The World Biodiversity Forum, convened by bioDISCOVERY and the URPP Global Change and Biodiversity , brought together more than 700 participants from over 60 countries at Davos. Under the theme of “Inspiration for Action”, motivating workshops, plenaries and presentations on all realms of biodiversity involving practitioners and actors with examples of solutions to inspire the transformational change required for conservation and sustainability.
The workshop “Towards a Global Biodiversity Monitoring system“, co-hosted by bioDISCOVERY, GEO BON and NASA/JPL and funded by the European Space Agency ESA , explored the necessity of such a global biodiversity monitoring system, the (monitoring) gaps are that such a system would fill, who the users of such as system would be, and which organisations could / would contribute to establish such as system.
After introductory presentations by Gary Geller, NASA JPL, and Andrew Gonzalez, GEO BON, participants were tasked to develop a conceptual vision, to identify key building blocks and to design a (conceptual) pilot version for a GBiOS. Discussions revealed that the scope of such a GBiOS needs to be clearly defined (who are at target users, what are th eir needs, what products fulfil their needs best) and that incentives for participation need to be clearly laid out (what is the added value of the system, who are the partners). All components of a GBiOS need to be integrated and harmonised, to have an appropriate level of interoperability to function as a “system of systems”, including data standards and observation protocols. Achieving this require capacity building, including technical capabilities, skills and human resources, as well as a governance model that allows consistent implementation, and empowers users to collect, analyse and utilise data.
A follow-up workshop, dedicated to further developing the GBiOS concept and establishment of pilot, is planned for the first half of 2023.
The workshop was complemented by a number of sessions dedicated to biodiversity monitoring and observation.