Steps to getting the full picture of Europe’s ecological health
“Imagine a Europe where biodiversity monitoring flows seamlessly across borders, providing a clear picture of the continent’s ecological health…”. This is the vision driving the EU-funded Biodiversa-plus project, and so in January 2023 it launched a 1-year pilot project to assess the current state of Europe’s biodiversity monitoring governance at the national or sub-national level. The pilot programme’s findings will aid the development of the European governance landscape in this sphere, and especially the process to set up a European-level Biodiversity Monitoring Coordination Centre (BMCC). The pilot project tackled three tasks. It assessed the governance structures and the data management and interoperability solutions of European countries’ biodiversity monitoring schemes. It also mapped the use of data and metadata standards, such as Darwin Core (DwC) and Ecological Metadata Language (EML). The findings were based on reports submitted by 10 participating countries and sub-national regions: Autonomous Province of Bolzano (Italy), the Azores (Portugal), Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Israel and Sweden. The results reveal differences between the countries and sub-national regions in all aspects studied. Governance structures were found to range from highly centralised models with few organisations involved in monitoring (e.g. Denmark) to decentralised models involving a wide network of organisations (Bolzano). Differences were also identified in the maturity of data management and interoperability solutions, with room for improvement in every participating country or region. However, the use of DwC and EML standards was found to be relatively common, with eight out of 10 participating countries and regions using them to some extent for biodiversity monitoring data. The two exceptions were Czechia, which reported using other data and metadata standards, and Bulgaria, in which no such standards are currently used.
Crucial hubs
The outlook for national hubs was revealed to be promising, with half of the participating countries and sub-national regions reporting already having a national hub in place. As explained in a Biodiversa-plus news item, these hubs are crucial for connecting to the future European BMCC being developed under the lead of EuropaBON, another EU-funded project and key collaborator of Biodiversa-plus. In their reports, contributors highlighted some issues that are currently preventing effective biodiversity monitoring governance in their country or region. These included difficulties in finding and accessing data and the lack of stable and sustainable financial resources. Other issues mentioned included inadequate coordination between stakeholders and lack of human resources. The way forward, based on the pilot project’s findings, is to plan the establishment of national and sub-national biodiversity monitoring coordination centres or hubs in detail, ensuring that there is one in each country or sub-national region to enable efficient connection with the BMCC. Additionally, the development of these hubs should be prioritised independently of European-level BMCC developments. “The message is clear: achieving a harmonised biodiversity monitoring network across Europe requires cooperation, flexibility and a focus on common goals,” concludes the news item. The Biodiversa-plus (The European Biodiversity Partnership) project ends in 2028. For more information, please see: Biodiversa-plus project website
Keywords
Biodiversa-plus, biodiversity, biodiversity monitoring, governance, data standard, metadata standard, data interoperability
