists can now measure species abundance and distributions in ways that were once impossible, with a seemingly endless number of applications on the horizon.
“Nature tech is massively expanding at the moment, and there are some wonderful ideas out there on how to use tech to solve the big problems we face,” explains Dr Katie Medcalf, environment director at data consultancy firm Environment Systems. “Environmental scientists, geospatial analysts, policy experts and software developers with all these different specialisms in nature and tech are coming together.”
Her company uses satellite imagery and data analysis to provide insights for land management planning, natural capital evaluation, habitat mapping, and ecological surveys. “We've worked with building companies that want to enhance nature on their land holdings, for example, and councils striving to meet government initiatives like 30 by 30,” Medcalf explains.
“Our tools bring all sorts of tech together to deliver up-to-date habitat maps using a huge range of data, such as imagery from LIDAR and remote sensing. We use tech to show where the land is providing good nature and ecosystem services, and where you can enhance them.”
There has been a spike in interest from master planners, developers, NGOs, councils, and impact assessment professionals looking to improve nature outcomes on their sites, with the Scottish government also harnessing nature tech for its environmental goals.
In 2023, Environment Systems was tasked by the Scottish government via its CivTech challenge to develop a solution that would help prioritise peatland restoration across the country. The result: PeatSCOPE, a digital mapping tool which integrates satellite data, spatial modelling, and natural capital analysis to target peatland sites for restoration that yield the maximum benefits.
“Peatland is a really fragile habitat; unless it's very wet, it's prone to erosion, and can leak enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere,” says Medcalf. “We developed a peatland condition layer using AI; splitting Scotland into16 biogeographical zones where the peat is different, looks and behaves differently, which can help determine peatland resources in need of restoration.”
Peatlands store approximately 30% of all soil carbon globally, despite covering only 3% of the Earth's land area. In the UK, 70% of drinking water comes from upland areas where peatlands are most commonly found, which purify rain and prevent flooding downstream.
By harnessing AI to interpret vast quantities of data, innovative tools like PeatSCOPE are offering vital insights into environmental protection. “We've got these massive libraries of data that we never had before, so we understand more about the ecology of the world all the time, and that's important to feed into these sort of models and maps,” Medcalf continues.
“But it’s not as simple as saying to the AI or deep learning model, ‘here's the factors that impact peatland condition, now go produce a map’. We had to build in this ecological expertise, and it’s important that we continue to have experts to verify the AI." The potential for nature tech is massive, with almost endless possibilities, and some of the most exciting applications involve measuring animal life.
During the Covid-19 lockdown, Geoff Carss began to reflect on the biggest barriers to conserving biodiversity, and noticed a glaring gap: good data collection. Acquiring accurate, time-series data over long periods of time using site survey methods had proved difficult, so he founded a new platform called Wilder Sensing.
“I was talking to someone from Amazon who said they had spent all this money on carbon credits around the world, but the data was just not very good, which had undermined investor confidence,” he tells me. “That got me thinking, ‘is there a technology which is low cost, can scale, technically, commercially, and geographically and is underpinned by robust science?’ The only thing that fitted those criteria was bioacoustics.”
Bioacoustics involves analysing animal noises, like the sounds of birds, mammals, and insects, to understand species diversity, behavior, and the health of ecosystems. With AI, this can now be done with unprecedented ease and efficiency, and Wilder Sensing is at the cutting edge of its development.
“We've made the technology very simple to use, although there's a lot of complexity that sits behind us,” Carss says. “Just buy a simple audio recorder, or we can provide one, place it in a field or woods for your survey, and upload your audio files to our website for analysis.
“We will check a file every three seconds, and if anything has made a sound, we provide a probability score for whether it was a robin, black bird, a black-tailed godwit, etc. We'll process an hour-long file in 30 seconds.
“It’s like an ecologist sitting in a field 24/7 for a winter or summer survey, which is obviously impossible because they need to sleep. Some have been running continually for three years now, generating around four millions species records, and our analytic tools explain the species distribution across the site, or how the species richness is changing over time.”
Wilder Sensing work with big ecological consulting firms, developers that want to demonstrate biodiversity net gain (BNG) improvements, regenerative farmers, solar farm developers, the RSPB, National Trust, and has even featured on SpringWatch in 2024 and 2025.
On an episode last year, presenter Chris Packham said: “You could put this in the heart of sticky, horrible insect-infested tropical rainforest and just leave it there for months and not have to go back. So when it comes to remote sensing to monitor these birds, better understand them and then conserve them, I'd invest – if I was on Dragons’ Den, I'd be in."
An equally exciting company at the forefront of this innovation boom is NatureMetrics, which analyses environmental DNA (eDNA) with AI to generate biodiversity insights at scale. The company was founded 11 years ago, and it’s Nature Intelligence Platform is transforming how businesses report their nature impact.
“We live in a soup of DNA particles; it's in the air, water, and soils. We take samples from the environment and amplify it in our laboratories before matching it against species libraries to determine what’s living in these different ecosystems and around us,” explains Pippa Howard, the company's chief of nature strategy.
“The beauty with eDNA is that it gives you the ability to see an enormous depth of species; tiny things that you can't see normally, such as the bacteria, fungi, and microbiomes, all the way through to blue whales.”
As with Wilder Sensing, the sampling process doesn’t require experts, with NatureMetrics providing non-practitioners with simple kits containing syringes and containers, before the samples are sent to labs for analysis.
“It's incredibly accessible; anyone can do it really, in any type of environment, and we've worked in around 116 countries now,” Howard says.
“We have the biggest commercial lab in the world for this type of work, so we're able to provide very consistent results by taking fragments of eDNA and RNA to get a picture of the full biome within a location.”
NatureMetrics’ online dashboards include a variety of graphs and dashboards to give a clear idea of how an environment, and species composition, structure and function, is changing over time.
“For environment and sustainability practitioners, we're offering a very sophisticated, rapid and cost-effective way of delivering a baseline for what biodiversity is present at a site,” Howard says. “It could be for BNG, or the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and various other reporting frameworks, helping businesses make good decisions and reduce exposure to nature risks.
“For an impact assessment, there is a very clear set of information that's required for delivering the mitigation hierarchy that we can provide – we're just very good at biodiversity accounting, essentially.”
Chris Seekings is the Deputy Editor of ISEP’s Transform magazine, which is published biomonthly for ISEP members. Chris’s role involves writing sustainability-related news, features and interviews, as well as helping to plan and manage the magazine’s other day-to-day activities.
