Our 2025 Annual Report: A Year of Momentum for Interspecies Understanding

Summary

Our 2025 Annual Report The past few years have seen a steady drumbeat of discoveries that illustrate the complex communications and culture of other animals, many of them accelerated by significant advances in technology. We are proud to be part of this incredible progress in understanding our fellow species. Our 2025 Annual Report highlights the advances we’ve made with our partners over the past year in the burgeoning new field of Animal Language Processing . Across our three core program pillars – Research to Decode, Building the Field, and Preparing Society for Impact – we expanded the tools, partnerships, and conversations needed to advance interspecies understanding. Dive into the Full Report Research to Decode In 2025, we focused on two core areas: 1) developing foundation models for animal communication. and 2) partnering with biologists to point these tools at specific Decode projects. These projects generate new datasets and insights, which improve our general models over time. We open-sourced our flagship foundation model, NatureLM-audio , the first large audio language model designed specifically for analyzing animal sounds. We published 14 new papers , expanded collaborations with researchers studying species ranging from killer whales (with Raincoast Conservation Foundation) to zebra finches (with McGill University) to carrion crows (with Universidad de León), and saw our work recognized at leading conferences including ICLR, NeurIPS, ICASSP, and DCASE. Video: Synchronized drone footage and underwater acoustic recordings from the Raincoast Conservation Foundation . It is illegal to fly drones over marine mammals if not under permit. These video clips were taken under SARA permit XMMS-2-2022-Amendment 2 (at a minimum 30m altitude) Building the Field In 2025, Earth Species Project co-organized the AI for Non-Human Animal Communication workshop at NeurIPS in San Diego, alongside representatives from Google DeepMind, ENES Lab Saint-Etienne, Naturalis Biodiversity Center. The workshop marked the first time this topic was formally introduced at a major AI conference. Our team co-organized a challenge for BioDCASE focused on Multi-Channel Alignment , which tackles the difficult problem of resynchronizing and aligning audio from multiple recording devices. We also co-organized the LINGUAE-animals Seminar with Phillippe Schlenker, Lucie Pavaux, Institu…