Journal article
Building essential biodiversity variables (EBVs) of species distribution and abundance at a global scale
WD Kissling, JA Ahumada, A Bowser, M Fernandez, N Fernández, EA García, RP Guralnick, NJB Isaac, S Kelling, W Los, L McRae, JB Mihoub, M Obst, M Santamaria, AK Skidmore, KJ Williams, D Agosti, D Amariles, C Arvanitidis, L Bastin Show all
Biological Reviews | WILEY | Published : 2018
DOI: 10.1111/brv.12359
Abstract
Much biodiversity data is collected worldwide, but it remains challenging to assemble the scattered knowledge for assessing biodiversity status and trends. The concept of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) was introduced to structure biodiversity monitoring globally, and to harmonize and standardize biodiversity data from disparate sources to capture a minimum set of critical variables required to study, report and manage biodiversity change. Here, we assess the challenges of a ‘Big Data’ approach to building global EBV data products across taxa and spatiotemporal scales, focusing on species distribution and abundance. The majority of currently available data on species distributions de..
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Awarded by Universidad de Sevilla
Funding Acknowledgements
This paper emerged from the first two workshops of the Horizon 2020 project GLOBIS-B (GLOBal Infrastructures for Supporting Biodiversity research; http://www.globisb.eu/). We thank Carsten Meyer and one anonymous reviewer for constructive comments on a previous version, Jacco Konijn for administrative support, Jan van Arkel for graphical support, and Jorg Freyhof, Renato De Giovanni, Liqiang Ji, Francisco Hernandez, Dimitris Koureas, Jesus Marco de Lucas, David Manset, Jeffrey Manuel, Eise van Maanen and John W. Watkins for discussions during the workshops. We are grateful to Jorg Freyhof, Helen Matthey, the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) for hosting our first workshop in Leipzig, Germany, from 29 February to 2 March 2016. We further thank Antonio Torralba Silgado, Juan Miguel Gonzalez Aranda, Jesus Miguel Santamaria, Clara Lujan, Alfonso Herrera, the University of Seville, and the Joint Research Unit LifeWatch Spain-JRU LW.ES for supporting our second workshop in Sevilla, Spain, from 13 15 June 2016. Financial support came from the European Commission (grant 654003). C. A. additionally received funding from the LifeWatchGreece infrastructure (MIS 384676), funded by the Greek Government under the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT), ESFRI Projects and National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF). M.O. was supported by the Swedish LifeWatch project funded by the Swedish Research Council (Grant no. 829-2009-6278), and J.E. by the Australian Research Council (grant FT0991640).