From FAIR to AI-FAIR Metadata-First Infrastructure for AI-Enabled Science

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and their capabilities have advanced rapidly over the past few years, leading to widespread interest and adoption in the biological and ecological sciences. However, the data infrastructure and computational resources that provide the foundation for AI workflows in ecology and biodiversity science remain fragmented. Moreover, the flow of value remains largely unidirectional: data move from collectors, through repositories and aggregators into models, and finally to research products or management actions. The derived value, such as corrected taxonomies, annotations, quality flags, and insights, rarely returns to source communities. We propose an extension of the original FAIR principles to address the needs of AI-ready infrastructure: the AI-FAIR metadata criteria, which place AI-enabled science in the context of a bidirectional Question-Data-Model triangle. This framework is designed to facilitate large-scale content-based analysis across diverse collections and ensure that the scientists generating the data benefit from the AI-enabled advances built on their data. Alongside these criteria, we introduce an agentic evaluation workflow that both rates existing datasets on the AI-FAIR and traditional FAIR criteria and provides actionable feedback where critical metadata is missing or incomplete. This modular dataset evaluation tool, paired with a domain-appropriate checklist, translates these principles into a reusable assessment of machine-learning readiness, AI-readiness for specified tasks, traceability, and ethical and CARE-aligned stewardship. Through this approach we aim to create a community-informed system to close the model data loop, so that AI also enriches data to further enable scientific discovery.