The conservation and management of biodiversity relies on comprehensive evidence to establish baselines and track changes. This dynamic setting highlights both the need for and importance of reliable indicators whose metrics are integrated within flexible analytical frameworks that are readily updated.
In this paper, researchers propose two novel indicators—the Species Status Information Index (SSII) and the Species Sampling Effectiveness Index (SSEI)—in support of global assessment, monitoring and decision-making around trends in biodiversity information. The authors also provide a platform for the continuous tracking of the indices in the future.
To demonstrate the indicator framework, the authors used nearly half a billion GBIF-mediated species occurrences to assess more than 31,000 terrestrial vertebrates. Their results found that 42 per cent of nations showed increasing trends in coverage over the previous decade, driven largely by a rapid increase in bird data. Fewer than 20 per cent of all countries had increased trends for non-bird taxa.
While citizen science initiatives provide invaluable contributions to biodiversity data, these findings indicate that they have not yet been optimized to closing gaps in knowledge. To ensure improvements in data coverage, the authors recommend shifting incentives from numbers of records and species collected to value of records contributed.
Some regions that previously showed comprehensive sampling, e.g. Western Europe and Australia, appeared to have slowed in their progress, likely a result of nations operating at maximum capacity. For these, shifting investments to support data mobilization and capacity building in nations lagging behind targets, may help contribute to goals defined through the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). As examples of such projects, the authors highlighted GBIF's BID and BIFA programmes.