Transforming ecosystem management in Scotland: The role of AI and Geospatial technology

At CivTech, we regularly invite guest contributors to share their insights. This time, we’re delighted to feature a blog from David Genney, Protected Areas and Surveillance Manager at NatureScot, exploring how AI and geospatial technology are transforming biodiversity monitoring in Scotland.

Biodiversity loss is a pressing challenge, and with Scotland’s commitment to protecting 30% of its land and seas by 2030, innovative solutions are needed to monitor and manage these areas effectively. In this blog, David discusses how NatureScot’s collaboration with CivTech and Informed Solutions has led to the development of InformedINSIGHT™, an AI-enabled platform that integrates satellite data, historical records, and ecological insights to revolutionise ecosystem management. Read on to discover how this technology is helping Scotland safeguard its natural heritage for the future.

David Genney, second from the right, alongside NatureScot and Informed Solutions colleagues.

In recent years, biodiversity loss has emerged as a critical challenge for Scotland’s landscape, prompting two urgent questions: How do we effectively monitor Protected Areas, and how do we use this knowledge to halt nature’s decline? At NatureScot, we’ve been tackling these questions head-on, and our collaboration with CivTech and Informed Solutions has been a crucial part of the journey.

Back in 2019, we posed a bold question as part of the Innovate for Nature CivTech Challenge: “How do we develop a meaningful understanding of the biodiversity crisis to inform the actions we need to take to address it?” This challenge was set in the context of the global initiative, 30 by 30, which seeks to protect or conserve 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030, a target Scotland has committed to achieving.

Currently, around 18% of Scotland’s land and freshwater is designated as protected, but if we’re to meet the 30% target, we’ll need to expand that coverage by 60% over the next five years. Doing this means we have to rethink how we monitor the health of these areas—and that’s no easy task. Our existing resources are already stretched to fulfil our current commitments accurately and effectively. So, the sheer scale of landscapes and marine areas we’re responsible for protecting makes accurate and timely assessment challenging.

The CivTech Challenge: Harnessing AI and Earth Observation Data Analytics

In 2022, as part of the broader Innovate for Nature Challenge, CivTech launched Challenge 8.5, inviting innovative companies to explore how technology could help us manage Scotland’s protected areas and deliver our commitment to 30 by 30. After a competitive process, we selected Informed Solutions to partner with us. Their expertise in AI, data analytics, and geospatial technology, along with their excellent User-Centred Design approach, provided the perfect partnership, working collaboratively with our in-house experts to problem-solve and innovate together.

Our partnership has developed a flexible, scalable system that makes the best use of a broad range of evidence sources, such as Earth Observation (EO) data including satellite imagery, historical documents and records from years of previous monitoring work, to streamline how we manage monitoring, drive efficiencies and help spot signs of environmental stress earlier.

A Collaborative Approach to Monitoring Nature’s Health

One of the standout elements of this collaboration was the deeply integrated, user-driven approach. Together with Informed Solutions, we worked closely with our Site Condition Monitoring (SCM) teams across both marine and terrestrial environments. By involving the people directly managing our natural assets, through iterative prototyping and constant feedback, we ensured the solution was grounded in the real-world challenges they face and robust scientific approaches.

What Does InformedINSIGHT™ Do?

The result of our collaboration has been InformedINSIGHT™, a powerful flexible, scalable, and future-proof solution for managing the complexity of environmental asset and biodiversity monitoring. Through its AI-enabled capability it pulls together and analyses diverse data sources and makes ‘decision ready’ for use in practical business workflows, enabling us to pinpoint changes in ecosystem health before it’s too late.

By integrating multiple data sources at multiple scales, from satellite imagery to eDNA, it enables proactive decision-making, helping us prioritise efforts where they matter most. This ensures that monitoring and interventions are targeted, effective and proactive.

As we work toward the 30 by 30 target, the platform plays a vital role in shifting from reactive monitoring to a preventative approach, streamlining prioritisation and analysis so that teams can respond faster to environmental changes. Delivering an effective transition from a fragmented, feature-based approach, to a more holistic, landscape-scale understanding of ecosystem health, simply cannot be achieved without the innovative capabilities provided by the platform.

The platform enhances coordination, reduces duplication, and streamlines workflows. Our modelling indicates that it is likely to enable a 45% to 66% reduction in protected areas monitoring program operating costs if all our reform work is implemented. As a result, we have paved the way to being able to monitor the additional 60% of terrestrial and marine protected areas to meet our 30 by 30 target, without an increase in program operating cost.

But it’s not just about savings; it’s about harnessing innovation to do what we do smarter, better, and for the future.

Four key operational benefits of InformedINSIGHT™:

• Prioritisation – Directing efforts where they will deliver the greatest ecological impact, ensuring resources are allocated strategically.

• Integration of Cutting-Edge Data – Continuously improving monitoring through new data sources, models, and processing techniques, driving innovation and insight.

• Optimisation – Offering flexible configurations that allow seamless monitoring across multiple sites and features, reducing redundancy and enhancing efficiency.

• Future-Proofed Monitoring – Built on a cloud-native architecture that minimises costs, automates workflows, and allows for rapid updates to adapt to evolving environmental challenges.

Through the benefits of broader oversight, smarter resource allocation, and improved monitoring accuracy, InformedINSIGHT™ is setting a new benchmark for protecting and managing ecosystems; not just for today, but for the future.

What’s Next? Scaling for Impact

We are excited to be rolling out InformedINSIGHT™ nationally across Scotland in the coming months. We believe the benefits of InformedINSIGHT™ can deliver similar benefits throughout the world, across a host of other countries mobilising to meet the 30 by 30 challenge. With NatureScot’s and CivTech’s support, it’s encouraging to see Informed Solutions taking this product to international markets and other organisations in the environmental asset monitoring and performance space. By sharing these innovations, we’re placing Scotland at the heart of the worldwide effort to tackle the impacts of climate change and halt the future loss of important biodiversity.

For those of us who work to safeguard Scotland’s unique biodiversity, this partnership has shown that when technology and ecology come together, we can develop real-world solutions that can accelerate our response to these existential challenges and threats.