Humanity faces a dual planetary challenge: to restore Earth’s rapidly degrading landscapes, which threaten biodiversity, water, and food security, and to develop the foundational science for terraforming extraterrestrial planets, which may one day extend the resilience of life beyond Earth. These challenges are deeply connected, grounded in the shared need to understand how life transforms barren environments into habitable ecosystems—what we call here the challenge of “landscape terraformation”. Advancing Landscape Terraformation science as a new solution to this dual challenge requires predictive, adaptive systems that navigate complexities of ecosystem emergence across radically different conditions. With the advent of AI models, real-time sensing, and digital twin technologies, we now have unprecedented ability to couple experimentation with intelligent computation. Thus, we here review initial examples of a multi-scale dynamic “collaboratory” that learns by integrating real-world experimentation and digital twinning of UA’s unique Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO) at Biosphere 2, in order to predict, trigger, and steer terraformation processes.

Scott Saleska is an ecologist who investigates how life reshapes Earth’s surface and climate—from tropical forests to engineered landscapes. His work combines experiments, remote sensing, and digital twinning technologies to understand and predict planetary-scale change. He is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, Biosphere 2 Director of Science, and Co-Director of a graduate training program in Ecosystem Genomics, all at the University of Arizona. He is elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union and of the Ecological Society of America; he was a visiting academic at ENS (2019), and will be a U.S.-Brazil Fulbright Scholar in 2026-2027.

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