Cost effective biodiversity monitoring at small spatial scales

Long-term monitoring is an important tool for assessing how biodiversity is changing as a consequence anthropogenic effects on the environment, such as land-use change and climate warming.

National monitoring programs are therefore commonly used as a starting point to mitigate negative effects of human activities, and to assess environmental quality targets.

Many mitigation actions, however, take place at local rather than national scales, but we generally lack monitoring data at these smaller scales.

The resulting absence of information about long-term trends at local levels hampers our ability to take appropriate and timely action to mitigate biodiversity loss.

The goal of this project is to develop cost-effective indicators of long-term change in species and biodiversity status at regional levels by combining two sources of existing data: Swedish bird monitoring data available at national scales, and unstructured citizen science data reported by the public at higher spatial resolution.

We will develop statistical tools to integrate these two data sets to make use of their respective strengths for more precise local monitoring.

We will then use these tools to investigate changes in local biodiversity status across Sweden, and to produce biodiversity and population indicators at regional levels. The statistical methods will be made available in an R package, and the regional indicators via a webpage.