AI-Hab is an innovative project being delivered by UKCEH and the University of Lincoln, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to transform how we assess and monitor habitats across the UK.
With the introduction of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) policies and growing demands for habitat restoration, there's an urgent need for scalable, accurate, and efficient tools to support ecological assessments. Traditional methods are time-consuming and require specialist expertise. AI-Hab addresses this gap by automating habitat classification using ground-level imagery.
Using tens of thousands of images from UKCEH’s long-term nationally representative Countryside Survey, this project will leverage the latest technological advances in computer science and software engineering to deliver an automated monitoring tool for habitat classification. Using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) methods developed at the University of Lincoln, the project will process this imagery and associated habitat labels to produce a computer vision model that can provide a user with habitat information and UKHab classifications from field-based imagery.
AI-Hab is funded through the NERC funding opportunity: Tools for automating image analysis for biodiversity monitoring
