 Good morning. Good day. Good evening, everyone. I suggest that we can get started while more and more people are perhaps joining us. So to start off with, I'd like to quickly introduce myself. I'm going to be the moderator today. My name is Jillian Campbell. I am the head of monitoring review and reporting for the convention on biological diversity secretariat. And for those of you who don't know right now at the global level, we're negotiating a new global biodiversity framework that will set the ambition and the vision for where we want to be in terms of biodiversity in the next 30 years up to 2050. And I think that probably most of you who are listening here today know that there is really an urgent need to protect and conserve and sustainably use the biodiversity resources that we have available to us as a global population. And so we are organizing this event with ITU on in celebration of the International Biodiversity Day in order to really try to consider what can we do differently? How can we better measure? How can we better use technology in order to protect and conserve our biodiversity? And so we have an excellent lineup of panelists today and without further ado, I will introduce you first to the three people who are going to be giving the opening remarks and then we'll move on to the panel discussion. So this morning we have Mr. Malcolm Johnson, who is the ITU Deputy Secretary General. Malcolm has a wealth of experience in terms of information and communication technology. He's been working in this field for quite a long time. He has been the Deputy Secretary General of ITU for a little bit more than six, seven years, and prior to that he was the Director of ITU's telecommunication standardization Bureau. He also worked in a number of different jobs in this field, some with the UK government and others with other organizations. Then we will also have opening remarks from his Excellency Mohammed Idris, who is the Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Egypt to the UN. He has a wealth of experience in terms of the Foreign Service and working with the United Nations. He also is a doctor and so obviously he, I think the issue is related to health and biodiversity are probably dear to his heart. So he will provide some opening remarks from his side. And then finally, in terms of the opening remarks, we will have Mr. His Excellency Philip Odita, who is the Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of the Republic of Uganda to the United Nations. He also has a long career in the Foreign Service with over 30 years of experience in Uganda's diplomatic service. And throughout his service, he has worked extensively with the United Nations, including working specifically also in Asian Pacific. So I will now hand over to Malcolm for his opening remarks. Thank you very much, Julian. So good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome. And thank you for joining today's session on information and communication technologies for biological diversity. The ITU is pleased to join the missions of the Arab Republic of Egypt and the Republic of Uganda to the UN, and the Convention on Biological Diversity to organize this event. And many thanks to the Honourable Ambassadors, Idris and Odita for your support and joining this event in celebration of tomorrow's International Biodiversity Day. And the theme is we're part of the solution. And as I believe the COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear. And we will hear more of this, of course, in this event, information and communication technologies, ICTs, are contributing in many ways to solving the world's most pressing challenges, such as COVID, but also the more long term challenges we face, such as loss of biodiversity and climate change. In fact, I believe that we will not be able to address any of these challenges or achieve any of the UN SDGs without the help of ICTs. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and 5G are driving an unprecedented digital transformation. The next transformation we're facing is how can we best use this transformation for action on climate change and biodiversity? And how can we do it before it's too late? This is what we'll be addressing in this session. As the UN Specialized Agency for ICTs is at the forefront of this digital transformation and has focused on ICTs for climate change ever since 2007, including participating in the climate change conferences to get the message across of how important ICTs are for addressing this challenge. ICT is a custodian of the radio regulations, the only international treaty governing the global use of the radio frequency spectrum and satellite orbits. And the topic of today's session closely resonates with that work on remote sensing and Earth observation. Indeed, satellite observations play a significant role in monitoring oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. Some of the presentations today will show how satellite imagery is converted into actionable information for biodiversity conservation, in addition to many other interesting ICT solutions and use cases. ICTU also develops the technical standards which are widely used in these digital technologies. And one of our aims in this work is to reduce the energy consumption, which of course is increasing significantly as the use of ICTs expand. The UN Secretary General said recently that 2021 was a make or break here to confront the global climate emergency. 2021 kicks off the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which aims to halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems across the globe. This can only succeed if everyone plays a part. But whilst it's important that we do that, it's also very important that we work together and exchange best practices, challenges and solutions. And collaboration, cooperation and coordination are the key words. I'm a big proponent of bringing all stakeholders together to pool our resources for the common good. This has driven the work of ICTU from its beginning over a century and a half ago. And this multi stakeholder approach is at the very heart of ICTU's work today, which is evident at the WSIS forum, which is in this final weekend this week. Thank you all again for joining us and a special thanks to our excellent speakers who look forward very much to hearing it. Thank you very much, Jillian. Thank you so much for this introduction and also for setting the stage for the panel that we're going to have in a minute. And with that, I'll hand over first to Ambassador Idris for his opening remarks. Thank you so much, Jillian. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Allow me at the outset to thank our partners in today's event, the ICTU and the ICTU office for organizing this timely virtual event to focus on how can information technology and communication contribute to our continuous efforts to preserve the biological diversity of our planet. I'm really so glad to be with Deputy Secretary General Johnson and Ambassador Odida and the all distinguished presenters and participants. Excellencies esteemed participants, we celebrate on 22nd of May every year about our birthday day. The events that we witnessed together since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 proved to us the firm interconnection between the health of humans on one hand and the safety of our biodiversity on the other hand. Reserving our nature, environment, and addressing biodiversity loss has become a necessity more than ever before. Here we have several opportunities to work together on the path of the biodiversity protection. Later in October 2021, the 15th session of the COP on biodiversity will take place in coming China. This will be an excellent opportunity to achieve an important step in addressing biodiversity loss by adopting the post 2020 global biodiversity framework. The process for formulating this framework has started under the current presidency of Egypt of COP 14 of the CBD. In order to achieve our targets to ensure the protection of our precious biodiversity as stipulated in the ICTU targets, we must utilize all available tools. Information technology and communication can indeed greatly contribute to our endeavors in this connection. By using the latest ICT, it's possible to collect, analyze, and evaluate a large amount of information efficiently. It is also possible to optimize human behaviors, working processes, and social systems by making positive use of data obtained from the aforementioned information. Examples of rising the ICT includes information and data collection, remote sensing of organisms, analysis and evaluation of impacts of organisms, ecosystems, and habitats, information management, and monitoring and observation of environment changes and behavior of organisms. Dear colleagues, we firmly believe that biodiversity should be addressed in a comprehensive manner that includes all components of the protection of environment based on this understanding. An initiative presented by Egypt was adopted by the CBD COP 14 held in Sharma Sheikh in 2018 to promote the coherent approach for addressing the biodiversity loss, climate change, and land and ecosystem degradation. Finally, I look forward to the presentations from this team's panelists present with us today and to our discussion on the contribution of ICT to addressing biodiversity loss. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Ambassador. And again, thank you for being with us today. I'll now hand over to Ambassador Odita for his opening remarks. Thank you very much. Just briefly. Jillian Campbell and Malcolm Johnson and excellent CEO and distinguished panelists. I'll begin my conversation today by sharing a couple of reflections. The first is taking a walk last year in Fort Lee, New Jersey where I live during the height of the pandemic. I'm also purchasing then the loud chirping of the birds and over the next period of months, the sudden appearance of all sorts of wildlife, raccoons, squirrels, deer, and I also recall in nearby cliffside there were a couple of sightings of bears in the summer. And it seems it takes a pandemic to remind us of the importance of nature. And it seemed at that moment that nature could celebrate a brief interlude of existence without negative impacts of humans. The second reflection is taken from a book by Dr. Stephen Gundry in his The Plant Paradox, where he reminds us that plants appeared on land 450 million years ago. This is long before the first insects arrived and about 220 million years before the first dinosaurs, certainly 400 million before the first humans. Yet we, the late comers seem to have had the most profound impact in degradation of our natural habitats. Yet distinguished delegates Uganda on its part ratified the convention on biodiversity in 1993 and is therefore part of party to its relevant protocols. We developed our first 10 year biodiversity strategy and action plan in 2002, while its successor plan is currently underway. It follows a review and critical updates taking into account guidance from the conference or parties. And in particular, the plan spanning from 2015 to 2005 has integrated gender issues to make it more gender responsive. The plan has several objectives, for instance, strengthening stakeholder coordination and frameworks, enhancing capacity for research monitoring information management and exchange, reducing and managing negative impacts of biodiversity, promoting sustainable use and equitable sharing of costs and benefits of biodiversity, enhancing awareness, harnessing modern biotechnology for socioeconomic development with adequate safety measures and promoting innovative sustainable mechanisms. The priority areas include restoration of degraded wetlands, preventing extinction of threatened or endangered species and curbing illegal wildlife trade, building capacity for effective implementation of access and benefit sharing arrangements, managing pollution and invasive alien species, managing research awareness, information sharing and value, waging of biodiversity and ecosystem services, maintaining biodiversity in mainstreaming biodiversity into sectoral cross sectoral and district development plans, and enhancing participation of indigenous people and local communities, including women, men and youth in implementation of the plan. And a couple of other priority areas aimed at enhancing mobilization and capacity building. I'd just like to say that for us, it's a pleasure to be part of this conversation. And I'd like to thank specifically the organizers and co-organizers of this event, in particular, ITU represented here by Malcolm Johnson, Deputy Secretary General of ITU and the Secretary of the Convention on Biodiversity, represented here by Gillian Campbell, and the permanent mission of the Arab Republic of Egypt, represented by his excellency Muhammad Idris, and all the distinguished panelists for allowing us to be part of this program. By sort of end by reflecting on a national target for promoting Uganda that was developed 15 years ago, following wide consultations with national stakeholders, this tagline was gifted by nature. I need the logical appreciation of the fact that Uganda is naturally endowed with a recorded 18,783 species of fauna and flora, and we do rank among the top 10 most biodiverse countries in the world. That having been said, currently the challenge is to ensure that we can integrate ICT and ensure that we can effectively do what we set out to do. The task is still enormous, there's quite a lot ahead, and specifically as mentioned, we are in the midst of the global pandemic, and so collaboration and international cooperation is key. We celebrate International Day for Biological Diversity tomorrow, Uganda is honored to be an active participant in the global Convention on Biodiversity and its subsidiary body for implementation. I thank you and look forward to the presentation from the distinguished panelists. Thank you so much. And yes, it is good to hear that you are attending the negotiations that we have going on this week. So, we'll now move on to the panel discussion before we get started on the panel discussion I just wanted to give you a few ground rules. My plan is that we will first hear from each of the panelists, and I will be saving all of the questions until the end of the panel discussion so that we make sure that we have a chance for each of the panelists to first share some views with you and some of their expertise. And then once we hear from each of the panelists, feel free to put your questions in the Q&A, which is a button at the bottom of your screen, and then I'll go through those to in order to select questions to have a panel discussion. You can also put your comments in the chat if you if you need or if you want to send me a message on on something that you think should be raised. So with that, we will now move on to the to the panel discussion, we do have an excellent group of panelists who work already are doing amazing things in terms of bringing together ICT and biodiversity. So, you know, it's not that it's just some future thing that we're going to do there are experiences that they will share with you things that are happening right now. So our first panelist is Lillian Pinte, he's the Vice President of Conservation Science at the Jane Goodall Institute. His background is mostly in the use of geospatial technologies, focused of course on the mandate of the Jane Goodall Institute which has to do with conserving chimpanzees and other wildlife and that they're vanishing habitats. There's a lot of experience working not just at sort of the analytical level, but also directly with local communities, villages, national governments in Africa, and an academic institutes. So then the next panelist will be Jason Holmberg, he's the executive director of an organization called Wild Me, which is a nonprofit organization of software professionals and machine learning experts that are working to apply artificial intelligence to combat extinction. This is obviously a very new field where they're using different AI algorithms to try to track individual animals across borders in order to see how conservation strategies are working or where there's gaps. And then we have Mike Gill, who's the director of the Biodiversity Indicators Program at NatureServe. And he's also an honorary fellow at the UN Environment Programs World Conservation Monitoring Center. And he has been working for the past three decades on biodiversity related research monitoring and conservation and certainly works a lot with different governments and local communities and the private sector in order to really provide advice on biodiversity conservation. And then lastly, we have Laura Rudolph, who is a UAE, so United Arab Emirates Ambassador for Nature. And she's an environmental advocate. She's a young person who is one of the 20 Ambassadors for Nature within the UAE and works closely with WWF World Wildlife Foundation to create digital initiatives that provide youth with experience and knowledge so that they can become future environmental leaders. So we have a very broad view of these different aspects of work. And so with that, I will hand over to Lilian. Thank you very much. I'll share my screen. Well, hello everyone. And again, thank you for the invitation to be part of this celebration of the International Day of Biodiversity. By sharing our experience, how information and communication technologies could be part of the conservation solutions. In 1960, when our founder, Dr. Jane Goodall, arrived at what is now Gobi National Park in Tanzania, she had an old binocular and a pen and a paper and her powerful tool of deep and compassionate observation to make this pioneering discovery that redefined our relationship with other animals and nature. Today, the Jane Goodall Institute is a global conservation NGO with a global mission that continues this incredible legacy for science was a focus on long term basic and applied research and buys for conservation action and results. We're a research organization that collaborates and integrates all sorts of different disciplines, sectors, ways of knowing and employ a system driven approach to achieve science based outcomes by tackling some of this most incredible complex questions with intention through the lens of this three major interconnected systems, animals, people, and the environment. So, this last year have offered very humbling reminders. And the new warning is that if you continue this disrespect for nature and continue to ignore the causes of zoonotic diseases, such as intrusive destruction of biodiversity and habit the natural habitats. We may be infected with viruses that cause pandemics, even more disruptive that we're experiencing right now through covered an ITM. Of course, it's incredible. It's amazing and exciting to see the recent explosion in big data and all the associated technologies. You probably, we keep hearing that 90% of today's data has been created in the last two years, which is incredible. But this has been true over the last 30 years, and every two years we generate more 10 times more data. So, giving the situation of the biodiversity, you know, we're wondering how we can do a better job in converting this potential to wiser decisions. So our solution comes from recognizing that the world by diversity in the hands of indigenous people in local communities. So, for more than 25 years, we developed this approach called Takari, which is our community driven conservation approach. So, Takari is a philosophy. It's about ownership, that local communities not need only to be engaged, but they have to own and drive the decisions in the landscapes. It's about recognizing all sorts of knowledge, indigenous, science, data, and if it's done right, then conservation is an outcome of local nature-based development and solutions which support people livelihoods and ecosystem services. So, over the 20 years, we have been using Takari framework to engage with the communities and use technology not for, but with the communities. So, we have been using very high resolution satellite imagery like this one's coming from Maxar as a common language to record local knowledge and map what cannot be seen by satellites, such as values, beliefs that connect people to their landscapes. We use GIS technology to integrate all this data with the local knowledge and participatory approaches to inform development of village land use plans and scale those plans through technology across many other countries from Tanzania, Uganda, DRC, Republic of Congo, and others. We empower and train these local communities with smartphones and mobile apps to enforce these village land use plans and protect them using a variety of apps from ODK to recently ASRI survey one to three. And they have been reporting wildlife presence and illegal activities such as chimpanzees, for example. And we're not only collecting data from drones and high resolution imagery, but we also use it to visualize change like this reforestation between 2005 to 2009 in a village in Tanzania. And we're communicating all this information through dashboards like this one using ASRI RJS powerful platform to decision makers. So what is the solution? From our experience, it's about looking at science and technology process, not to inform from outside, but to be part of this societal decision making processes from inside. It's about engaging from the beginning. It's about empowering people not only with tools, but also with capacity and resources to own and use these tools to drive the decisions which they want to make about their futures, about the use of natural resources in the landscapes. And through technology, of course, we can connect these local efforts with a global vision and coordinate with many other communities to contribute to our global spatial framework and vision. So, I just want to thank you again our partners from local communities to the governments which we're working and also with the private sector for such a long term support. And I welcome all of you to join us in our mission. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing this excellent work where that you are doing of course on a keystone species that allows you to make a change across the region. And so with that, I will hand over to Jason. Good morning. My name is Jason Holmberg. I'm the executive director of an NGO called wild me, and I'm really honored to be here. I'd like to present our application to machine learning for wildlife conservation. There we go. So, wild me we're a little bit unusual. Oftentimes when you hear articles about wildlife conservation you hear scientists say, we're the engineers. And like the previous presenter we firmly believe that engineers operate in support of local conservation strategies and local knowledge was once asked how is AI going to save endangered animals and I said it isn't not at all. What it is going to do is help local conservation strategies, speed and scale their efforts and create conservation strategies that are data driven. And all of these, all of our work as a set of software professionals and machine learning experts is in direct support of individuals in the field. Now our goal as engineers is to iterate. Somebody comes up whether it's an academia or from local knowledge when somebody comes up with a strategy that works. Our goal is to help them apply it and to develop continuous iteration on that strategy. How can we study its effect and rapidly iterate that strategy so that it's getting better with every iteration. So this might be banning fishing or allowing fishing and maybe putting up a fence or taking down a fence. How do we monitor wildlife populations in response to those actions and ensure that they actually work and that we can refine them to do better. And so our strategies are generally directly in support of different modes of wildlife data collection. We're going to talk about aerial surveys and transects and application of the ML to speed and scale those as well as population modeling efforts. These may be micro capture studies where we're tagging and tracking animals over 10 or 20 years. These also may be community engaging rally style events where we don't have a preconceived notion of how many animals we have. So we send hundreds of people into the field to collect data and then we use ML to understand the population dynamics as a result and more and more we're getting into anti poaching as well. So for aerial surveys we're talking about flying planes over large swaths it could be seals on ice or elephants in Africa. The current state of the art is to have rear seat observers observing and manually counting. We're talking about with camera driven approaches that move staff from the plane to the lab where they're reviewing high volumes of imagery and applying ML to rapidly get through hundreds of thousands of photographs to come up with a census. Now the photograph I show here that's actually an easy case. In the real world, we get photographs that look like this. And on the left you can see the little yellow box that's an elephant, and on the very right the actual photograph we see. So this is a great task for ML, but a very laborious task for human view. The other mode we operate in with ML is applying AI for census rallies. And here this is 2016, 2018, 2020, and again in 2022, the Great Grebys rally. Let's get hundreds of people into the field, taking pictures of zebras, and then we're going to use machine models to data mine. Who's who among the zebra population and the giraffe population, literally using computer vision to draw relationships, every pair of photographs, and find the identities of animals and create population models that help us understand how many animals do we have is that more or less than last time. In the Great Grebys rally, I was not just talking about detecting such as finding animals and images with an images with machine learning, but also the level of individual identification. Whether it's the spots on a cheetah that give it unique markings that allow us to noninvasively tag it but rather respectfully photograph it from a distance and yet still identify which cheetah this is. The the fluke of a humpback which has a roar shock like test of black and white on it that is its individual pattern much like a human fingerprint. We use AI to literally find a needle in a haystack of data or answer the question of 20,000 photographs, which individual is represented by this new photograph. So there's power in the name, both in empathy, meaning that we study animals as individuals and get to know them as individuals, rather than as these remote groups as these others. So these are the individuals we know in a study. And as well in being able to individually identify animals, not only can we do population modeling, we can also do other studies like molecular ecology, animal biometrics toxicology and others. In addition to vision and machine learning, we can replace the old form of tagging animals physically, which is invasive and can cause infection or death with just respectful and safe photography at a distance that doesn't interfere with the animals life. For continuous monitoring, in which we're not doing rally style events but rather really following an animal population over borders, time, studies, and some of these animals may live 100 years of more such as the whale shark. We have a wild book and we have wild books for many different species. The wild book ecosystem engages both the public citizen scientists, biologists, computer vision researchers and data scientists around a data management framework as well as a machine learning server that helps speed and scale the efforts of everyone in this network of individuals. We start small with projects, whether it's applying machine learning and wild book to study leafy and we DC dragons, some of the most beautiful creatures on the planet and yet so delicate. And this is a study engaging just three researchers using using ML to support and speed and scale their efforts to study this population, or whether we go global and we go big with wild book. We're talking about fluke book dot org, where we support over 300 researchers with computer vision for 15 different species of whales and dolphins. Ultimately we're trying to do with is is get to a point of impact, where either the data that is processed by machine learning has enabled conservationists and on site representatives to get together and say no we need to change the IUCN red list for a species, or back to population analysis we can track a population and use that data to justify conservation action locally, or even just the publication of new science in which we get global communities of researchers studying a species across the globe to pool their data and knowledge and come up with new insights on the movements and behavior and lifestyles of the different wildlife that they're studying. And the wild needs goal is to be a core of engineers supporting wildlife conservation in the field. Thank you. Thank you for this very interesting presentation. It is extremely exciting to to think about what we can do with some of these new types of algorithms that really can identify individual species and populations and obviously it's important to get the question right so that you can make sure that you're able to track things over time. So I will now hand over to Mike for his intervention. Great. Thank you so much Jillian, and welcome to everyone. I will briefly profile the work of about 1500 experts and 200 organizations around the world are working together to basically accelerate the production and use and access to biodiversity data so this is a global biodiversity network called Geobon, I'll just call it that for short. And my organization NatureServe is a core part of that. But first I just wanted to quickly profile, and Jillian mentioned it right at the start that we are currently seeing governments around the world that will negotiate a new decadal plan and new deal for nature. And just like the UN Convention on Biological Diversity or Sustainable Development Goals or Ramsar Convention wetlands. These these global agreements set targets they set global targets and they set national targets. And the challenge before us is to actually inform those targets guide them and track our progress towards them using indicators. And the challenge further is that these indicators are only as good as the biodiversity data that goes into them. And unfortunately, as we all know, we lack the sufficient adequate and critical but credible biodiversity data around the world. This is just a snapshot of vertebrate population data sets that go into the Living Planet Index. And it looks pretty good because those circles quite large but actually for all parts of the world, we really lack the data we need to be able to actually take the pulse of the planet. And when you overlay that on land with the most biodiverse or mega diverse regions of the planet, such as Uganda and elsewhere, we have this paradox where the data that we need most sometimes is where it's least found. And through this, we've had this global effort for the last 15 years through something called the Group on Earth Observations, which started as a collaboration between space space agencies but it's grown to include ground networks around the world to increase the access use of Earth observation data. And I just finished six years of co-chairing the biodiversity component of that, which again involves about 1500 people from 200 organizations. A big focus for Geobahn and NatureServe is really to actually lower the threshold for the use of new technology by all partners around the world and to actually accelerate technology transfer for conservation. So this is just a really brief snapshot of just some of the Earth observation satellites circling overhead right now. And all these satellites are streaming petabytes of data as we speak. It's a fire hose of data as Lillian said. But for the most part, we don't always know what this data means. So quantity does not necessarily equal quality. We actually have to innovate using machine learning algorithms, cloud computing to actually take that fire hose of data and make sense of it. And secondly, there's lots of great innovations occurring, such as Matt Hansen's Global Force Change and Global Force Watch, where they're actually using the power of Google Earth Engine and cloud computing and machine learning and algorithms to be able to track force loss and force gain over time across the Earth and even actually provide daily early alert warnings to governments around the world where we might be seeing some illegal poaching of trees. Going further on to that and to the ground, we obviously are seeing some major advances in how we actually collect data. One of those is through bio acoustics where we have small sensors that basically eavesdrop on nature. And when you combine that with machine learning and AI and other techniques, you can really start to actually streamline how we actually identify status and abundance and distribution of different species. So just have a listen of this recording from the Bornean rainforest from David Minnaki. And so what you're seeing here is a sonogram coming from acoustic sensors that then gets analyzed to actually identify what these species amphibians are. And these are great techniques actually increase the power of our observation networks using new technologies. Briefly also, we have the power of just making ordinary citizens into human sensors through their GPS enabled smartphones and combining that with machine learning and optical recognition. One great example of this is iNaturalist out of the California Academy of Sciences, where you simply with your smartphone can be an observer or a citizen science of nature. You can really increase the amount and flow of data coming from nontraditional sources. And when we actually look at species records, this is looking at species records found in the US national biodiversity data set, oh by year over time. You'll see that at the beginning, all our records came from museums like the National Museum of Natural History and California Academy of Sciences. And when I watch eBird, eBird is a citizen science app that is just dwarfing all the other sources of information and citizen science really has an incredible potential that's already being realized to actually improve the amount of data and coverage around the world. But again, we need to make sense of all of this. And so putting it all together is the job of Chio Bon and its networks, we work hand in hand with governments around the world to build integrated biodiversity observation and information systems. And we take a user driven approach. So we start with what are those key conservation challenges questions and policies that governments need. And then we design the system around that where we actually then answer. What kind of data do you need and how do we actually get that data and how we increase capacity for governments and institutions and organizations around the world to leverage up on things like remotely sense data cloud computing, AI citizen science and so forth. Now, with some really excellent very simple but powerful outputs for conservation. This is an example of some work that we've been doing in collaboration with Uganda, as well as South Africa and Unaps World Conservation Monitoring Center to bring together local data and national data in Uganda, as well as integrating that with remotely sense data to produce ecosystem threat status maps which can actually identify where we should prioritize conservation efforts. And in the United States we use hundreds of species distribution models to identify the most important areas for biodiversity so that we can protect so we really need to actually triage our approach and identify and protect the areas that are of most importance. And finally, within NatureServe, we're using user driven design and Esri ArcGIS online technology to bring global data sets and national data sets together into flexible formats where we can actually build dashboards to basically drive conservation as we go. And so with that, I will stop and thank you very much. Thank you, Mike. That was very interesting. It's interesting to think about what you can do with sound just not only photos. So I will now hand over to Laura for as our final panelist. Hello everyone. It's a pleasure to be here and joining you in this discussion about using the ICTs for the environment. I'm Laura. I'm 17 and a student and just like many youth around the world. I'm involved in various environmental initiatives which really focus on various public awareness campaigns and youth mobilization, and which really had to utilize technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. So this year with my other fellow youth ambassadors for Nature, an incredible Emirates Nation's WWF team, I've been part of a program called Connecting Nature, which essentially is a program that provides youth with the experiences, knowledge and skills to become future changemakers and environmental users. So Connecting Nature is essentially a platform for youth by youth. We have a website and an app where students can take part in different activities. And as they take part in more activities, they gain digital badges and certificates as like they learn more about the biodiversity and the different issues in this country, and also environmental issues around the world. So in that in the future, we can all have environments at the heart of all our decisions. In the past, we've had lots of outdoor events to harness the power of citizen science to gather data and research in different areas just like Mr. Gill had explained. And so examples would be gathering data on biodiversity in the mangroves or different amounts of plastic pollution on beaches during beach cleanups. We've also had events such as nature hikes and trips to conservation areas, really kind of communicating with different scientists. And I really believe that once you feel connected to nature, you have a bigger desire to protect it. So it was more about encouraging youth to get out there out in nature and just spend time there. In the past, we've had to swiftly adapt to a virtual environment due to pandemic, but of course we've been able to reach so much more youth than before because technology made all our events so much more accessible. So we've had lots of digital workshops and discussions environmental debates, things like quiz and then go nights and environmental topics and screenings of various documentaries. And once you gain a certain amount of badges, you can host your own events and the investors have really planned and delivered lots of experiences as well. Technology, I believe, can also really help bridge the gap between policy makers and youth. So during the summer of 2020, we hosted the reimagined youth circle bachelor series, which essentially was a series of webinars on topics such as their politics and protective nature, flattening the carbon curve, green innovation, food security, and each of these sessions invites a special guest, officials, director generals, UAE ministers and chief executives to present their plans for green recovery and also listen to what you have to say. So the key objective of this series was to offer UAE youth platform to shed our ideas by giving them a voice that effectively reached the same decision makers who had been part of the process. And all of these contributions were then recorded into the form of a flash white paper, which then outlines what over 1600 way youth would like to see in the country's green recovery. And that was then presented to different businesses and ministers of the UAE. I'm also an education coordinator at the Riyadh initiative, which is a completely new flood environmental organization organization. Our mission is to make environmental education and the climate movement accessible to everyone because many, you know, teenagers and children they don't have access to different resources at their schools so their schools might not have lessons that teach environmental topics. So Riyadh was created after a large scale after campaign that mobilized thousands of youth all around the world to digitally protest and make climate pledges. And I really find that youth are so passionate about helping the environment and so we really try to make time and we really try to give as many opportunities as we can to use to help mobilize and empower them. And what I love about the Riyadh initiative is that it's completely digital, which means that we have volunteers from all over the world helping creating toolkits in different languages, organizing campaigns with other organizations around the world and hosting webinars to, you know, increase understanding. And we also have lots of content on social media. And in the past we've digitally partnered with organizations such as UNICEF, Fridays for Future, Lonely Whale and the Student National, as well as universities such as MIT, Duke and Columbia. So as you can see at the bottom are kind of all our toolkits. And these are some of the content that we've placed, really trying to educate everyone about climate change, biodiversity, talking to experts, having different interviews on social media. And really talking about other issues as well that are really intersected with the climate movement. Social media honestly is such a powerful tool to spread awareness and connect people in order to share different ideas and perspectives. So I love seeing youth really utilizing these technologies and I used to use honestly have significantly helped youth and runners work with these past few years. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. So we are, we have heard some very useful interventions and interesting information. And now, I think we are running sort of close time so what I would like to do I think is just sort of ask a couple of questions to each panelist. So I'm going to start with a question that's related to the one in the chat, and I'm going to go back to Laura initially, and then to Lillian on a similar version of this question and so Laura, the question really here that I'm going to ask is, how, how do you take into account sort of advancements in terms of understanding user experience in order to to design the content to design your approach so that you really are able to better engage with youth and and get more youth engaged. And I do want to say I think this is extremely important what what you are doing. As Mike was mentioning, in terms of achieving these biodiversity goals, it can't just be governments, it needs to be everyone. And so, how do we, how do we do this how do we get people involved and it would be really great to hear your views on how do you use the sort of new technology advancements to reach out to more people. And with RIA, especially a big part of our organization is trying to create content to put on social media. And we really try to make it as accessible as possible, but to lots of different people so we really try to make it as clear and simple as we can so that you know children teams of all ages can really read it and also translate it into different languages. And so things like you know bright colors bold statements really help kind of pick out the key bits of information, because I mean when we do research, we go through hundreds of articles and research papers and it is quite sometimes difficult for children to read. These really complex, you know, research, and also the data and everything the grass might be really difficult to understand. So for us it's more about taking all this information and making it accessible to everyone. So that's kind of what you know design and music experience has really helped with. Thanks. So I'm going to ask you a very similar question Lillian. When I was listening to your presentation earlier I was thinking that, you know, obviously you are training the local communities in order to use some of the apps that you've been developing. However, I would imagine that you know you would like to do less and less training and so how do you sort of have this feedback loop that you make sure that you are adjusting the applications that you're developing in order to best cater to the user experience. And just as a side note, I was actually curious also if you are actually using currently sort of apps that connect to the network if you're using some sort of SSID interaction so that people are just texting in order to send in this data. Thanks. So at some level, you know, we use the power of geography to integrate a lot of this data collections and activities at different scales and then connected across, you know, local with regional plans with national policies and global objectives. And this is a typical for us last mile challenge right how how we can actually connect all those communities to this to this capacity so at this point we are very sensitive to what type of data they're collecting so they actually define a lot of times what type of data they feel they need for conservation decision making with us providing and facilitating that process and advising maybe how to do it better and leverage different tools so there is that ownership of from the beginning of the data. And then we have to continuously provide some support with technology because of that last mile challenge challenge but we know how to scale and how this is possible to engage more and more local. I can see more and more local companies who have capacity to fly drones to fix mobile phones and truly connecting them those communities to this expanding networks is it's what it's our strategy to scale. Thank you very much for that explanation. Okay, what I would like to ask both Jason and Mike is sort of a different take on this, which is listening to the presentations yes 90% of the data has been created in the last. However, I want to say that this data is not globally distributed evenly. So, most of the data is being generated in specific places and traditionally those specific places are often not the places where biodiversity is located. And so I'm wondering, in order to to really monitor individual species. And Jason you mentioned and Mike also mentioned some specific drives, but how do you sort of try to stimulate collection of data in places where there is limited data collection over a longer period of time so that it's not just once off events how do we how do we build up these biodiversity monitoring system so that we have routine data is really what I would like to hear your views on so maybe I'll go first to Jason and then to Mike on the same question. This is a great question also related to the user experience question that was asked in the chat and the other panelists just responded to our strategy is is lowering the barrier to entry. This is specifically with ICT so one is data standards, right so if we create a cloud based platform that has a common data standard. If we have good user experience and we've been through several generations of developing user experience for ml and learned not to go to fully automated systems but to start putting humans back in the loop with ml as a as a collaborative data analysis if we provide all of this in a cloud based infrastructure, if we have internationalization if we train ml based on classification of data by local experts that ml will begin reflecting that classification in support of them in a relatable way. And what we can do in is lower the barrier to entry for additional field sites, we saw this a lot with whale shark or very first wild book for whale sharks, where we began to see field stations popping up because the tool was accessible through a browser and the computer vision was accessible without any complex installation. The user experience was easy enough that somebody could go to remote field station. This might be the Maldives the Seychelles, Thailand where there was not a pre existing dedicated research effort. When somebody had the passion and interest to start that they could engage with us get the tools. They can use them freely and in their own way for their own purposes, and start that field station almost instantaneously without meeting a high investment cost to get going in their research. So that's, that would be my answer to the question. Tough to top that Jason but I'll try so so this this is a really hard question in that we've often tried to take shortcuts we have all these global indicators and global data sets that we try and disaggregate to different parts of the world but then the experts on the ground tell us these things are locally valid in many cases. And so I don't think there's an easy solution, except that I think sometimes as scientists we tend to make these things way more complicated than they need to be and the analogy I would use this as our kitchen. If you stock your kitchen with a few core ingredients like flour, sugar, milk, eggs, you can make a cake you can make brownies you can make cookies the same goes with biodiversity data. What we're finding and if there are projects in the tropical Andes and Southeast Asia and Africa and Arctic and everywhere we go. It's really the same core ingredients and you just have to mix those in different ways, and you can come up with some really excellent powerful conservation tools. And we connect those to the users so to those decision makers whether it's a local community or a national or subnational government and by doing that it creates that workflow that repeats itself and builds on itself and starts to actually gain support for more diversity observations on the ground. And I think the way we can kind of streamline that a little bit is through lowering the threshold for countries and organizations to take advantage of icts to do that. Thank you so much. I think that we're out of time. And what I would like to do at the end now, as we're running out of time is perhaps we could go to all of the panelists, including the ambassadors and and to Malcolm from ITU. And just sort of ask, I'm going to ask one broad question, and then you can sort of tell me in one sentence, what your view is as we are providing perhaps some, some thoughts to the to the attendees in this room. What do you think is going to be the major opportunity in terms of using technology for biodiversity moving forward just what do you see as one major opportunity that could create a change over the next decade as we're looking to that to the next decade of biodiversity. I will quickly start since it's my question. And so I think for me in terms of of the opportunities I really think that citizen engagement and engaging citizens is the opportunity. I think that all of the panelists have touched on this, we need more and more people to be involved not only in collecting data, but in using data and then it creates a feedback loop so that people are more and more interested in, and being part of this cycle. So that may be a sort of go in order of how people appear on my screen and go to Lillian. Yes, I think it's the power to convert this data into stories and help connect our brains with our hearts and, and, and engage in more compassion decision making and technologies are helping us not only collect and store manage analyze visualize but also share communicate and encourage that connection so I think this is our major. What I'm excited about to see in the future. Mike. Well I think that's hard repeating what's just been said but it's really about Peter people data and technology. So it's not just technology coming up with the solution but but as Lillian said you have to sort of convert that into something that people care about. I think the blend of citizen science with things like machine learning like we just heard from Jason really has the power to actually just equip and empower people to be seen as as part of the solution and be sensors for nature. Laura. I agree I think is connecting and engaging the public with technology and also openly communicating and easily connecting with experts and you know decision makers with youths and the public. I think any way that we can build community around technology is where we really succeed where we get the tools into the hands of the most innovative. And so we definitely whether it's how we support our software to the researchers we support in different countries, or how we connect scientists across borders. We build a community we find that we succeed much faster. And it's cool to talk about AI and ML but frankly where where those things actually succeed is when they're supporting communities. Ambassador. Yeah, what comes to mind is the whole question of bridging the digital divide, but right now the issue of global cooperation and coordination comes to mind as key in that using ICTs we're better able to collaborate to share to generate the information. And so it looks like there's a lot of potential for us to be able to have access to information instantaneously and at a much more sophisticated level. Thank you. Thank you. Ambassador Idris. Thank you Julianne and thank you for everyone for this really rich and better discussion. I think, as you mentioned, being a former physician, it caught my attention putting your hand on the pulse. It's very important one of the really huge advances in medicine happen when you have more ways of investigation and to know what's happening inside this human body and human brain and you'd be able to have information and analyze it. So I think through these technologies you are now able to really know what's happening within our universe and within our planet and put our hands on the pulse. So you need information that's very important. You need a interpretation of this information to understand what's happening and then you need action. So this cycle I think is very important. The information interpretation and then the management of the case and try to cure the illnesses and keep the our planet in a healthy manner. Thank you very much. Thank you and Malcolm. Thank you Julianne and thanks to all the panelists for some tremendous interventions there really brings a message across so well about the importance of ICTs. And many thanks to the ambassadors Idris and Odita for staying with us right to the end. It's very nice to see that. So it doesn't often happen. So, and I must say I emphasize with the ambassador, he said of the psychological boost of listening to birds in the morning. It's a good example. I agree with everything that's been said, but my key message again is, you know, we, we all need to bring our own specific competencies to the table, and collaborate to cooperate and coordinate our activities so that we avoid duplication of effort and all work for the common If ITU can do anything with regard to providing more spectrum or international standard, then you know we're very, very willing to help that because international standards are very important in ensuring interoperability and benefiting from the economies of scale so it's been wonderful and I hope we can continue this collaboration. Thank you, Julianne. Thank you. I think this right here is an excellent example of collaboration and I would like to thank all of the panelists and also the ambassadors for joining us today, and for the other people who joined us in the room. And I also wanted to say on this international day of biodiversity that we're celebrating. This has been a incredibly up, you know, optimistic side event or optimistic event that we have had. Often I think we do get bogged down thinking about how monumental the task is of trying to protect biodiversity, but I think today what we really showed is that we do have new ways to do this. And there are opportunities we are making progress. And if we do continue to work together and collaborate and engage with people we really can see a change in the right direction. And so with that, I would like to thank everyone again for for joining us. And I hope to see you again, virtually or in person somewhere. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.