Abstract:
“We are living through both an ecological crisis and a revolution in computing, and how research infrastructures respond to the intersection of these two realities will determine whether biodiversity science is equipped to matter at the scale and speed the world requires.
Across domains, the most enduring research infrastructures have not been those that adopted new technologies reactively, but those built on a deep understanding of where computer science was heading: how knowledge would be represented, how machines would reason over it, how trust and provenance would be encoded, and how intelligence would emerge from federated, distributed systems.
Biodiversity science is no exception, and in many ways its complexity, scale, and heterogeneity make having sound foundations even more critical. This talk argues for a Foundations First approach to what we define as Biodiversity Intelligence, the capacity to transform distributed observations of the living world into robust, reproducible, and actionable knowledge for researchers, policymakers, and society. But solid foundations are not only about technology. The infrastructures that will truly serve biodiversity science are those that also rethink the human roles that build, maintain, and support them, moving from classical software development and user requirement collection towards Forward Deployment Engineering, where technical expertise meets user needs in the field, and preparing researchers themselves to become active, literate participants in an AI-enabled scientific environment rather than passive consumers of tools.
We will examine how foundational shifts in computer science, from FAIR Digital Objects and machine-actionable workflows to Digital Twins for ecosystem modelling and AI-assisted knowledge discovery, must be matched by equally deliberate shifts in how we train, organise, and empower the people behind the infrastructure. The conclusion is simple: serving users well, over the long term, requires both solid technical foundations and a new generation of people prepared to bring them to life.“.
About Dr. Anne Fouilloux:
Anne Fouilloux has over 20 years of experience in high-performance computing and Earth system science. Her career spans data-intensive computing and optimisation at CNRS-IDRIS (France), software development at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF, UK), research software engineering at the University of Oslo (Norway), and project leadership at the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC).
Her work is driven by the conviction that research infrastructures must serve society. She focuses on building scalable, open, and sustainable digital ecosystems that enable researchers, infrastructure providers, and policymakers to address real-world challenges such as climate change adaptation and biodiversity loss.
She has extensive expertise in FAIR principles, FAIR Digital Objects, and distributed e-infrastructures, with a strong emphasis on interoperability and data fusion across disciplines as foundations for Digital Twins, AI-driven analytics, and advanced environmental decision-support systems. A long-standing contributor to open-source communities, she champions approaches such as Discrete Global Grid Systems and cloud-optimised formats like Zarr to remove technical barriers and enable meaningful reuse of environmental data across infrastructures.
Main publications:
- Fouilloux A, Iaquinta J, Gupta AK, et al. (2023). Building on Communities to Further Software Sustainability.Computing in Science & Engineering, 25(3): 84–88.
- Fouilloux A, Trasatti E, Foglini F, et al. (2023). FAIR Research Objects for realising Open Science with the EOSC project RELIANCE. Research Ideas and Outcomes, 9: e108765.
- Magagna B, Fouilloux A, von Szombathely M, et al. (2025). Accelerating Climate Change Adaptation in Cities with FAIR2Adapt. REAL CORP 2025 Proceedings.