IEEE WCCI 2026 Special Session

This Special Session, organized in the flagship conference of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, will bring together practitioners interested in the use of computational intelligence and machine learning methods to monitor biodiversity and the behavior and interaction of living organisms in an environment.

Dates: 22-26 June 2026

Venue: Mecc, Maastricht, the Netherlands

Special Session on Neural Networks for Biodiversity

The biodiversity crisis continues to grow and becomes more visible every year. Although much monitoring is already conducted, there is a massive information gap due to the scale of the issue: for example, there is currently ongoing discussion about whether the recently-identified “insect apocalypse” applies
across all species and all parts of the world. Resolving these issues is of vital importance since insects and many other animals are, among other things, crucial to society as crop pollinators. On the positive side, new information streams for biodiversity are becoming available, from audio and video
recorders, satellite and drone imaging, and many other environmental sensors. Signal processing and statistical optimisation have a key role to play, since they are needed to turn these raw data streams into evidence.

Topics of Interest

  • Machine learning for large-scale bioacoustic data
  • Automated detection and classification of species
  • Population size estimation from acoustic or multimodal data
  • Novel embeddings and representations for ecological data
  • Deep learning for biodiversity monitoring and conservation
  • Integration of audio, visual, and sensor modalities
  • Case studies from zoos, field stations, and citizen science projects
  • Tools, datasets, and reproducibility in ecological AI research

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: 31 January 2026

Author notification: Spring 2026

Camera-ready submission: Spring 2026

Conference:  June 22-26, 2026, Maastricht, The Netherlands

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Organizers

Aki Härmä – Maastricht University, the Netherlands

Dan Stowell – Tilburg University, the Netherlands

Ricard Marxer – Université de Toulon, France

Aysenur Arslan-Dogan – Maastricht University, the Netherlands

Novelty and Motivation

The biodiversity crisis continues to grow and becomes more visible every year. Although much monitoring is already conducted, there is a massive information gap due to the scale of the issue: for example there is currently ongoing discussion about whether the recently-identified “insect apocalypse” applies across all species and all parts of the world. Resolving these issues is of vital importance since insects and many other animals are, among other things, crucial to society as crop pollinators. On the positive side, new information streams for biodiversity are becoming available, from audio and video recorders, satellite and drone imaging, and many other environmental sensors.
Signal processing and statistical optimisation have a key role to play, since they are needed to turn these raw data streams into evidence.

Scientific development of such methods requires attention to the specific properties of the signals as well as the inferences required: for example, a single audio signal may embed evidence of multiple different species and their interactions, as well as weather and human factors.

2026 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI) 

This special session is part of the IEEE WCCI conference. Follow the instuctions for authors on the conference website below:

Go to conference page