Scaling Species Diversity Analysis in Carbon Credit Projects with Large-Context LLMs

AbstractReforestation and revegetation projects can help mitigate climate change because plant growth removes CO2 from the air. However, the use of non-native species and monocultures in these projects may negatively affect biodiversity. Here, we describe a data pipeline to extract information about species that are planted or managed in over 1,000 afforestation/reforestation/revegetation and improved forest management projects, based on detailed project documentation. The pipeline leverages a large-context LLM and results in a macro-averaged recall of 79% and a macro-averaged precision of 89% across all projects and species.