Irish boffins are exploring how artificial intelligence can be used to predict threats to Irish peat bogs and their impact on the climate. Ireland’s national centre for applied AI, CeADAR, has teamed up with the National Parks and Wildlife Service and Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre in Applied Geosciences iCRAG for a €200k project, AI2Peat. The researchers plan to use data gathered by drones, satellites and citizen scientists to develop all-Ireland mapping that will identify issues like illegal mining, erosion, landslides, biodiversity decline as well as areas of high conservation value. Irish peatlands store large amounts of carbon dioxide when intact. But over the decades, many have been drained, mined, planted and turned into fields, changing them from carbon sinks into carbon emitters. Now a team led by CeADAR’s Dr Oisín Boydell and Dr Eoghan Holohan of iCRAG is turning to AI for solutions to the challenges around monitoring remote peatlands and estimating carbon storage capacity in individual habitats.