About

The Future Earth cluster on “Global Biodiversity Monitoring, Prediction and Reporting” aims to provide a forum for interdisciplinary research activities and scientific questions associated with globally integrated monitoring and assessment of biodiversity (species, populations, traits). Its goal is to bring together observational, conservation, remote sensing and modeling communities concerned with spatio-temporally explicit biodiversity and environmental data to consider the elements and development of a scientifically sound and global biodiversity monitoring system.

Aim

The Biodiversity Monitoring cluster activity will bring together the observational, remote sensing and modelling communities in Future Earth and beyond that are collecting and using spatio-temporally explicit biodiversity or environmental data to:

• Facilitate, and create standards and infrastructure for collaborative global spatio-temporal biodiversity and ecosystem function monitoring, data harmonization and integration, prediction, reporting and visualization.
• Identify (temporal, spatial and taxonomic) gaps in data collection efforts.
• Document the connection between environmental and biological variation and how it affects spatio-temporal patterns and change in ecosystems, biological communities, species, populations, traits and genetic patterns.
• Develop and provide integrated knowledge products (e.g. map layers, biodiversity trends) to support the various global monitoring initiatives (e.g. GEOSS, GEO BON), assessment mechanisms (e.g. IPBES, CBD, IPCC), and Future Earth projects.
• Collaboratively advance Future Earth cross-cutting capabilities “Observing Systems” and “Data Systems”.
• Capture, report and predict ongoing changes of different biodiversity attributes (including functional diversity derived from ecosystem models) under global environmental change and contribute to assessing the resulting consequences for ecosystem function and service provision.