Engineering Ecosystem Resilience

Living organisms underpin our food, climate stability, and materials – ecological collapse threatens the foundations of civilisation. By pairing advanced monitoring with resilience-boosting interventions, we could halt biodiversity loss and enable people and nature to thrive.

Opportunity space

Opportunity seeds

Programme development

Within opportunity spaces, we build multi-year R&D programmes designed to advance complex, large-scale ideas that require coordinated investment and management across disciplines and institutions.

Read the programme thesis below for our current thinking and discover some of the ways we've shaped our programme direction. Subject to approval, this programme is expected to launch in February 2026.

Read the programme thesis: Accelerated Adaptation

As humans change the environment faster than wild species can naturally adapt, 1 in 4 animals and plants face extinction within a century.
Traditional conservation approaches are essential, but they’re unlikely to scale at the pace needed to prevent breakdown of our ecosystems.
Recent advances in high-throughput genomics, precision biology, robotics, and AI are converging, unlocking a new pathway that can complement and enhance traditional nature stewardship approaches.
This emerging programme will explore potential pathways to accelerate adaptation, including supercharging natural mechanisms and molecular engineering.
Alongside technical research, the programme will explore the ethical and governance implications of potential interventions from the outset.

Read the programme thesis

Resources

Read the programme thesis (accessible version)
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Pre-programme discovery projects

To help guide our thinking and shape the programme’s development, we have funded a series of short, exploratory research projects. These projects range from diving into particular research directions and technical feasibilities to exploring ethical and governance needs.

Genetics-based methods for precise interventions against invasive species

Project lead: Luke Alphey, University of York

This project will analyse the potential use of genetics-based methods for managing/removing invasive species from sensitive ecosystems.

A data-driven protocol to detect and integrate specialist pollinators into landscape restoration

Project lead: Nuria Blasco-Lavilla, Independent

This project will develop and test a proof-of-concept protocol to detect specialist pollinator-plant interactions using existing biological datasets and AI-based plant recognition tools.

Understanding resilience for global biodiversity: a text‑mining investigation of national biodiversity strategies and action plans

Project lead: Jay Burns, University of Edinburgh

This project will use AI to analyse how countries define and apply “resilience” in their formal biodiversity plans; it aims to identify global patterns, gaps, and priorities to inform more effective and equitable biodiversity policy and ecosystem management, including to guide future research directions.

Universal method for plant cell regeneration

Project lead: Jonathan Clarke, John Innes Centre

This project will deploy AI based data mining strategies to develop a universal protocol for plant cell regeneration

Engineering ecosystem resilience through the lens of genomic technologies

Project lead: Jose De-Vega, Earlham Institute

This project will explore how advanced genomic approaches, from environmental DNA to synthetic genomes, can be used to better monitor, predict, and actively improve environmental resilience in the face of the rapid decline of biodiversity.

TRACER: Turning Literature into Community-built Ecosystem Resilience (Pilot)

Project lead: Manmohan Dev Sharma, University of Exeter

This project will develop a community-curated Text2Trait platform powered by AI-assisted, Human-in-the-loop Actionable Research and Vocabulary Extraction Technology (HARVEST) for turning scientific literature into actionable insights within a queryable knowledge graph.

Foundational AI to forecast ecosystem resilience

Project lead: Lynn Dicks, University of Cambridge

This project will explore the potential for foundational AI techniques to forecast ecosystem resilience under engineering and related management interventions, in ways that are useful for nature conservation.

Ethics and governance framework for engineering ecosystem resilience

Project lead: Michael Gyapong Akrasi, Independent

This project will develop a practical ethics and governance framework to guide the responsible and equitable use of emerging technologies such as AI, synthetic biology, and robotics in efforts to engineer ecosystem resilience.

Do we really need DNA?

Project lead: Marcus Hicks, Queen Mary University of London

This project will examine the added value and cost-effectiveness that genomic data brings to monitoring ecosystem resilience, in comparison to traditional ecological measurements.

From sanctuary to system: robotics and AI for measuring and expanding pollinator networks

Project lead: Henry Hickson, University of Bristol

This project will conduct a feasibility study on using drones to monitor pollinator networks, aiming to support the creation of pollinator-friendly ecosystems and the recovery of natural pollinator populations

Next generation metacommunity modelling for ecosystem resilience

Project lead: Benjamin Hodgson, University of Leeds

This project will develop a mathematical metacommunity model to enhance our understanding of the mechanisms and strategies which promote ecosystem resilience to environmental change in human-dominated landscapes.

Robotics for invasive species: state-of-the-art mapping and workshop series

Project lead: George Jackson-Mills, University of Leeds

This project will deliver a focused workshop series that unites leading roboticists and ecologists to explore bold, high-risk, high-reward opportunities for tackling invasive species management with robotics.

Towards multi-modal ecosystem modelling

Project lead: Oisin Mac Aodha, University of Edinburgh

This project will advocate for investigating a new generation of computational methods that leverage multi-modal data to provide more granular insights into different ecosystems and the species contained within them.

The role of individual variation in population and ecosystem resilience

Project lead: Daniel Nussey, University of Edinburgh

This project will review how individuals are known to vary in their ability to respond to environmental cues and to resist or recover from environmental challenges in natural populations, and consider how this individual level variation might shape population and ecosystem resilience.

Risk, uncertainty and ecosystem resilience

Project lead: Michael O'Connor, Independent

This project will investigate models of risk and uncertainty across a range of fields, focusing on how they influence the way we (mis)value ecosystems, and looking towards potential applications to the insurance industry.

Addressing nature-related risks to engineer ecosystem resilience

Project lead: Tom Oliver, University of Reading

This project will test and refine a new framework for screening different solutions to the nature crisis; we’ll take a systems approach to assessing risk mitigation and adaptation, as well as identifying potential negative side-effects, trade-offs and co-benefits.

Engineering methane cycling in trees for climate and ecosystem resilience

Project lead: Sunitha Pangala, Imperial College London

This project tests whether tree methane cycling is an engineerable resilience trait and delivers a validated woody-tissue methods kit and a deployable genome-to-trait pipeline, laying the groundwork for future augmentation of methanotrophic communities.

Predicting changes in ecosystem dynamics

Project lead: Nathalie Pettorelli, Institute of Zoology

This project will review attempts to model complex biological systems, and assess (i) their ability to simulate ecosystems that give rise to known emergent properties and obey known ecological principles; (ii) their reliance on metrics that can be easily derived from freely available data; and (iii) their potential to yield AI breakthroughs.

Forecasting biodiversity and ecosystem resilience to inform and assess interventions

Project lead: Eric Postma, University of Exeter

This project will review the forecasting literature and identify the key players in the UK’s forecasting landscape to inform the development of a multidisciplinary ecosystem forecasting framework aimed at developing, monitoring and assessing large-scale ecosystem interventions.

Landscape Engineering for Biodiversity Resilience Applications (LEBRA)

Project lead: Axel Rossberg, Queen Mary University of London

This project will provide the theoretical foundation for a new landscape biodiversity engineering tool powered by computationally efficient modelling rooted in first ecological principles.

Socio-technical engineering for ecosystem resilience

Project lead: Lindsay Stringer, University of York

This project will deliver a socially responsible framework for engineering ecosystem resilience, applicable across a range of innovations, integrating diverse knowledge and stakeholder perspectives.

Integrating biodiversity monitoring with metrics of ecosystem resilience

Project lead: Joseph Tobias, Imperial College London

This project will focus on streamlining integration between advanced biodiversity monitoring technologies and predictive ecosystem models and metrics with improved capacity to monitor ecosystem risks and identify appropriate interventions.

Meet the programme team

Our Programme Directors are supported by a core team that provides a blend of operational coordination and highly specialised technical expertise.

Yannick Wurm

Programme Director

Yannick joins ARIA from Queen Mary University of London, where he is Professor of Evolutionary Genomics & Bioinformatics. Yannick pioneered the use of molecular tools to assess pollinator health, has built startups to commercialise genome analysis software, and created a real-time network for pollinator monitoring.

Alex Smith

Programme Specialist

Alex is a project management professional with experience in complex transformations. He recently streamlined national public service infrastructure for the Nursing and Midwifery Council and has led strategic initiatives at the London School of Economics, including delivering programmes, establishing governance and replacing legacy systems. Alex supports ARIA as an operating partner from Pace.

Seth Barribeau

External Technical Advisor

Seth is a biotech strategist who has led evolutionary ecology labs in the US and UK, co-founded computational oncology startup Intervance, and led international genomics consortia across 20+ institutions. He holds a PhD in Zoology from University of Canterbury and has held roles at Kyoto University, Emory University, ETH Zurich, East Carolina University, and the University of Liverpool.

Alice Pettitt

Frontier Specialist

Alice works with the Programme Directors to scope out emerging areas of technology that can shape current and future ARIA programmes. Before ARIA, she was a Venture Fellow at Creator Fund and a Founder's Associate at Gathr. She holds a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from UCL and has also carried out conservation research in the Amazon rainforest.

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