Biodiversity indicators miss local and short-term change: A blank space waiting to be filled

The year 2030 is rapidly approaching. Building, monitoring, and reporting indicators to evaluate the 2030 targets in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is a major challenge that requires, at minimum, nations to assess their progress at least once within the next five years. To effectively capture this progress, we need indicators that capture fast-paced, on-the-ground biodiversity change, alongside slower, more diffuse biodiversity trends at national scales. We gathered a group of biodiversity scientists and practitioners to evaluate how well common types of indicators cover the space-time continuum of biodiversity changes. We highlight a striking, nearly unanimously agreed upon, gap in the available indicator toolbox in our ability to capture on-the-ground biodiversity changes. To fill this blank space, we call for investment in local-scale and short-term monitoring, research on how to optimize this monitoring for rapid detection, and urgent development of indicators at these more actionable scales. DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X2J89R Subjects Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Biodiversity Indicators, Global Biodiversity Framework, gap analysis, Biodiversity Monitoring, decision support, conservation, spatiotemporal scales Dates Published: 2024-06-14 07:25 Last Updated: 2025-02-04 03:22 Older Versions License CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Additional Metadata Data and Code Availability Statement: Open data and code will be made available upon publication of this article. Language: English