Tianyao Shi
Author directory2026
BIRDS: Characterizing and Understanding Biodiversity Impact of Large Language Model Serving
Tianyao Shi | Yi Ding
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Tianyao Shi | Yi Ding
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
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 reveals that biodiversity impact accumulates at scale and exposes quality-aware serving tradeoffs. The code is available at https://github.com/TianyaoShi/BIRDS.