The Earth Species Project

What it reported doing in 2024

Organizational Growth and Development: Strategy Development and Theory of Change: In 2024, we developed a new organizational strategy that will guide ESP into the future by allowing us to advance not just the science of animal communication, but the broader change we hope to see in the world. The new strategy relies on three pillars to achieve impact: Research to Decode, Building The Field, and Preparing Society for Impact. Scaling our team: In 2024, we added six new full time employees bringing our total team to 23 across communications, research, and impact. Notably we brought on key leadership roles including Olivier Pietquin, our Chief Scientist and head of research, and Brittany Solano, our Director of Communications. Growing our board: Over the course of 2024, we worked actively working to grow our Board of Directors to better support our mission. This has led to us welcoming two visionary leaders to our Board of Directors in 2025: Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief who led the Paris Agreement, and Thomas Zurbuchen, former head of NASAs Science Mission Directorate. Their expertise and global perspectives strengthen ESPs ability to bridge frontier science, policy, and planetary stewardship.Research To DecodeESP is unique in building frontier AI models that can analyze data across taxa, helping to decode communication in species as diverse as birds and primates, cetaceans and insects. In 2024, we: Released NatureLM-audio, the first large audio-language model designed specifically for animal sounds. By unifying diverse bioacoustic tasks within a single, generalizable model, NatureLM-audio represents a major leap forward for AI-powered animal communication research. The paper was accepted to ICLR 2025, a prestigious AI research conference.Equipped the field with several new tools and benchmarks (e.g. BirdAVES, Biodenoising, and BEBE) designed to support the scientific community and demonstrate key capabilities in multimodal decoding.Progressed a range of decode projects with partners to discover the language of carrion crows, jumping spiders, and zebra finches, among others. Papers on these projects will be released in 2025.You can read more about our decode projects in our 2024 annual report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F1W3wmgaVfL6hl_bvNO5JTK4PG_XsEK3/view Moving forward, we will be working on orca communication with partners in a project to pioneer new methods of data collection and annotation that can help to pair movement with vocalizations and unlock semantic meaning of killer whale vocalization. Building the Field By establishing standards, creating a shared understanding, sharing our science, and promoting responsible practices, were creating the conditions for a global community to come together and build the foundations of this emerging field.Expanding Access to AI Tools and BenchmarksESP's open-source tools and benchmarks (on GitHub and HuggingFace) drove impact across the research community. For example, Our Bio-logger benchmark, BEBE, helped Oregon State University researchers study cougar behavior in Yellowstone to improve predation modeling. Cornell postdoc Wendy Erb used ESP's Voxaboxen to detect vocal stress in Bornean orangutans affected by wildfire smoke. Researchers from multiple institutions, including Raincoast Conservation Foundation, cited our AVES audio encoder model in a paper exploring ML techniques for beluga whale call classification.Building the Research Community We're fostering a growing community at the intersection of AI and animal communication. Our Discord community connects bioacousticians, ML researchers, and conservationists and has expanded significantly. ESP also co-organized the Virtual Interaction and Human-Animal Robot Communication (VIHAR) workshop with Professor Roger Moore at INTERSPEECH and participated in the Animals in Translation workshop (led by Interspecies Internet, co-hosted by Santa Fe Institute), which established criteria for successful animal communica

Financial Efficiency

• Mission deployment rate: 19.1%; rating input score 19
• Program expense ratio: 79.2%; rating input score 79
• Fundraising efficiency: $37.68 raised per $1 spent on fundraising; rating input score 71; 71st percentile among comparable filings

Transparency & Controls

• Consistency checks: 92.3%; rating input score 92; 8th percentile among comparable filings
• Pay-setting controls: 1 of 6 controls in place; rating input score 17
  • Compensation committee: Missing
  • Independent consultant: Missing
  • Other Form 990s reviewed: Missing
  • Written employment contract: Missing
  • Compensation survey or study: Missing
  • Board or committee approval: Pass
• Foreign activity oversight: Scored; rating input score 0
• Grant itemization coverage: Scored; rating input score 0
• Major donor itemization: Yes; rating input score 100
• Related-party transparency: Limited

Accountability

• Independent voting board: 75%; rating input score 75; 14th percentile among comparable filings
• Governance controls: 9 of 9 controls in place; rating input score 100
  • Conflict-of-interest policy: Pass
  • Whistleblower policy: Pass
  • Document-retention policy: Pass
  • CEO compensation review process: Pass
  • Other executive compensation review process: Pass
  • Form 990 shared with the board: Pass
  • Board meeting minutes documented: Pass
  • Audit committee oversight: Pass
  • Independent financial-statement audit: Pass

Sustainability

• Operating margin: 76.7%; rating input score 98; 98th percentile among comparable filings
• Total-asset coverage ratio: 3.81; rating input score 80; 80th percentile among comparable filings
• Liabilities to assets ratio: 0.03; rating input score 88; 88th percentile among comparable filings
• Officer compensation ratio: 30.4%; rating input score 1; 1st percentile among comparable filings

Growth

• Program expense growth: 45.5% per year; rating input score 100; 98th percentile among comparable filings
• Revenue growth: 64.5% per year; rating input score 100; 99th percentile among comparable filings
• Asset growth: 72.6% per year; rating input score 100; 99th percentile among comparable filings