Tool using AI to understand ecosystem service

Learn about ARIES in less than 3 minutes by watching this video!

The main problem that the ARIES team want to solve is to provide a flexible tool to answer questions in relation to sustainability and the environment. It believes the necessary information is partially already existing or will become available as new studies and analyses are carried out, but the main challenge to overcome is the lack of coordination and organisation of the information available among experts of different areas. ARIES wants to provide the instruments to consider all the aspects of a problem and find the best possible answer to it in order to contribute to well-informed nature positive decision-making. What ARIES proposes is a system that enables the combination of knowledge from the different disciplines that provide the integrated information necessary to answer the users’ queries.

ARIES is an artificial intelligent modeller, rather than a single model or collection of models. ARIES chooses ecological process models where appropriate, and turns to simpler models where process models do not exist or are inadequate. Based on a simple user query, ARIES builds all the agents involved in the nature/society interaction, connects them into a flow network, and creates the best possible models for each agent and connection. The result is a detailed, adaptive, and dynamic assessment of  how nature provides benefits to people.

ARIES is currently collaborating with a number of National Statistical Offices and is in close relationship with institutions working in the area of sustainability at global level, such as UNSD, UNEP, World Bank, ESA, NASA, JRC, the SEEA community. Even if constrained by the existing data and model availability, the solution adjusts as closely as possible to the best standards available in this sector.

For non-profit purposes, ARIES can offer a year collaboration for €100k, in which it commits to have a person in the team fully dedicated to the project. For involvement with the private sector, discussions about the kind of collaboration need to be undertaken.