BIOINT - Using citizen science data to identify species interactions and protect biodiversity

Species interactions are essential to support biodiversity, e.g. pollination allow plants to reproduce, and herbivores eat plants. The loss of one species can cause a cascade of extinctions when dependent species lose their essential interactions.

However, due to a lack of knowledge about interactions between individual species, existing models and indicators focus on how climate or land use changes affects biodiversity.

As existing methods do not include extinction cascades, they potentially underestimate how environmental change will impact biodiversity.To accurately detect biodiversity changes, we aim to develop a method to infer species interactions from observed extinctions cascades.

The BIOINT (BIOdiversity INTeractions) model will attribute species changes to environmental conditions and, importantly, the loss of other species. To improve accuracy in species trends, we will integrate Swedish citizen science data and monitoring data.

Using existing data is a cost-effective way to infer species interactions, which will be validated with a unique interaction database.

BIOINT will quantify how much each species contributes to maintaining biodiversity through its interactions; its irreplaceability.

Interactions will be further summarized into a multi-species indicator of how strong and intact interactions are between species at a given site.

BIOINT will provide a method to detect biodiversity trends, and an indicator to monitor changes in species interactions.