UvA ecologists aim to map biodiversity in Europe using a single measuring system
At present, Europe is still a patchwork quilt when it comes to measuring biodiversity. UvA ecologist are proposing a integrated monitoring system for the entire continent, with a European coordination centre.
Daniel Kissling, associate professor of Quantitative Biodiversity, calls it “perhaps the most important publication” of his life. “In any case, it has the greatest real-world impact.” Together with other scientists, practitioners and policy officers from the European Commission, he has spent the past five years working on the design of a monitoring system – the Biodiversity Observation Network (BON) – that will map biodiversitythe variety of all life forms on earth across Europe. This will make it possible to track the state of biodiversity and the progress of nature restoration at the European level. Last week, they published the results in the journal Nature Reviews Biodiversity.
Patchwork quilt
At present, Europe still looks like a patchwork quilt when it comes to measuring biodiversity. There are thousands of different monitoring schemes and fragmented programmes that have little connection among them. This is partly due to the historical development of EU legislation. Since the 1980s, various legal frameworks have been created to protect biodiversity, such as the Habitats Directive, the Birds Directive and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive.
Kissling: “Among the best monitoring systems we have in Europe are those for birds, butterflies, trees commercially important fish. And we know that biodiversity is declining in these areas. But even for the best-measured groups, such as butterflies and phytoplankton in lakes, there are still large parts of Europe – often in Eastern, Southern and Northern Europe – where we have no data.” Moreover, the same data is often collected in different ways, which makes it difficult to compare it at European level.
Monumental task
Researchers are now proposing to bring all these separate measurement programs together into one monitoring system that maps biodiversity across Europe. This is a monumental task, in which the researchers have broken down the umbrella term “biodiversity” into species-focused variables (genetic composition, species populations and species traits) and ecosystem-focused variables (community composition, ecosystem functioning and ecosystem structure).
This new umbrella system covers not only well-studied groups such as birds and butterflies, but also many groups such as zooplankton, lichens, dragonflies, terrestrial arthropods, fungi and crop pests. Moreover, it covers measurements that are relevant to characterize the structure and functioning of whole ecosystems, such as algal blooms, standing and lying deadwood or changes in the biomass production of land, lakes, rivers and oceans. “We started with nearly 300 variables to map biodiversity, and ended up with 84,” says Kissling. “This gives us a broad picture of diversity and and the variables we propose are feasible to implement.”
European coordination centre
NGOs, universities, research institutes, and environmental consultancies will be responsible for carrying out these measurements in EU member states. In addition, the researchers propose a European coordination centre, the European Biodiversity Observation Coordination Centre (EBOCC), which will be responsible for bringing together the thousands of monitoring programmes.
“The idea of the EBOCC as a central coordination body has already been taken up by the European Parlement,” says Kissling. “This is one of the greatest successes of the project. Funds have been made available and last month a tender was granted to test the tasks and functions of this coordination centre.”
The roadmap is to be rolled out across Europe in the coming years. This will be done in five steps, which are expected to take ten years. Kissling: “It’s a huge amount of work, and the challenge will remain to secure long-term funding for it.”
