Biodiversity Meets Data - BMD - connecting high-throughput biodiversity monitoring with Earth Observation data

Species occurrence data from in situ measurements constitutes the fundamental ingredient for analyses of status of biodiversity, including mapping of species distributions and estimating extinction risks, and thereby supplies core scientific evidence that informs biodiversity policy. These data are a critical component in monitoring progress towards targets to protect and conserve biodiversity, such as those included in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the EU Nature Directives, the EU Biodiversity Strategy and the EU Nature Restoration Regulation. However, the availability of these data is still lacking for many parts of the world, and even for Europe, it is highly biased towards the North and West with poor coverage of Europe’s most diverse regions in the South and East.The Horizon Europe project ‘Biodiversity Meets Data’ - BMD - is developing a single access point providing users with: a) platforms for high-throughput biodiversity monitoring using camera traps, acoustic devices, and eDNA sampling combined with AI-based species identification, and b) biodiversity analysis tools (BATs) to analyse the captured data in the terrestrial, freshwater, and marine realms. Combining species occurrence information with spatial and temporal explicit Earth Observation (EO) and abiotic data in the BATs allows for powerful quantification of the effects of habitat and climate change on the status of biodiversity and the trends in species distributions and population sizes. BMD is focussed on the effectiveness of the EU Nature Directives and their implementation in the EU Natura 2000 network, and provides Natura 200 site managers and policymakers with monitoring and analyses tools.In this presentation we identify the gaps and biases in European biodiversity data and indicate which of the high-throughput biodiversity monitoring devices can be deployed most effectively to monitor the species for which the Natura 2000 sites were designated. EO data, and their derived habitat metrics, guide Natura 2000 site managers to localities for optimal deployment of high-throughput biodiversity monitoring devices.