Foundational computer science at the heart of biodiversity science

We are living through both an ecological crisis and a revolution in computing, and how research infrastructures respond to the intersection of these two realities will determine whether biodiversity science is equipped to matter at the scale and speed the world requires. Across domains, the most enduring research infrastructures have not been those that adopted new technologies reactively, but those built on a deep understanding of where computer science was heading: how knowledge would be represented, how machines would reason over it, how trust and provenance would be encoded, and how intelligence would emerge from federated, distributed systems. Biodiversity science is no exception, and in many ways its complexity, scale, and heterogeneity make having sound foundations even more critical. This talk argues for a Foundations First approach to what we define as Biodiversity Intelligence, the capacity to transform distributed observations of the living world into robust, reproducible, and actionable knowledge for researchers, policymakers, and society. But solid foundations are not only about technology. The infrastructures that will truly serve biodiversity science are those that also rethink the human roles that build, maintain, and support them, moving from classical software development and user requirement collection towards Forward Deployment Engineering, where technical expertise meets user needs in the field, and preparing researchers themselves to become active, literate participants in an AI-enabled scientific environment rather than passive consumers of tools. We will examine how foundational shifts in computer science, from FAIR Digital Objects and machine-actionable workflows to Digital Twins for ecosystem modelling and AI-assisted knowledge discovery, must be matched by equally deliberate shifts in how we train, organise, and empower the people behind the infrastructure. The conclusion is simple: serving users well, over the long term, requires both solid technical foundations and a new generation of people prepared to bring them to life.