{
  "abstract": "Large language model (LLM) serving creates environmental impacts beyond carbon and water, including ecosystem damage through biodiversity-related pathways. We present BIRDS, a framework for Biodiversity Impact of Request-Driven LLM Serving. BIRDS defines request-level functional units, quantifies operational and embodied biodiversity impact, and introduces Quality-Normalized Biodiversity Impact (QNBI) to jointly analyze ecological impact and response quality. Across diverse workloads, models, GPUs, and regions, BIRDS reveals that biodiversity impact accumulates at scale and exposes quality-aware serving tradeoffs. The code is available at https://github.com/TianyaoShi/BIRDS.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": "Journal reference: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026",
  "arxiv": "2605.27480",
  "author_total": 2,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Tianyao Shi"
    },
    {
      "name": "Yi Ding"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/089bgvmt83myk.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2605.27480",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "089bgvmt83myk",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27480",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cs.CY"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "q-bio.OT"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2208|Green IT and Sustainability"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7162668942",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.27480",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-08-29",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/089bgvmt83myk.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:17:49Z",
      "native_id": "2605.27480",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27480"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "arxiv:q-bio.OT",
      "subfield": "general"
    }
  ],
  "title": "BIRDS: Characterizing and Understanding Biodiversity Impact of Large Language Model Serving",
  "title_text": "BIRDS: Characterizing and Understanding Biodiversity Impact of Large Language Model Serving",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:17:49Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/089bgvmt83myk",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}