Nonprofit · EIN 82-5167508
THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT
Tax-exempt · BERKELEY, CA 94709
Financials
| Year ended | Form | Revenue | Expenses | Net income | Total assets | Liabilities | Net assets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| December 31, 2024 | 990 | $20,793,212 | $4,837,122 | $15,956,090 | $18,409,885 | $504,292 | $17,905,593 |
| December 31, 2023 | 990 | $3,504,583 | $3,012,338 | $492,245 | $2,446,094 | $496,591 | $1,949,503 |
Financial details: 990 for the year ended December 31, 2024
Revenue
- Contributions, gifts and grants
- $20,597,542
- Program service revenue
- $0
- Investment income
- $164,754
- Other revenue
- $30,916
Expenses
- Grants and similar amounts paid
- $0
- Compensation of officers, directors and key employees
- $553,420
- Other salaries and wages
- $1,375,230
- Salaries, compensation and benefits (total)
- $2,350,625
- Professional fundraising fees
- $0
- Program services (functional)
- $3,829,285
- Management and general (functional)
- $461,127
- Fundraising (functional)
- $546,710
Balance sheet and other
- Total assets, start of year
- $2,446,094
- Total assets, end of year
- $18,409,885
- Total liabilities, end of year
- $504,292
- Net assets, end of year
- $17,905,593
- Net assets without donor restrictions
- $13,715,217
- Net assets with donor restrictions
- $4,190,376
- Gross receipts
- $20,793,212
- Employees
- 14
- Volunteers
- 5
- Year formed
- 2018
- State of legal domicile
- CA
From the e-filed returns the IRS publishes as XML (latest three processing years; amended returns replace the original). PDF copies at the IRS.
Officers, directors and key employees
As listed on the 990 for the year ended December 31, 2024, highest compensation first.
| Name | Title | Hours / week | Compensation | Other / benefits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrea Austin | Head of Operations | 40 | $180,000 | $33,444 |
| KATHERINE ZACARIAN | CEO Trustee or director, Officer | 40 | $180,000 | $11,655 |
| Benjamin Hoffman | Senior AI Research | 40 | $155,000 | $36,445 |
| Sara Keen | Senior Research Sc | 40 | $155,000 | $34,004 |
| Masato Hagiwara | Senior AI Research | 40 | $155,000 | $25,493 |
| Madeline Cusimano | Senior AI Research | 40 | $155,000 | $24,979 |
| Jen-Yu Liu | Senior AI Research | 40 | $155,000 | $18,884 |
| AZA RASKIN | President Trustee or director, Officer | 20 | $144,000 | $4,320 |
| MICHAEL SELVITELLE | Senior Advisor Trustee or director | 8 | $0 | $0 |
| SEAN WHITE | Director Trustee or director | 2 | $0 | $0 |
| WENDY HANAMURA | Director Trustee or director | 2 | $0 | $0 |
| BREWSTER KAHLE | Director Trustee or director | 2 | $0 | $0 |
| MERLIN VAN LAWICK | Director Trustee or director | 2 | $0 | $0 |
| KAY BUTTERFIELD | Director Trustee or director | 2 | $0 | $0 |
990 for the year ended December 31, 2023: 14 people
| Name | Title | Hours / week | Compensation | Other / benefits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrea Austin | Head of Operations | 40 | $180,000 | $31,509 |
| KATHERINE ZACARIAN | CEO Trustee or director, Officer | 40 | $180,000 | $16,372 |
| Benjamin Hoffman | Senior AI Research | 40 | $146,250 | $33,026 |
| Madeline Cusimano | Senior AI Research | 40 | $146,250 | $23,901 |
| Jen-Yu Liu | Senior AI Research | 40 | $146,250 | $18,062 |
| Masato Hagiwara | Senior AI Research | 40 | $127,262 | $24,648 |
| Sara Keen | Senior Research Sc | 40 | $129,167 | $19,063 |
| AZA RASKIN | President Trustee or director, Officer | 16 | $135,000 | $9,514 |
| MICHAEL SELVITELLE | Senior Advisor Trustee or director | 8 | $6,000 | $0 |
| SEAN WHITE | Director Trustee or director | 2 | $0 | $0 |
| WENDY HANAMURA | Director Trustee or director | 2 | $0 | $0 |
| BREWSTER KAHLE | Director Trustee or director | 2 | $0 | $0 |
| MERLIN VAN LAWICK | Director Trustee or director | 2 | $0 | $0 |
| KAY BUTTERFIELD | Director Trustee or director | 2 | $0 | $0 |
Address and contacts
- Address (IRS master file)
- 1536 OXFORD ST, BERKELEY, CA 94709-1575
- In care of
- % MICHAEL SELVITELLE
- Principal officer (990 for 2024)
- AZA RASKIN, 8605 SANTA MONICA BLVD 78666, WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90069
- Signed the 990
- AZA RASKIN, INTERIM CEO
- Phone
- (707) 439-8688
- Website
- WWW.EARTHSPECIES.ORG
- Return prepared by
- BREGANTE COMPANY LLP CPAS
California records
California keeps its own records of charities and corporations. Search them by EIN 82-5167508 or by the name THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT.
- Attorney General, Registry of Charities and Fundraisers
- Registration status and filed reports (CT-TR-1, RRF-1)
- Secretary of State, bizfile Online
- Corporation status, entity number, agent for service
- Franchise Tax Board
- Entity status letter (state tax exemption, good standing)
Mission
The Earth Species Project (ESP) develops frontier AI to amplify the voices of nature, creating new pathways for the transformation of our systemsand ourselves. We envision a relationship with the rest of nature that allows the diversity of life to thrive.
Program accomplishments
- Organizational Growth and Development: Strategy Development and Theory of Change: In 2024, we developed a new organizational strategy that will guide ESP into the future by allowing us to advance not just the science of animal communication, but the broader change we hope to see in the world. The new strategy relies on three pillars to achieve impact: Research to Decode, Building The Field, and Preparing Society for Impact. Scaling our team: In 2024, we added six new full time employees bringing our total team to 23 across communications, research, and impact. Notably we brought on key leadership roles including Olivier Pietquin, our Chief Scientist and head of research, and Brittany Solano, our Director of Communications. Growing our board: Over the course of 2024, we worked actively working to grow our Board of Directors to better support our mission. This has led to us welcoming two visionary leaders to our Board of Directors in 2025: Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief who led the Paris Agreement, and Thomas Zurbuchen, former head of NASAs Science Mission Directorate. Their expertise and global perspectives strengthen ESPs ability to bridge frontier science, policy, and planetary stewardship.Research To DecodeESP is unique in building frontier AI models that can analyze data across taxa, helping to decode communication in species as diverse as birds and primates, cetaceans and insects. In 2024, we:Released NatureLM-audio, the first large audio-language model designed specifically for animal sounds. By unifying diverse bioacoustic tasks within a single, generalizable model, NatureLM-audio represents a major leap forward for AI-powered animal communication research. The paper was accepted to ICLR 2025, a prestigious AI research conference.Equipped the field with several new tools and benchmarks (e.g. BirdAVES, Biodenoising, and BEBE) designed to support the scientific community and demonstrate key capabilities in multimodal decoding.Progressed a range of decode projects with partners to discover the language of carrion crows, jumping spiders, and zebra finches, among others. Papers on these projects will be released in 2025.You can read more about our decode projects in our 2024 annual report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F1W3wmgaVfL6hl_bvNO5JTK4PG_XsEK3/view Moving forward, we will be working on orca communication with partners in a project to pioneer new methods of data collection and annotation that can help to pair movement with vocalizations and unlock semantic meaning of killer whale vocalization. Building the Field By establishing standards, creating a shared understanding, sharing our science, and promoting responsible practices, were creating the conditions for a global community to come together and build the foundations of this emerging field.Expanding Access to AI Tools and BenchmarksESP's open-source tools and benchmarks (on GitHub and HuggingFace) drove impact across the research community. For example, Our Bio-logger benchmark, BEBE, helped Oregon State University researchers study cougar behavior in Yellowstone to improve predation modeling. Cornell postdoc Wendy Erb used ESP's Voxaboxen to detect vocal stress in Bornean orangutans affected by wildfire smoke. Researchers from multiple institutions, including Raincoast Conservation Foundation, cited our AVES audio encoder model in a paper exploring ML techniques for beluga whale call classification.Building the Research Community We're fostering a growing community at the intersection of AI and animal communication. Our Discord community connects bioacousticians, ML researchers, and conservationists and has expanded significantly. ESP also co-organized the Virtual Interaction and Human-Animal Robot Communication (VIHAR) workshop with Professor Roger Moore at INTERSPEECH and participated in the Animals in Translation workshop (led by Interspecies Internet, co-hosted by Santa Fe Institute), which established criteria for successful animal communication decoding. Results were published in 2025.Looking forward, we will be co-organizing a workshop in 2025 at a leading machine learning conference, in partnership with collaborators from Google DeepMind, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, and ENES Lab Saint-Etienne. Our day-long workshop titled AI for Non-Human Animal Communication is a first-of-its-kind for the NeurIPS conference, bridging the gap between AI and ethology.Preparing Society for ImpactUltimately we are aiming to shift human mindsets away from human exceptionalism in order to reset our relationship with nature. To catalyze this shift, we have been working with partners to establish the foundations for selecting a suite of pilot projects that will help people imagine new futures while also avoiding the possible unintended consequences of this new technology. These projects include a survey on AI and animal communication to be conducted in 2025 to better understand public sentiment and use this to refine our theory of change. Responsible development and useWe have been developing a set of principles to govern the development and use of our models, which will engage experts and stakeholders across a wide range of disciplines. Looking ahead, we aim to catalyze a global conversation on the standards and regulatory frameworks that will be needed for this emerging field.Shifting PerspectivesWe drove momentum and seeded new ideas in influential global media including: The Financial Times, Atmos, Axios, Vox, Bloomberg, AP, New Yorker, Forbes, and more.Expenses $3,829,285
What it must file and when
IRS records say it files Form 990 or 990-EZ. Based on its last return; a smaller organization may file the 990-N. Its accounting year ends in December, so each return is due on the 15th day of the 5th month after that.
| Tax year | Year ended | Due | IRS public records |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | December 31, 2025 | May 15, 2026 | Not on file |
| 2024 | December 31, 2024 | May 15, 2025 | 990 on file |
| 2023 | December 31, 2023 | May 15, 2024 | 990 on file |
IRS record
- EIN
- 82-5167508
- Tax-exempt status
- 501(c)(3): Charitable, religious, educational or scientific organization
- Foundation status
- Publicly supported organization (170(b)(1)(A)(vi))
- Donations deductible (Pub 78)
- Public charity, 50% deduction limit
- Exempt since
- 2020
- Accounting year ends
- December
- Files
- Form 990 or 990-EZ
- Assets (IRS master file)
- $18,409,885
- Income (IRS master file)
- $20,793,212
Filing history
| Form | Year ended | Revenue | Expenses | Assets | Return |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 990 | December 2024 | $20,793,212 | $4,837,122 | $18,409,885 | IRS |
| 990 | December 2023 | $3,504,583 | $3,012,338 | $2,446,094 | XML |
| 990 | December 2022 | $2,986,377 | $2,138,062 | $1,640,646 | IRS |
| 990 | December 2021 | – | – | – | IRS |
| 990 | December 2020 | – | – | – | IRS |
990-N: the IRS bulk file holds only the latest e-Postcard per organization; earlier years come from archived copies of that file since 2020 and can have gaps (the IRS e-Postcard search lists every one). 990, 990-EZ, 990-PF, 990-T: every e-filed return in the IRS e-file index since 2019; XML for the latest three processing years, amounts from the IRS Statistics of Income extracts before that. PDF copies and determination letters at the IRS (search EIN 82-5167508).
Questions about THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT
- What is the EIN of THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT?
- The employer identification number (EIN) of THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT is 82-5167508.
- Is THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT tax-exempt?
- Yes. The IRS lists it as tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) since 2020.
- Are donations to THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT tax-deductible?
- Yes. It is listed in IRS Publication 78 (Public charity, 50% deduction limit).
- Which annual return does THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT file?
- Form 990 or 990-EZ. Based on its last return; a smaller organization may file the 990-N.
- When is the next return of THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT due?
- The return for tax year 2025 (the year ending December 31, 2025) is due May 15, 2026. Form 8868 extends it by six months; the 990-N cannot be extended.
- When did THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT last file with the IRS?
- The latest return in the IRS public files is the 990 for the year ended December 2024.
- Who is the principal officer of THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT?
- The 990 for the year ended December 31, 2024 names AZA RASKIN.
- Who are the officers and directors of THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT?
- The 990 for the year ended December 31, 2024 lists 14 people; 8 received compensation from the organization, the highest $180,000 (Andrea Austin, Head of Operations).
- How much revenue does THE EARTH SPECIES PROJECT have?
- On its 990 for the year ended December 31, 2024 it reported revenue of $20,793,212, expenses of $4,837,122 and total assets of $18,409,885 at year end.
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