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While most biodiversity data is collected by scientists on the ground, engineers continue to develop remote sensing products that allow us to detect large-scale changes on Earth from space. In a paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, Miguel Fernandez joined a team of scientists from agencies and institutes such as NASA and the UN Environment Program in evaluating how to maximize the potential for monitoring biodiversity by including data collected by satellites.
NatureServe and Network staff collaborated with Australian ecologists to apply NatureServe’s International Vegetation Classification (IVC) to Australian woodlands and grasslands, providing a comprehensive approach for describing and classifying ecosystems at multiple scales.
NatureServe, together with colleagues on the IUCN SSC Post-2020 Task Force and the Red List Committee contributed to the launch of the STAR (Species Threat Abatement & Restoration) metric. STAR offers, for the first time, a robust and spatially explicit indicator to track actions aimed at reducing threats to species. This fills a big hole in the global indicator library, allowing countries (and even corporations or investment banks) to quantify their efforts to improve conditions for the persistence of biodiversity. It also represents yet another conservation knowledge product based on the Red List.
| Ensuring effective implementation of the post-2020 global biodiversity targets
Alongside researchers at the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), and the Institute of Biology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the study, Ensuring effective implementation of the post-2020 global biodiversity targets, examines the global failure in delivering the Aichi Biodiversity Targets (strategic international goals adopted in 2010 to address the crisis of biodiversity loss).
Here we introduce the International Vegetation Classification (IVC), based on the EcoVeg approach, as a useful, multi-scaled and comprehensive terrestrial classification that can inform biome concepts.
This standard places NatureServe and the Network in a better position to place the most current, complete, and consistent biodiversity data into the hands of researchers and decision-makers.
With tremendous biodiversity but increasing threats, Southeast Asia faces challenges in meeting its commitments to the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 2020 Aichi Targets. The use of indicators to monitor, evaluate and guide conservation progress is increasingly urgent. We found indicator use variable among nations but increasing.
Invasive annual grasses are a severe risk to native vegetation of the intermountain West. We developed a regional spatial model encompassing eight ecoregions to indicate the relative abundance of invasive annual grass at five levels of canopy cover.
