INVACORP

InvaCorp is a research initiative developed at CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay and the MNHN to help companies quantify the ecological impacts of invasive alien species using state-of-the-art invasion science and artificial intelligence.

It combines two major research developments from our group: InvaPact, a new quantitative metric for ecological impacts of biological invasions, and FastMind, an expert-supervised Large Language Model (LLM)-based pipeline developed to extract complex ecological information automatically from very large collections of structured documents.

Together, these tools offer a new way to transform the ecological information already contained in corporate environmental documentation into standardized, comparable and quantitative data.

Biodiversity reporting is rapidly becoming more quantitative. New regulatory frameworks increasingly require major companies to assess, document and report their impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems.

In Europe, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and specifically ESRS E4 on Biodiversity and Ecosystems, places biodiversity impacts, dependencies, risks, actions, targets and metrics within corporate sustainability reporting. Invasive alien species are explicitly recognised as one of the major direct drivers of biodiversity loss.

In the United Kingdom, quantitative biodiversity requirements, including the Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) framework, are similarly increasing the need for robust and measurable ecological indicators.

Yet an important methodological gap remains: there is currently no universal, standardized quantitative metric for measuring the magnitude of ecological impacts caused by invasive alien species.

Such impacts are still generally described using heterogeneous qualitative information, making comparisons among sites, projects, species and ecosystems extremely difficult and generally unrobust.

This is the problem that InvaPact was designed to solve.

Over the past four years, CNRS Research Director Franck Courchamp has coordinated an international consortium of more than 180 researchers from 55 countries to develop InvaPact, a new framework for systematically characterising, standardizing and quantifying the ecological impacts of invasive alien species.

InvaPact integrates:

– a standardized typology of 19 types of ecological impacts;
– impacts across six levels of ecological organisation, from individuals and populations to ecosystem functions and the abiotic environment;
– the EEICAT framework for assessing ecological severity;
– international expert assessment of the relative importance of different types of impacts;
– and a new standardized impact metric ranging from 0 to 100.

The objective is to create a common quantitative currency for biological invasions, allowing ecological impacts that were previously expressed through heterogeneous qualitative descriptions to be quantified and compared consistently.

Quantifying these impacts creates a second challenge: extracting the information required to calculate them from enormous quantities of documents.

We therefore developed FastMind, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based data-mining pipeline designed to read structured documents such as published scientific studies, and automatically transform complex ecological information into standardized, machine-readable data.

FastMind was initially developed to extract approximately 55 ecological parameters from nearly 14,000 scientific publications. When evaluated against manually validated reference publications, the pipeline achieved an overall extraction accuracy much higher than human experts.

Using this approach, we have assembled nearly 160,000 documented ecological impacts, creating an unprecedented global reference quantitative dataset for biological invasions.

Large companies already possess enormous quantities of potentially valuable biodiversity information.

Infrastructure, energy, construction, forestry, water and other asset-intensive organisations have accumulated, sometimes over several decades, thousands of:

– environmental impact assessments;
– ecological monitoring reports;
– biodiversity surveys;
– site assessments;
– restoration and mitigation reports;
– environmental compliance documents.

These documents can contain detailed information on invasive alien species and their ecological impacts. Yet much of this information remains effectively locked inside PDFs and other unstructured documents. Manually reviewing thousands of reports across hundreds of sites and projects is extremely time-consuming and often practically impossible.

InvaCorp aims to make this existing information quantitatively exploitable

The FastMind pipeline can be adapted to a company’s own environmental documentation to identify and extract relevant information automatically. The InvaPact metric can then translate documented invasion impacts into standardized quantitative values.

In this way, thousands of disconnected and largely underexploited environmental reports can progressively be transformed into a structured, searchable and quantitative corporate database of ecological impacts.

Depending on the organisation, its activities and its existing environmental information, an InvaCorp research collaboration could include:

– automated extraction of invasion-related ecological information from existing corporate documents;
– construction of a standardized database of invasive-species impacts;
– calculation of quantitative InvaPact scores;
– statistical analyses at the level of sites, projects, species, regions or the organisation as a whole;
– identification of major impact patterns, hotspots and knowledge gaps;
– quantification of restoration or mitigation measures;
– comparison with the global scientific InvaPact database;
– interactive visualisation and analytical tools;
– quantitative indicators that can contribute to biodiversity and sustainability reporting;
– periodic integration of newly generated environmental information.

The aim is not to replace existing ecological expertise, field monitoring or environmental assessment. Instead, InvaCorp provides a rigorous scientific framework for making the enormous quantity of information already generated by these activities comparable and quantitatively exploitable at corporate scale.

Unlike a generic ESG reporting tool, InvaCorp originates directly from fundamental research in invasion biology. It connects corporate biodiversity information with an international scientific consortium, a global database of invasion impacts, a standardized ecological metric and a validated AI-assisted extraction pipeline.

We are interested in developing research partnerships with organisations for which invasive alien species, biodiversity impacts and environmental reporting represent significant operational or strategic issues.

A collaboration would begin with a subset of existing environmental documentation in order to evaluate how the InvaCorp approach can be applied to the organisation’s data, activities and reporting requirements.

To discuss a potential collaboration: franck.courchamp@cnrs.fr