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

Jessica Walkenhorst, Colin McCormick


Abstract
Reforestation 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.
Anthology ID:
2025.climatenlp-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Kalyan Dutia, Peter Henderson, Markus Leippold, Christoper Manning, Gaku Morio, Veruska Muccione, Jingwei Ni, Tobias Schimanski, Dominik Stammbach, Alok Singh, Alba (Ruiran) Su, Saeid A. Vaghefi
Venues:
ClimateNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
188–193
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.climatenlp-1.12/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jessica Walkenhorst and Colin McCormick. 2025. Scaling Species Diversity Analysis in Carbon Credit Projects with Large-Context LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2025), pages 188–193, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Scaling Species Diversity Analysis in Carbon Credit Projects with Large-Context LLMs (Walkenhorst & McCormick, ClimateNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.climatenlp-1.12.pdf