OlmoEarth's impact: Global Ecosystem Atlas

The Global Ecosystem Atlas (GEA), a program of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), is an effort to provide a transparent and globally consistent view of ecosystems, enabling countries, communities, and practitioners to plan, prioritize, and monitor ecosystem health and nature-positive action over time. The work underpins national biodiversity plans and climate commitments, providing regulators and program leads with a shared baseline to target resources and measure results.

“Less than 20% of the world's ecosystems are subject to satellite monitoring,” Dr. Nicholas Murray, Lead Scientist of the GEA initiatives and Associate Professor of Global Ecology & Conservation at James Cook University in Australia, says. “The desert shrublands, for instance—there's no global map. What we try to do in the Atlas is shine a light on all those ecosystems that people don't really think about.”

Before partnering with us, GEA faced familiar blockers: long production cycles for global maps, fragmented workflows that made quality control difficult, and a publication model requiring extensive internal and external reviews—slowing updates and creating uncertainty about cadence.

“One reason ecosystems have been so poorly mapped is because they have been difficult to reliably distinguish from space using commonly applied remote sensing methods,” Murray says. “We're looking for new ways to tackle a really challenging problem that can reduce the setup and running costs of our ecosystem mapping pipelines, allowing us to affordably and accurately classify ecosystems and make regular updates to our map datasets in a changing world.”

Leveraging the OlmoEarth Platform, the GEA team is annotating ~90,000 points that cover all of the world’s ecosystems. These expertly labeled points will be used to distinguish among the more than 100 types of ecosystems on Earth – e.g., terrestrial, aquatic, forest, or desert.

“Training data – human labels – remain a core requirement for any mapping program, particularly for ecosystems that lack public archives of their occurrences or existing data of where they are likely to occur, and OlmoEarth Platform allows us to do that efficiently and with high accuracy,” Murray says. “That's really important.”

The result is a clearer path from raw inputs to decision-ready maps: faster turnaround, consistent quality, and an auditable record of outcomes that support nature-based solutions at scale. By aligning scientific methods with stakeholder workflows, GEA can keep products current faster, helping decision-makers act with confidence.

Murray says he’s excited about what the future of the OlmoEarth Platform holds, such as using OlmoEarth’s foundation models and AI infrastructure to support ecosystem condition monitoring, retrospective analysis, and alerting.

“AI is helping us put overlooked ecosystems on the map, and that's really important, because you need to manage the planet as a whole,” Murray says. “Putting over a hundred ecosystem types around the world on a global map is something that has yet to be achieved, in part because of the lack of classification methods that could overcome the challenge of mapping so many different ecosystem types. Working with OlmoEarth has allowed us to reduce the setup costs of implementing coordinated training data collection across a large annotation team, and also enabled us to activate a new class of models that are proving to be really effective for the problem that we're working on.”

"The Global Ecosystems Atlas turns trusted data into actionable insights while tools like Ai2’s OlmoEarth help us overcome the technical challenges required to get there," adds Yana Gevorgyan, Director of the GEO Secretariat. "Building the world’s most comprehensive, standardized resource on the distribution, condition, and change of all ecosystems is a technically formidable challenge, long considered impossible. With AI and collaboration with partners like Ai2, Google, and Esri, it’s now moving from vision to reality. The Global Ecosystem Atlas, powered by tools like OlmoEarth, is more than a map – it’s the knowledge infrastructure our planet needs to map, measure, and manage ecosystems more effectively."