Developing a circumpolar programme for the monitoring of Arctic terrestrial biodiversity.

This review provides a synopsis of the main findings of individual papers in the special issue Terrestrial Biodiversity in a Rapidly Changing Arctic. The special issue was developed to inform the State of the Arctic Terrestrial Biodiversity Report developed by the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program (CBMP) of the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF), Arctic Council working group. Salient points about the status and trends of Arctic biodiversity and biodiversity monitoring are organized by taxonomic groups: (1) vegetation, (2) invertebrates, (3) mammals, and (4) birds. This is followed by a discussion about commonalities across the collection of papers, for example, that heterogeneity was a predominant pattern of change particularly when assessing global trends for Arctic terrestrial biodiversity. Finally, the need for a comprehensive, integrated, ecosystem-based monitoring program, coupled with targeted research projects deciphering causal patterns, is discussed.

Monitoring is an essential component of measuring the performance of protected areas. This requirement led to the development of a biodiversity monitoring system for South African National Parks (SANParks). The system comprises of ten major programmes, each focusing on a core area of conservation biodiversity monitoring, with resource use being one of the focal areas. With the growing appreciation of the importance of natural resources for the socio-economic well-being of communities and other stakeholders, sustainable resource use is an important component of the management of natural areas and national parks. To gauge sustainability, a sound monitoring and research programme that fits within the context of the SANParks’ adaptive management approach towards social-ecological system management is required. The purpose of this article was to define the context and scope in which consumptive resource use takes place within SANParks and to outline the criteria necessary for developing a sound monitoring programme to assess the sustainability of such use. The monitoring programme is structured in view of the fact that sustainable resource use is achievable only where all dimensions of sustainability (social, economic and ecological) are considered simultaneously. In terms of the social and economic dimensions of sustainability, the programme provides for assessing stakeholder needs, trends in resource use and the social and economic impacts of resource use. Monitoring that relates to the ecological dimension of sustainability of biological resource use deals with the rate of turnover and population dynamics of target species, as well as harvest impact. In terms of abiotic (non-renewable) resources, monitoring deals with sound management practices to minimise impact on the environment, and to optimise benefits through responsible use.Conservation implications: The resource use monitoring programme is intended to ensure that monitoring relating to the harvesting of natural resources from national parks is scientifically sound and conducted in a structured way, towards meeting the objective of sustainable use and compliance with national legislation. The article illustrates how SANParks meets its obligation to monitor biodiversity conservation while at the same time meeting the needs for the consumptive use of resources.

Fungi represent a megadiverse kingdom, and play crucial ecological roles as decomposers of dead organic matter and through biotic interactions as parasites, pathogens and symbionts in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. They are of fundamental importance for carbon cycling in most ecosystems, and directly or indirectly influence the activity and biodiversity of other organisms. Despite their importance, major gaps remain in our understanding of fungal biodiversity and conservation. These include knowledge gaps in taxonomy, biogeography, ecology, traits, trends and sensitivity to environmental change, which are crucial for the success of conservation of fungi, interacting organisms, and entire ecosystems. We also see strong geographic biases in fungal knowledge and expertise, with many presumed biodiversity hotspots vastly understudied and excluded from large-scale initiatives. Partly as a consequence of these gaps, fungi have been underrepresented in biodiversity monitoring programs, conservation planning, and policy frameworks. However, recent methodological advancements, including those in molecular techniques, citizen science, etc. allow for inclusion and upscaling of fungi biodiversity data. The fungal perspective could also provide new ways to think about biodiversity monitoring and conservation, which embrace biotic interactions or the functioning of ecosystems, for instance. In this introductory presentation to the session, we will outline key knowledge gaps and provide guiding questions and concepts for a discussion and to map ways forward to reduce these gaps with improved inclusion and collaboration. We will also introduce important initiatives aimed at addressing some of these knowledge gaps and at developing concepts and experiences. The goal of this introductory presentation is to contextualise the contributions of the session and guide the discussions to support the development of frameworks and concepts needed for effective fungal biodiversity monitoring and conservation, and ultimately to facilitate the integration of fungi in respective programs and policies. Given the increasing awareness of fungi in academia, among land managers, policymakers and society in general, inclusion of fungi in biodiversity monitoring and conservation programs is urgent, relevant, and timely.

The arctic fox metapopulation in Fennoscandia has been critically endangered over a century, but due to thorough research and intensive conservation measures it has now started to recover. On Varanger Peninsula in northeastern Norway, research about the causes of the arctic fox decline was initiated in 2004. A conceptual model that hypothesized the irregularity of lemming cycles caused by warmer winters and high abundance of the competitively superior red fox as the two main drivers of the critical state of the local population guided the establishment of a monitoring program that included arctic and red foxes, but also other key ecosystem components. Intensive red fox culling in part of the study area was implemented as an experimental management action. This research has subsequently become a part of the Climate-ecological Observatory for Arctic Tundra (COAT), an adaptive monitoring program for long-term research on climate change impacts on terrestrial arctic ecosystems. Following the paradigm of adaptive monitoring, the results of the first 12 years of the study was evaluated in 2017 and led to the conclusion that red fox culling was not sufficient to help arctic foxes recover in the present ecosystem conditions. We hypothesized that absence of lemming peaks and an initially very small and isolated arctic fox population (i.e. demographic stochasticity) contributed to the lack of a response to the culling action. Consequently, two additional management actions decided by the Norwegian Environment Agency were implemented in collaboration with the National Program for Arctic Fox Conservation to address these hypotheses. Supplemental feeding was initiated together with the release of 65 captive bred arctic fox pups from the Norwegian Captive Breeding Program on Varanger over three years (2018-2020). These combined management actions resulted in a strong increase of the local arctic fox population. At the same time, the research conducted to evaluate these management actions has resulted in several now 20-year long time series that are integrated in the research plan of COAT. These data provide unique knowledge about this low arctic ecosystem affected by rapid climate change and increasing human activities. This study shows how on the one hand a monitoring program emerged from a management question – the conservation of arctic foxes – and on the other hand how a thoroughly designed adaptive monitoring program provides crucial information for managing endangered populations.

Analyzing the market position of fish species subject to the impact of long-term changes: a case study of French fisheries in the Bay of Biscay

Using network ecology to understand and mitigate long‐term insect declines

Reconstructing past ecological population dynamics and demographic events is crucial for understanding the dynamics of ecological processes, evaluating the impact of environmental changes and making informed conservation decisions. In forest ecosystems, retrodiction (i.e. the backward projection of ecological populations) plays a pivotal role in understanding historical forest carbon levels and the factors that have influenced their variation over time, because forest demography is a major determinant of the amount of carbon stored in forest ecosystems. The persistent lack of quantitative methods has been a significant obstacle in retrodicting forest demography, especially in applications of a broad geographical scale. While there is a wealth of models for predicting future forest conditions, models that can project these conditions backward in time are scarce. This study presents reverse matrix model (RMM), an innovative retrodiction modelling approach grounded in the principles of transition matrix models. RMM is designed to deduce past demographic characteristics of ecological populations using current data, making it one of the first models capable of projecting the fine‐scale dynamics of forest demography into the past. We assessed the retrodictive performance of RMM by fitting it to a dataset of a disturbed tropical rainforest in French Guiana in 2001–2023, then comparing the retrodictions to observations back to 1983 when the disturbance occurred. We further empirically evaluated the viability of retrodiction over a defined duration by inverting the density‐dependent matrix model by Lin et al. (1996), which predicts the dynamics of northern hardwoods in the United States. The case studies demonstrate significant potential for RMM application in various domains of forestry and conservation, including ecosystem management and conservation planning, global change impact assessment and biodiversity monitoring.

Biodiversity loss is widely recognized as a crucial survival issue in society. This became clear when most countries of the international community signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 . There is vast evidence that the loss of biodiversity is not only a biological and an ethical problem but it is also substantially a financial problem because important ecosystem services are lost on a global level. Many countries have recognized these facts and have implemented national biodiversity monitoring strategies to detect changes in biodiversity, usually substituted by monitoring species and species richness. Some of these protocols recently started to accept a loss of precision for single species by assessing multiple species at the same time (rapid multispecies assessments). This is because resources to implement one monitoring system per species often are simply not available and multiple-species monitoring on a landscape level is much more resource efficient. The hope is that these approaches can help to provide information and manage well for the entire global systems. These systems are also more resilient against sudden changes in the focus of research interest, which may render more specific monitoring systems useless before they are even fully implemented. Some regional examples of such monitoring systems are the Multiple Species Inventory and Monitoring Protocol (MSIM) for National Forest System lands in the USA, the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Program (ABMP) in Canada, the Biodiversity Monitoring Switzerland, or the International Biodiversity Observation Year in Western Pacific and Asia (IBOY-DIWPA).

State-of-the-art tools are revolutionizing protected area (PA) manager approaches to biodiversity monitoring. Effective strategies are available for test site establishment, data collection, archiving, analysis, and presentation. In PAs, use of new technologies will support a shift from primarily expert-based to automated monitoring procedures, allowing increasingly efficient data collection and facilitating adherence to conservation requirements. Selection and application of appropriate tools increasingly improve options for adaptive management. In this chapter, modern biodiversity monitoring techniques are introduced and discussed in relation to previous standard approaches for their applicability in diverse habitats and for different groups of organisms. A review of some of today’s most exciting technologies is presented, including environmental DNA analysis for species identification; automated optical, olfactory, and auditory devices; remote sensing applications relaying site conditions in real-time; and uses of unmanned aerial systems technology for observation and mapping. An overview is given in the context of applicability of monitoring tools in different ecosystems, providing a theoretical basis from conceptualization to implementation of novel tools in a monitoring program. Practical examples from real-world PAs are provided.

The use of camera traps to sample populations and communities of birds andmammals shows great promise as a tool for monitoring terrestrial species that often avoid easy observation (Kery, 2010). Use of camera traps in ecology is growing exponentially (Rowcliffe & Carbone, 2008), including an expanding roster of inventories, surveys and monitoring programs. The commentaries on O’Brien et al., (2010a) in this issue (Dobson & Nowak, 2010; Nichols, 2010) show that camera trap photographs not only provide data on cryptic species but can also be used to sway public opinion and policymakers in a way that is different from, and clearly complementary to, the most compelling graph or table. Dobson, Nowak and Nichols point out several aspects of monitoring and camera trapping that I want to highlight for researchers interested in biodiversity monitoring and conservation, and the policy makers who rely on their data and information.

In a time when the global economy continues to stutter, social justice and climate change mitigation simultaneously increase in urgency and complexity. In this context,existing organisations are put under pressure to display sustainable entrepreneurial behaviour,transforming their strategy to meet new social and environmental goals. This paper analyses the process of sustainable entrepreneurship in the context of existing hybrid organisations. We conducted extensive fieldwork at a Dutch housing association in transition. The case organisation set an ambitious climate mitigation target to be achieved by 2030 inducing a chain of organisational changes. At the same time, the strategy department is also dealing with a number of social challenges, among which a worrying increase of poverty, an ageing target group, and a rising refugees’ requests for housing. We offer a set of new propositions to underpin the mechanism fostering and contrasting the sustainable entrepreneurship process. One key finding is that some of the mechanisms that fuel organisational inertia in its conventional (negative)connotation, might be the ones enabling positive long-term social and environmental change.

We explored the key issues that are most likely to influence any set of guiding principles for developing biodiversity monitoring programmes in Australia's rangelands. We defined the Australian rangelands and came up with an overview of their climate extremes, land‐use pressures and biodiversity loss, and then focussed on issues underpinning the design phase of any monitoring programme. Using Noss's 1990 framework of compositional, structural and functional attributes of biodiversity and its new revisions by others, we showed how the elusive, abstract concept of biodiversity can be used to identify many measurable attributes that can form a minimum and necessary set of indicators for any biodiversity monitoring task. We then described the steps in the monitoring process, with a particular focus on the reasons for monitoring biodiversity as they strongly influence the selection of indicators. We concluded by compiling a table of key issues as background information for developing guiding principles (Table 4). The list is by no means an exhaustive list for the design phase but it does indicate that considerable attention needs to be given to this phase when developing monitoring programmes. We have intentionally not addressed the equally important issues associated with the planning and delivery phases of developing a monitoring programme, as Wallace et al. and Watson and Novelly cover these in their papers in the present issue of Austral Ecology.

Using Community-Led Mini-Grant Projects to Increase Access to Healthy, Affordable Food and Places to be Active

The success of long-term wildlife monitoring programs can be influenced by many factors and study designs often represent compromises between spatial scales and costs. Adaptive monitoring programs can iteratively manage this tension by adopting new cost-efficient technologies, which can provide projects the opportunity to reallocate costs to address new hypotheses, adapt to changing ecological conditions, or adjust sampling scale or resolution. If there is interest in longer time series of monitoring data, methodological transitions may necessitate integrated models to link newer data with historical data. However, data integration can be difficult if spatial or temporal scales are mismatched. Here, we develop an integrated multistate site-occupancy model and resolve sample unit spatial mismatch to link datasets from two northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) monitoring schemes that broadly overlapped during a methodological transition. The first dataset was obtained from a decades-long spotted owl monitoring program using call-playback and mark-resight surveys on historical territories of varying size and shape. This monitoring program has recently transitioned to passive acoustic monitoring of randomly selected 5-km2 hexagons over larger spatial extents. Both monitoring datasets overlapped with areas in which barred owl (Strix varia), an invasive competitor that has played an important role in northern spotted owl declines, were being removed experimentally. Reconciling spatial mismatch substantially increased the representation of the call-playback dataset and integrating the two datasets increased precision of spotted owl use and paired occupancy estimates relative to single dataset estimates. Estimates of spotted owl pair occupancy across the study area were lower than previous territory-based estimates based on call-playback surveys. Our integrated model further showed that a concurrent barred owl removal experiment increased landscape use and site occupancy by pairs of spotted owls. Our empirical application of an integrated modelling approach demonstrates a useful analytical framework for long-term monitoring efforts undergoing methodological transitions (e.g. mark-recapture to non-invasive population monitoring). This framework allows monitoring programs to maintain continuity of monitoring objectives across methodological transitions, rigorously incorporate previous findings, and adaptively respond to changing ecological conditions.

Taiwan’s marine ecosystems are increasingly vulnerable to anthropogenic and environmental pressures, highlighting the urgent need for effective biodiversity monitoring. This study investigates existing marine biodiversity observation and monitoring mechanisms in Taiwan to inform future conservation and policy development. The study analyzes three long-term ecological datasets: (1) plankton assemblages in western coastal waters (1993–2021), (2) fish assemblages in northern rocky tide pools, and (3) fish assemblages in southern tide pools. Additionally, it evaluates the Taiwan Marine Environment Monitoring Service (TwMEMS), which integrates real-time and historical oceanographic data for ecological assessment and disaster preparedness. The findings reveal distinct seasonal and regional biodiversity patterns. Plankton communities exhibited peak chlorophyll-a concentrations in the third quarter, indicating nutrient enrichment likely from upwelling or runoff. Fish assemblages showed site-specific species richness, with notable dominance of Bathygobius fuscus and Istiblennius species. TwMEMS data demonstrated improved tsunami detection through advanced filtering techniques, supporting ecosystem risk monitoring. Taiwan’s monitoring systems provide valuable baseline data for assessing long-term ecological change but face challenges in data integration and indicator standardization. Strengthening these frameworks through regional monitoring hubs, standardized biodiversity indicators, and alignment with international platforms such as GBIF and BONs will enhance marine conservation effectiveness. This study emphasizes the role of integrated observation mechanisms in supporting ecosystem-based management and Taiwan’s contribution to global biodiversity goals.