A process for tracking global biodiversity
Measuring biodiversity Scientists are developing a process to measure changes in global biodiversity, inspired by that used to measure global climate change.
A team of international researchers report the developments today in the journal Science.
International efforts to prevent dangerous loss of biodiversity are currently stymied by a lack of agreed ways to measure it, say the researchers.
"If you ask the question of how much has biodiversity changed globally in the last year or five years, at the moment it's very difficult to answer," says team member, Dr Eren Turak, a research scientist at the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage.
"Although information on biodiversity is being collected everywhere in the world, there is very little co-ordination or harmony in the way it's being collected, so it's very difficult to piece together the big picture of how things might be changing."
Turak and others belonging to the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network have been co-ordinating the development of a process that would solve this problem.
They want to narrow down a list of measurements, called Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), inspired by the 50 Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) that are today used to monitor global climate change.
EBVs will be the "common currency" that enables scientists to aggregate data and "paint a global picture" of biodiversity at any one point in time, says Turak.
They will help prioritise what data should be collected given scarce resources, he says.
And they will help scientists to extend models currently biased towards developed countries, to developing countries, which have fewer resources for monitoring biodiversity.
EBVs are expected to measure such things as the genetic diversity of species, abundance of species; nutrient retention rate of ecosystems, and three-dimensional structure of habitats.
Importantly, the EBVs will also make better use of available data, by allowing for the diverse ways in which data is currently collected across the world.
"We talk about harmonisation of data collection rather than standardisation," says Turak.
"Standardisation means exactly the same information is collected everywhere in the same way. That's actually a very big ask."
Also involved in the development of EBVs is Dr Simon Ferrier of CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences.
He says different countries have different expertise and resources for monitoring biodiversity. The idea is to allow for this by not being "overly prescriptive".
For example, says Ferrier, an EBV measuring species abundance should be flexible about the survey method used and even what species is measured.
"In one country they might be working on birds, but in another they might be working on mammals," says Ferrier.
He says while a consensus on EBVs on this basis involves some compromise of consistency, it is a more achievable approach given real world constraints than standardising data collection.
"If we aren't willing to compromise we aren't going to get people on board, and the information collected," says Ferrier.
Ferrier says new technologies will be central to the new approach.
Apart from remote sensing and environmental metagenomics (the identification of species diversity using DNA found in soil and water), smart phones will also play a key role in facilitating cost-saving citizen science, he says.
"Citizen science is harnessing the power of lots of individuals around the world who like making observations about the natural world," says Ferrier, adding they can enter observations to central data bases using their smart phones.
The development of EBVs will be discussed at next week's Bonn meeting of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which has been dubbed the 'IPCC' for biodiversity.