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.
-
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.
-
This is where most of today's work sits. Foundation models, multimodal AI, and embeddings are disclosing patterns and structure inside increasingly complex datasets.
-
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.
-
The instruments and methods capturing signals from non-human animals and living systems in the field.
-
Foundation models, embeddings and datasets — and where shared resources could reduce duplicate efforts.
-
Animal data governance, Data Sovereignty, privacy-preserving architectures, ecological protection and other conservation efforts.
-
The standards and coordination layer that would enable tools, models, and datasets across the field to actually work together.
Who This Is ForIf you're working on animal communication, machine learning, or ecological and multi-modal sensing, this network is being built with you in mind:
Researchers
Engineers
Technologists
Conservation practitioners
Ethicists
Infrastructure builders
Philanthropic partners
We’ve already confirmed all of the in-person participants, inviting a small working group to ensure the conversation is focused and productive.
But this work is bigger than one room. So this page is for all those who’re interested in joining remotely, contributing to the discussion, and helping us map who else is working in this space.
Can't make the time or timezone work? Sign up anyway — we're building an ongoing network and will keep you posted on future sessions, working groups, and other ways to contribute.