Professor Ian Donohue

Our partnership brings together world-leading researchers and the key players in the Irish wind energy sector to add significant value to green renewable energy and enhance its competitiveness through developing the template and tools needed to optimise land management and the delivery of natural capital co-benefits from onshore wind farms.

We will develop a smart environmental monitoring system that will bring about a revolution in biodiversity quantification by delivering and interpreting dynamic high resolution biodiversity data in real time. We will develop and integrate acoustic, visual and mm-wave all-weather radar sensors, with processing and interpretation using AI species-recognition and functional diversity tools, to address translation of information from landscapes and animals via digital means to human understanding. Our project will bring about a step-change in environmental monitoring, transforming data resolution and quality, while addressing explicitly what is lost and gained through digital translation from animal to human understanding.

Decarb-AI is an exciting research project aimed at reducing Ireland"s carbon emissions using Artificial Intelligence (AI). This project brings together top researchers from seven Irish universities, combining their expertise in AI, environmental science, and engineering to tackle climate emissions. Using advanced computing power, the team will create AI-based tools to measure and predict carbon emissions, manage natural resources, and support businesses in becoming more environmentally friendly. The project also includes special training for students, helping them become innovative leaders who can apply these solutions in the real world, contributing to Ireland"s goal of a greener, healthier future.

Ecosystems worldwide are being increasingly affected by a multitude of components of human-induced global environmental change, including land-use change, climate change, habitat loss and nutrient enrichment of both land and water. This is causing species to go extinct at rates many thousands of times above background levels, undermining even further the capacity of biological communities to cope with, and recover from, disturbances (i.e. their stability). However, we know remarkably little about how these disturbances alter the many different components of ecological stability and less still about the stability of ecosystem functioning and services - respectively, the processes or jobs performed by ecosystems, many of which are utilised directly by humanity, and the goods and services we receive from ecosystems. This project will combine development of new theory, experimental work in the field and large-scale global analyses of ecosystems in collaboration with a global network of scientists, to further our knowledge of how ecosystems respond to and recover from disturbances. By disturbing systems in ways that mimic global change (e.g. by increasing temperature to simulate predicted warming), we can tease apart what makes ecosystems stable or why some may be more suscpetible to collapse, as well as when ecosystems are able to produce the services that humanity relies on. Only by combining different approaches across scales from microorganisms to global systems, and drawing on knowledge of experts from a range of fields, can we begin to gain a more complete understanding of what makes ecosystems stable, and ultimately what might drive them to collapse in our uncertain but increasingly threatened world.