Sustainable Intelligence for the Wild: Democratizing Ecological Monitoring via Knowledge-Adaptive Edge Expert Agents

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 15 May 2026] Sustainable Intelligence for the Wild: Democratizing Ecological Monitoring via Knowledge-Adaptive Edge Expert Agents Jiaxing Li, Hao Fang, Chi Xu, Miao Zhang, Jiangchuan Liu, William I. Atlas, Katrina M. Connors, Mark A. Spoljaric Rapid biodiversity loss underscore the urgency of effective monitoring, yet manual surveys remain resource-intensive. While on-device AI offers a scalable alternative, its performance in the wild is often challenged by environmental variability. Current methods rely heavily on cloud resource, which requires continuous uploading of field data for model retraining. This approach is unsuitable for remote deployments because it consumes limited power and network connectivity. To address these constraints, this research proposes a shift from model adaptation to knowledge adaptation. We introduce an architecture that separates visual perception from reasoning, combining a visual encoder with a dynamic knowledge base. We uses an explicit knowledge base to replace implicitly encoding expert knowledge into model parameters. This method also supports knowledge sustainability by preserving expert insights in a structured form. Through cross-disciplinary collaboration with biologists and Indigenous communities, this work advances ethical AI co-development, fostering responsible and culturally informed ecosystem management. Comments: 10 pages Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2605.16671 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.16671v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16671 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jiaxing Li [view email] [v1] Fri, 15 May 2026 22:12:02 UTC (5,967 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CV cs.CY cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)