Conference Agenda

ID: 572 / 4.04.2: 1

From Integrated In-Situ and Remote Sensing Campaigns to Open, Operational Biodiversity Data Products: Priorities, Gaps, and Opportunities

Anabelle Cardoso^1,8, Kyla Dahlin², Mike Harfoot³, Erin Hestir⁴, Carsten Meyer⁵, Javier Pacheco-Labrador⁶, Christian Rossi⁷, Maria J. Santos⁷, Adam M. Wilson¹

1 University at Buffalo, United States of America; 2 Michigan State University, United States of America; 3 Vizzuality, United Kingdom; 4 University of California Merced, United States of America; 5 iDiv; 6Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain; 7 University of Zurich, Switzerland; 8 University of Capetown, South Africa

Conserving biodiversity is a global priority that urgently requires effective decision-making. Open, Operational Biodiversity Data Products (OOBDPs) that deliver information to decision makers at the appropriate spatiotemporal scale are critical to informing conservation policy and action across governments, corporations, and for local communities. Rapidly developing such systems will require efficient spatiotemporal scaling of biodiversity data products without losing their integrity.

Scaling biodiversity data products is complex because biodiversity is intrinsically local; it is the product of a unique environmental and evolutionary history and is specific to a point in space and time. Local knowledge and in situ measurements that capture this complexity are resource-intensive to collect, and it is not feasible to do this everywhere all the time. Therefore, to create biodiversity data products for decision-making, you need to scale up local knowledge and in-situ measurements by integrating them with remote sensing data, which can be collected across large areas and at regular intervals.

Integrating remote sensing and local data to produce biodiversity data products should go beyond simply pairing co-located field and remote sensing measurements, applying an algorithm, and producing a map of the world. Yet, this approach is common practice in academic, non-profit, and corporate settings, and the resulting maps are widely used by governments to inform policy and reporting. There is thus an urgent need for our community to propose an alternative strategy.

This workshop aims to solicit feedback from the community on two major topics:

• What are the key challenges, gaps, opportunities and best practices for integrating local knowledge and in situ measurements with remote sensing for biodiversity data products?

• What are the key characteristics of OOBDPs, which are the priority data products and what are the challenges, opportunities and best practices for efficiently developing, evaluating and continually improving them?