Biodiversity Monitoring of Island Ecosystems

Oceanic islands contribute disproportionately to global biodiversity, hosting many endemic species with unique evolutionary and functional adaptations. Regrettably, islands are epicentres of biodiversity change, particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic disturbances such as habitat loss, climate change, and the introduction of non-native species. The impact of these anthropogenic drivers on islands has far-reaching implications. Therefore, in BioMonI, we work to underscore the importance of oceanic islands and related monitoring efforts at national, regional, and global levels. BioMonI aims to empower local and regional stakeholders by providing standardised monitoring protocols, historical baselines, quantitative estimates, and co-develop future scenarios of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) and Ecosystem Service Variables (EESVs).

Research

Towards a transnational oceanic island monitoring network

With BIOMONI, we aim to build a global long-term, easily accessible monitoring network specifically tailored to the pressing needs of biodiversity conservation and monitoring on islands. We encompass different spatiotemporal scales by unlocking palaeoecological archives, exploring unmanned aerial vehicles and satellite imagery to scale up, and integrating future island biodiversity scenarios. Further, in BioMon, we are working to include elusive dimensions of biodiversity via, e.g., genetic and genomic tools, broadening the spectrum of monitoring and conservation by integrating cross-scale evolutionary and functional perspectives linking local, regional, and global scales. To do that, we are assembling BIOMONI-PLOT, a long-term vegetation plot network to understand biodiversity and ecosystem change, with baseline data from three focal archipelagos (Azores, Canary Islands, and Mascarenes) but aim to mobilize data from archipelagos worldwide. The structure of BIOMONI-PLOT allows it to be easily integrated with species-level data and island-level information from the Global Inventory of Floras and Traits database (GIFT) as well as other vegetation-plot initiatives.

Team

Our team includes Holger Kreft, Nathaly Guerrero, Patrick Weigelt, and Wolf Wildpret at the University of Göttingen (Germany), Bernd Lenzner, Franz Essl, and Fabio Mologni at the University of Vienna (Austria), Paulo Borges, Rosalina Gabriel, and Rui Bentos Elias at the University of the Azores (Portugal), Lea de Nascimento, José Maria Fernández-Palacios, and Rüdiger Otto at the University of La Laguna (Spain), Clara Zemp, Samantha Suter, Vladimir Wingate, and Giorgia Camperio at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland), Claudine Ah-Peng and Dominique Strasberg at the University of La Réunion (France), & Jairo Patiño and Brent Emerson at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, Spain).