Building the Technical Foundations of an Interspecies Internet
The Interspecies Internet NYC Climate Week session will be held in collaboration with Nature Tech Collective and the Doris Duke Foundation.
Working Session · New York Climate Week 2026
A small working session exploring what it will take to move interspecies communication research from isolated breakthroughs toward shared, interoperable infrastructure — and how AI-learned representations of animal signals go beyond interpretation and support interaction.
Date: Friday 25 September 2026
Time: 12:30 – 4:00 pm ET
Venue: Treehouse, Doris Duke Foundation, New York City
Format: In-room + remote
Host: Interspecies Internet
Co-host: Nature Tech Collective
Why Now?Research into animal communication, AI, and biological sensing is advancing fast but in isolation. The field has broadly moved through two stages. We think a third is approaching, and it's still largely unexplored.
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New ways for animals and living systems to express signals that humans can capture using tools such as: bioacoustic sensors, computer vision, wearables, and environmental sensing. This phase focused largely on building channels and collecting data.
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This is where most of today's work sits. Foundation models, multimodal AI, and embeddings are disclosing patterns and structure inside increasingly complex datasets.
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This phase represents an open question: how could learned representations power adaptive systems for more responsive interaction between humans, animals and living systems? And what forms of infrastructure, governance, and ethics would this transformation require?
What We're MappingOur first step is a mapping exercise: who's working in this space, and what gaps are they addressing? The working group itself was structured around four areas.
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The instruments and methods capturing signals from non-human animals and living systems in the field.
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Foundation models, embeddings and datasets — and where shared resources could reduce duplicate efforts.
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Animal data governance, Data Sovereignty, privacy-preserving architectures, ecological protection and other conservation efforts.
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The standards and coordination layer that would enable tools, models, and datasets across the field to actually work together.
Who This Is ForWe brought together a small, focused group of researchers, technologists, practitioners, and others working across animal communication, machine learning, and ecological and multi-modal sensing.
But this work is bigger than one room. We also welcomed applicants to join remotely, contribute to the discussion, and help us build a clearer picture of who else is working in this space. Below is the list of participants who joined us.
In Person ParticipantsNicole Loher — CETI Program
Marconi — Wildmon
Emma Crowe — MOTH Program
Paige Perillat-Piratoine — Nature Tech Collective
Brittany Solano — Earth Species Project
Danilo Olivaz — Earth Species Project
Jinger Zeng — Seeed Studio
Neil Gershenfeld — Interspecies Internet
Diana Reiss — Interspecies Internet
Irene Pepperberg — Interspecies Internet
Rajesh Kasturirangan — Socratus
Leena Al Olaimy — Symbaiosys
Tom Walker — Cecil Earth
Mara Lehmann — Archaster Labs
Kevin Mariott — XPRIZE Foundation
Kate Armstrong — Interspecies Internet
Matt Browning — Ecological Medicine at Clemson University
Candi Corcoran — JPMorgan; Data & Governance
Austin Wade Smith — Regen Foundation
Catjee Kluskens
Kees Kluskens
Online ParticipantsAarati Akkapeddi — NYU Tandon
Kaja Wasik — Echo Labs
Namitha Suresh — Flox Intelligence
Jeff Reed — Grizzly Systems
Tammara Aurora — Bioacoustics Centre India
Emma Mathies — Earth Species Project
Beno — Fab Lab Peru / REGEN.now
Carolina Almeida — Interspecies Internet
Priya Prakash — D4SC.io
Vanessa Wijngaarden — Anicom
Vint Cerf — Interspecies Internet
Cathy Richards — Open Environmental Data Project
Sasha Sebright — Unearthtodox
Brenda McCowan — UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine
Mark Graham — Internet Archive
Elena Giardina — National Geographic
Álvaro Laiz — Independent Researcher & Artist
Courtney Vail — Lightkeepers
Talia Speaker — Wild Labs
Irina Wang — Dark Matter Labs