A vision for global monitoring of biological invasions

Managing biological invasions relies on good global coverage of species distributions. Accurate information on alien species distributions, obtained from international policy and cross-border co-operation, is required to evaluate trans-boundary and trading partnership risks. However, a standardized approach for systematically monitoring alien species and tracking biological invasions is still lacking. This Perspective presents a vision for global observation and monitoring of biological invasions. We show how the architecture for tracking biological invasions is provided by a minimum information set of Essential Variables, global collaboration on data sharing and infrastructure, and strategic contributions by countries. We show how this novel, synthetic approach to an observation system for alien species provides a tangible and attainable solution to delivering the information needed to slow the rate of new incursions and reduce the impacts of invaders. We identify three Essential Variables for Invasion Monitoring; alien species occurrence, species alien status and alien species impact. We outline how delivery of this minimum information set by joint, complementary contributions from countries and global community initiatives is possible. Country contributions are made feasible using a modular approach where all countries are able to participate and strategically build their contributions to a global information set over time. The vision we outline will deliver wide-ranging benefits to countries and international efforts to slow the rate of biological invasions and minimize their environmental impacts. These benefits will accrue over time as global coverage and information on alien species increases

Content assessment of the primary biodiversity data published through GBIF network: Status, challenges and potentials

With the establishment of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in 2001 as an inter-governmental co-ordinating body, concerted efforts were made during the past decade to establish a global research infrastructure to facilitate the sharing, discovery and access to primary biodiversity data. As on date the participants in GBIF have enabled the discovery and access to over 267+ million such data records. While this remarkable achievement in terms of volume of data must be acknowledged, concerns about the quality and ‘fitness-for-use’ of the data should also be carefully considered in future developments. This contribution is therefore a direct response to the calls for comprehensive content assessment of the GBIF mobilised data. It is the first comprehensive assessment of the coverage of the content mobilised so far through GBIF, as well as a mean to identify the existing gaps and reflect on fitness-for-use requirements. This paper describes the complementary methodologies adopted by the GBIF Secretariat and University of Navarra for the development of a comprehensive content assessment. Outcomes of these research initiatives are summarised in four categories, namely, (a) data quality assessment, (b) trends/patterns assessment, (c) fitness-for-use assessment, and (d) ecosystem specific data diversity assessment. In conclusion we make specific suggestions to the GBIF community on the adoption of common indicators to assess progress towards future targets as well as recommendations to populate such exercise at various levels within the GBIF Network from national level to thematic levels

Biophysical characterization of protected areas globally through optimized image segmentation and classification

Protected areas (PAs) need to be assessed systematically according to biodiversity values and threats in order to support decision-making processes. For this, PAs can be characterized according to their species, ecosystems and threats, but such information is often difficult to access and usually not comparable across regions. There are currently over 200,000 PAs in the world, and assessing these systematically according to their ecological values remains a huge challenge. However, linking remote sensing with ecological modelling can help to overcome some limitations of conservation studies, such as the sampling bias of biodiversity inventories. The aim of this paper is to introduce eHabitat+, a habitat modelling service supporting the European Commission's Digital Observatory for Protected Areas, and specifically to discuss a component that systematically stratifies PAs into different habitat functional types based on remote sensing data. eHabitat+ uses an optimized procedure of automatic image segmentation based on several environmental variables to identify the main biophysical gradients in each PA. This allows a systematic production of key indicators on PAs that can be compared globally. Results from a few case studies are illustrated to show the benefits and limitations of this open-source tool

Towards a Roadmap for Advancing the Catalogue of the World’s Natural History Collections

Natural history collections are the foundations upon which all knowledge of natural history is constructed. Biological specimens are the best documentation of variation within each species, increasingly serve as curated sources for reference DNA, and are frequently our only evidence for historical species distribution. Collections represent an enormous multigenerational investment in research infrastructure for the biological sciences, but despite this importance most of the holdings of these institutions remain invisible on the Internet, inaccessible to taxonomists from other countries and hidden from computational biodiversity research.Although comprehensive digitisation of the complete holdings of each natural history collection is the long-term goal, this is an expensive and labor-intensive task and will not be completed in the near future for all collections. However, many benefits could quickly be achieved by publishing high-quality metadata on each collection to increase its visibility, provide the foundations for further digitisation and enable researchers to discover and communicate with collections of interest.This paper summarises the results from a consultation activity carried out in 2020 as part of the SYNTHESYS+ (Synthesys of Systematic Resources), “Developing implementation roadmaps for priority infrastructure areas as part of cooperative RI for biodiversity” project. This consultation was primed through an ideas paper, and introductory webinars and conducted as a facilitated two-week online multilingual discussion around 26 topics grouped under four broad headings (Users, Content, Technology and Governance). The results of these discussions are summarised here, along with the wider context of existing and planned initiatives

The Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) Data Portal

The Author(s) 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/3.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected] The attached file is the published pdf

Research infrastructure challenges in preparing essential biodiversity variables data products for alien invasive species

Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV) are information products for assessing biodiversity change. Species populations EBVs are one class of EBVs that can be used to monitor the spread of invasive species. However, systematic, reliable, repeatable procedures to process primary data into EBVs do not yet exist, and environmental research infrastructures still must improve their capabilities to deliver EBV data products. Here, we tested the ability of two mature biodiversity data infrastructures, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Atlas of Living Australia to cooperatively produce EBV data products for three alien invasive species. We detailed workflow steps to discover, filter, retrieve and prepare the primary data before evaluating species’ distributional changes. The two data infrastructures were able to execute several workflow steps, but external tools, third-party sources and expert judgement were required, and a repeatable workflow was difficult to establish. Nevertheless, the resulting data products revealed strong range expansions for the invasive species, demonstrating the policy-relevant information about global environmental change that can be provided by EBV data products. Our results show that more coordination between infrastructure providers is needed to efficiently produce EBV-ready data products for invasion monitoring in a repeatable fashion. Addressing these issues will allow improved tracking of invasive species range dynamics and hence monitoring of ongoing global biodiversity change

Biodiversity into your hands - A call for a virtual global natural history 'metacollection'

10.1186/1742-9994-10-55Frontiers in Zoology101

Community engagement: The ‘last mile’ challenge for European research e-infrastructures

Europe is building its Open Science Cloud; a set of robust and interoperable e-infrastructures with the capacity to provide data and computational solutions through cloud-based services. The development and sustainable operation of such e-infrastructures are at the forefront of European funding priorities. The research community, however, is still reluctant to engage at the scale required to signal a Europe-wide change in the mode of operation of scientific practices. The striking differences in uptake rates between researchers from different scientific domains indicate that communities do not equally share the benefits of the above European investments. We highlight the need to support research communities in organically engaging with the European Open Science Cloud through the development of trustworthy and interoperable Virtual Research Environments. These domain-specific solutions can support communities in gradually bridging technical and socio-cultural gaps between traditional and open digital science practice, better diffusing the benefits of European e-infrastructures

A vision for global monitoring of biological invasions

Managing biological invasions relies on good global coverage of species distributions. Accurate information on alien species distributions, obtained from international policy and cross-border co-operation, is required to evaluate trans-boundary and trading partnership risks. However, a standardized approach for systematically monitoring alien species and tracking biological invasions is still lacking. This Perspective presents a vision for global observation and monitoring of biological invasions. We show how the architecture for tracking biological invasions is provided by a minimum information set of Essential Variables, global collaboration on data sharing and infrastructure, and strategic contributions by countries. We show how this novel, synthetic approach to an observation system for alien species provides a tangible and attainable solution to delivering the information needed to slow the rate of new incursions and reduce the impacts of invaders. We identify three Essential Variables for Invasion Monitoring; alien species occurrence, species alien status and alien species impact. We outline how delivery of this minimum information set by joint, complementary contributions from countries and global community initiatives is possible. Country contributions are made feasible using a modular approach where all countries are able to participate and strategically build their contributions to a global information set over time. The vision we outline will deliver wide-ranging benefits to countries and international efforts to slow the rate of biological invasions and minimize their environmental impacts. These benefits will accrue over time as global coverage and information on alien species increases