Earth Species Project is using AI to understand animal communication. And they're storing benchmark datasets training data on Filecoin. Here's why:

BEANS-Zero is a benchmark dataset of bioacoustic recordings: whale songs, bird calls, frog croaks across hundreds of species. ESP used this dataset to evaluate NatureLM-audio, the first AI foundation model for bioacoustics.

What the trained AI can now do: – Identify thousands of species by their vocalizations – Predict sex and life stages from sound – Uncover communication patterns scientists couldn't analyze before – All using natural language prompts (no coding required)

So why store the evaluation dataset on Filecoin? Because AI breakthroughs depend on accessible data. If BEANS-Zero disappeared (server failure, lost funding, shutdown), no one could verify ESP's results or build on this research. Open science requires open infrastructure.

Decentralized storage ensures: ✓ Results are reproducible and verifiable ✓ Data integrity is cryptographically proven ✓ Long-term availability doesn't depend on single institutions In collaboration with @FFDWeb, ESP demonstrates how serious science works.