A decade of real-time intelligence for the planet

This Earth Day marks a decade of getting real-time intelligence into the hands of people protecting the planet. Philanthropist and Ai2 founder Paul Allen’s conviction was straightforward but powerful: those on the ground, at the front lines, deserve better information. They need to know what’s happening and where, so they can act in time. 

That commitment began with Allen and continues through Ai2. What started as a belief that AI and technology could make a material difference for conservation has grown into a set of programs operating at planetary scale. 

• EarthRanger helps coordinate on-the-ground protection of wildlife, ecosystems, and the communities that depend on them across more than 900 protected areas in 95 countries.
• Skylight brings that same reach across nearly 150 organizations, helping governments and conservation organizations see what's happening in their oceans so they can act on it. And
• OlmoEarth transforms satellite imagery, radar, and real-world observations into timely, trustworthy intelligence.

EarthRanger: From alert to action

In northern Thailand, the boundary between forest and farmland is a nightly negotiation. Wild elephants emerging from protected areas to raid durian and jackfruit orchards, pineapple fields, and cassava plantations bring real economic harm – and sometimes physical danger – to farming communities that have lived alongside them for generations. 

A new initiative led by Thailand's Department of National Parks, conservation partners, and local farming communities uses EarthRanger to bring together AI, camera-trap technology from Wildlife Protection Solutions, and community-driven data collection to change the paradigm.

With the platform as the backbone, community members log elephant sightings, crop damage, and conflict incidents directly from their phones through EarthRanger's mobile app. At Kuiburi National Park, 64 AI-enabled camera traps across 32 farms transmit real-time alerts automatically into EarthRanger the moment elephants step out of cover. When movement toward a known crop area is detected, 25 community rangers across five response teams mobilize within minutes. 

The immediate goal is to guide elephants back into the forest before serious damage occurs. The longer one is to move from reactive response to predictive, using spatial patterns and individual profiles to anticipate conflict before it happens.

Thailand is just one example. EarthRanger's 10-Year Impact Report documents what a decade of this work looks like across hundreds of protected areas worldwide—read it here.

Skylight: From detection to results

The same challenge – information arriving too late to act on – shows up in a very different form on the open ocean. Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing costs an estimated $23 billion a year in stolen marine resources and drives the depletion of fisheries on which coastal communities, especially underresourced nations and small island states, depend. Ships turn off tracking systems, operate at night, and transfer catch at sea to obscure their origins. For decades, illegal fishing has relied on a simple bet: evade authorities, face no accountability.

Skylight, powered by the same technology in OlmoEarth, is helping nations turn the tables. 

With Skylight, we pioneered the first real-time, global detection of vessels using publicly available satellite imagery—and satellite monitoring, validated analytics, and legal follow-through now form a continuous chain from detection to sanction. 

Earlier this year, Argentina's Naval Prefecture identified a foreign fishing vessel operating within its waters. Skylight's advanced analytics helped validate the detection and contributed to an enforcement action that resulted in a significant fine. Argentine officials describe the case as a historical precedent: effective economic sanctions imposed without ever needing to physically intercept or board the vessel. 

Skylight isn’t simply a technical advancement—it's helping shift what governance at sea looks like, offering a model for how nations can protect their waters even where resources, distances, and risk have historically made doing so nearly impossible.

While illegal fishing remains Skylight's core focus, it’s not the only threat happening far offshore and out of sight. We’re already integrating new capabilities that bring previously unseen pollution, including oil spills, into focus, and working with partners to push that visibility closer to real time.

OlmoEarth: The AI behind powerful insights

OlmoEarth is our family of open foundation models built entirely in-house for Earth observation. Trained on terabytes of information, OlmoEarth uses optical imagery, radar, and other satellite data to detect vessels, map land cover change, estimate wildfire risk, and identify deforestation. Where once that kind of planetary-scale analysis took months, OlmoEarth delivers it in hours, mapping what’s where, detecting changes as they happen, and identifying threats across land, sea, coastlines, and beyond.

OlmoEarth is also openly available, so partners worldwide can adapt it to their own needs. Global Mangrove Watch found that using OlmoEarth in early access achieved 97% accuracy while significantly reducing processing time, enabling near-real-time monitoring of mangroves – which play a vital role in climate change mitigation – for the first time.

What comes next

This Earth Day, Ai2's focus is where it has always been: building tools that give communities, governments, and organizations on the frontlines the information and capabilities they need to protect the planet. That work is ongoing, and Ai2 is committed to it for the long term.