Large language models unlock the ecology of species interactions.

Large language models can accurately extract species interactions from multilingual citizen science comments, significantly expanding ecological data coverage.

• Why it matters: Understanding species interactions is crucial for studying population dynamics, distributions, and responses to environmental change, but data are limited across scales due to collection challenges.
• What they did: The authors developed an LLM workflow that processes billions of biodiversity comments, demonstrating high accuracy in identifying interaction types and species in two case studies: bird-bird and plant-pollinator interactions.
• The result: This approach enhances the spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scope of interaction data, enabling new ecological analyses and supporting biodiversity conservation efforts amid global change.