‘Our proposal offers a blueprint for Europe to improve its fragmented and incoherent monitoring systems. We want to create a single coordinated, continent-wide network capable of tracking changes in species and ecosystems – based on data ranging from the DNA of plants and animals to entire forests, rivers and oceans’, says ecologist Daniel Kissling, head of the biogeography and macroecology lab at the University of Amsterdam and lead author of a study in Nature Reviews Biodiversity of 23 February.
In it, fifteen European research institutions propose a framework for streamlined biodiversity data collection, based on 84 Essential Biodiversity Variables. This would allow information from highly diverse sources – such as professional field records and citizen observations, sensors and satellites – to be integrated into reports for policymakers. To achieve such an integrated, transnational system, the authors propose establishing a European Biodiversity Observation Coordination Centre. The European Parliament has already approved preparatory steps towards this. The roadmap ‘directly aligns with the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030’, the Nature Restoration Regulation and other EU legislation, and Kissling describes it in the university magazine Folia as ‘perhaps the most important publication’ of his career.