The expansion of China’s modernized eco-environmental monitoring networks has generated vast amounts of data. Consequently, traditional, expertise-reliant analysis is increasingly ill-suited for agile regulatory decision-making. Although large language models (LLMs) present a promising alternative, their practical deployment remains limited by domain-specific knowledge gaps, hallucinations and an inherent difficulty in managing multi-faceted ecological tasks. This study introduces EnvSentry, a novel multi-engine collaborative LLM framework designed for intelligent eco-environmental monitoring and governance. EnvSentry coordinates reasoning, instruction, and multimodal engines, supported by a dynamic, vector-indexed knowledge base and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ensure factual veracity. By transitioning operational workflows from fragmented, latent batch processing to integrated, real-time intelligent agent chains, the system achieves a closed-loop capability of intent recognition, data retrieval, and quality control. The model was evaluated across distinct environmental contexts, specifically water quality anomaly detection and air quality forecasting. Results show that EnvSentry yields higher analytical precision and attribution rates than baseline methods, while compressing decision-making latency from hours to seconds. Relative to baseline models, EnvSentry achieves a 25% improvement in water quality attribution accuracy (50% to 75%), a 90% reduction in decision making latency for anomaly detection, and a 10% absolute gain in data anomaly detection accuracy. In air quality forecasting, it reduces expert judgment time from 60 to 20 min and attains >85% agreement with expert forecasts when used by non-specialist personnel. These improvements suggest a practical shift in eco-environmental monitoring—moving from fragmented, reactive measures toward an integrated and proactive system. Consequently, this approach offers a viable path toward data-driven autonomous ecological management.
Li et al. (Wed,) studied this question.