It’s time for Ecosystem Intelligence

At Hypernature, we’re pursuing a bold mission: to give ecosystems intelligence.

What does that mean? It means enabling ecosystems to sense, interpret, and adapt for themselves — not as passive assets we manage, but as dynamic systems with their own capacity to understand and respond to change. In practice, ecosystem intelligence becomes a new ecosystem function. A kind of nervous system. A new category of infrastructure.

If that sounds “out there,” it shouldn’t. To us, this feels like the natural evolution of human intelligence technologies applied to ecological systems. At some point, the tools we build to manage, understand and report on ecosystems begin to merge with the ecosystems themselves. This could even mark a new evolutionary transition for life on Earth (Smith & Szathmary, 1997)

The ecosystem intelligence perspective avoids the limitations of narrower foci like “business intelligence,” “nature intelligence,” or “climate intelligence.” These approaches optimise for isolated metrics, carbon, yield, biodiversity, compliance – but ecosystems don’t operate in silos. What we want is for all components of an ecosystem to thrive — jobs, production, communities, soil, biodiversity, climate resilience. Fragmented intelligence can’t deliver that.

At Hypernature, we bring decades of experience building intelligence systems that automate predictions and recommendations for complex adaptive systems. Again and again, we’ve seen ecosystems managed through narrow, oversimplified lenses — even when the real bottleneck is the absence of a system‑level perspective.

This is why we believe it’s time to build infrastructure for the ecosystem itself — a shared intelligence layer that businesses, governments, and communities can build on to make better decisions and adapt together.

So what is ecosystem intelligence made of? A hybrid of silicon‑based computation and human/institutional intelligence (land stewards, regulators, businesses, communities) giving the ecosystem the ability to sense, actuate, interpret, reason, coordinate, and adapt.

Crucially, ecosystem intelligence is notabout measuring everything or building perfect digital twins. Ecosystems are messy, incomplete, and full of uncertainty — and yet we know a great deal about how they behave.

Intelligence means making good decisions with imperfect information and recognising that desirable future states may look nothing like the present (Gunderson & Holling, 2002). Think of a degraded landscape today versus what it could become in ten years.

There is also a deep technical connection between ecosystem intelligence and the next generation of AI. The frontier of AI is moving toward world models — systems that understand and reason about the world, not just pattern‑match. This ability to interpret, predict, and reason across scales is central to ecosystem intelligence. And it’s something we’ve spent decades building and training models to do for complex adaptive systems.

One challenge with many “nature intelligence” approaches is the assumption that nature is separate from us. We see that as outdated and unhelpful. Humans are part of most ecosystems, and ecosystem intelligence requires understanding the roles our species can play within them — not pretending we sit outside them. Our relationship with living systems is still primitive. Many of the ecosystems we will eventually thrive within don’t even exist yet. Ecosystem intelligence can help us design and realise these new, resilient, productive systems (synthetic ecology, anyone?).

So where is ecosystem intelligence most needed now?

Three obvious candidates would be top of a priority list (though there are many more):

• Global agrifood supply chains — highly exposed to ecological volatility, globally interconnected, and under pressure to transform while remaining productive.
• Cities — which must continue delivering essential services while reinventing how they sustain themselves.
• Degraded landscapes— over a billion hectares that need to be rebuilt into resilient, functioning ecosystems.

It’s time to think seriously about — and start building — ecosystem intelligence.

References

Smith & Szathmary. The major transitions in evolution. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Gunderson & Holling. Panarchy : understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press, 2002.