by For the few people who get the chance to see Earth from space, the impact is often profound. Known as the “overview effect”, astronauts report that the experience is overwhelming, as the planet’s fragility and beauty become apparent. Others, such as actor William Shatner, said they were overcome with grief.
Now, scientists are proposing the creation of a new system that they hope will use the view from space to transform our understanding of Earth’s changing ecology and its complex systems.
By combining satellite data and images with ground-based technologies such as camera traps, acoustic monitoring and DNA barcoding in every country in the world, scientists say the creation of a new multibillion-dollar international scheme would allow countries to effectively track the health of the planet. and protect food, water and material supplies for billions of people.
In 2022, governments pledged to transform their relationship with nature by the end of the decade. From halting extinctions caused by human behavior to restoring nearly a third of the planet’s degraded ecosystems, countries have signed up to 23 goals to halt the rapid decline of life on Earth.
But a growing number of scientists warn that data on the health of the planet’s seas, soils, forests and species is so flawed that it will be impossible to know whether we have succeeded in meeting the agreed targets. Despite great progress in monitoring the climate, information on Earth’s biodiversity is relatively poor, they say. To overcome the issue, researchers have proposed creating a new system to monitor the biosphere similar to how people monitor the weather, regularly “taking the pulse of the planet”.
Canada, Colombia and several European nations are among the countries developing their own biodiversity observation networks – known as BONs – which researchers say should be combined into a global observing system. The BON system brings together raw data on seas, soils, forests and species to provide an overview of a nation’s biodiversity health – which could then be combined at a planetary level.
“The uncertainty in our knowledge of where biodiversity is changing is so great that even if we met the targets, we wouldn’t be able to measure them,” says Andrew Gonzalez, professor of conservation biology at McGill University. his colleague. – chairman of GEO BON, a global biodiversity observation network that aims to make the initiative a reality.
“We wouldn’t even know if we would reach the goal. I’m not sure if everyone is ready for that conclusion but that’s the stark truth,” he says. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, as the saying goes. And if you can’t predict it, you can’t protect it. These things are really important.”
If you go to the doctor, you don’t want them to look at you and say, ‘you look healthy’ or, ‘you look a bit skinny’. They take measurements
This year, the world’s space agencies are coming together to improve their biodiversity monitoring. The current data have several limitations, the researchers say. An analysis of 742m records of nearly 375,000 species in 2021 found widespread gaps and biases: only 6.74% of the planet was sampled, and high elevations and deep seas are particularly unknown. Some of the biggest gaps were in the tropics, despite the fact that these areas had large areas of life. Europe, the USA, Australia and South Africa accounted for 82% of all records, while more than half of the records focused on less than 2% of known species.
The data gaps are not limited to animals. In 2023, Kew Gardens identified 32 planetary “dark spots” – including Fiji, New Guinea and Madagascar – known to be rich in plant biodiversity but with poor data records. Fourteen dark spots were in the Asia-tropical region, six were in the Asia-temperate region, nine in South America and two in Africa. There was one in North America.
Alice Hughes, associate professor at the University of Hong Kong, says the poor data coverage means that places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has the largest share of the world’s second largest rainforest – with a large number of species – is understood badly despite being under significant threat. Geospatial data can be used to monitor loss from spaces, Hughes says, but new technologies like eDNA and other methods have opened up new ways to monitor ecosystem health.
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Other techniques, such as acoustic monitoring and DNA barcoding, allow a better understanding of ecosystems and identify some of the millions of species yet to be discovered. Innovations in scanning technologies enable researchers to check an entire forest for disease and identify species distributions. But scientists say there is still more to be done to look at Earth’s systems as a whole.
“If you go to the doctor, you don’t want them to look at you and say, ‘you look healthy’ or, ‘you look a little skinny’,” says Hughes. “They make measurements. There are many different ways to use this data but basically it would allow us to take the pulse of the planet.”
Maria Azeredo de Dornelas, professor of biology at the University of St Andrews, says: “We need a larger observation system that allows us to measure biodiversity as we measure the weather. We probably don’t need it as often as the weather but we have to do it.
“The potential is there to do this very well. It would require international cooperation because it is not the kind of thing that one country or even a continent can do. The planet’s biodiversity really doesn’t care about political borders.”
