The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) has released a set of standardised guidelines to develop biodiversity monitoring programmes in Protected Areas (PAs) and Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs) worldwide, providing a snapshot of the most advanced tools and technologies.

As more than 295,000 PAs and OECMs are represented on the World Database on Protected Areas, IUCN stressed the need for utilising standardised monitoring frameworks to ensure valid and comparable datasets.

“The ambitious call to action of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and other international agreements highlights the importance of an internationally recognised biodiversity monitoring framework that can be applied in protected areas, OECMs, and national or international monitoring networks,” IUCN said.

“The monitoring framework supports consistency in the decision-making processes for which good methodological and technical preparation is mandatory.”

The decision-making framework proposed by IUCN encompassed four phases:

• The preparatory phase, designed to identify monitoring requirements and information gaps
• The conceptual phase, aiming to evaluate the scope of individual biodiversity monitoring programmes
• The implementation phase, when the actual monitoring occurs
• The re-evaluation phase to assess and report the outcomes of the biodiversity monitoring programme

According to IUCN, during the implementation phase, the application of digital tools has the potential to bring about a revolution in the monitoring of biodiversity in PAs and OECMs management.

By collecting data in an automated and standardised manner, it may be possible to improve the comparability of data across different PAs.

“In recent years, development of advanced sensor-based devices has dramatically improved capacities for biodiversity monitoring,” the document said.

The most promising technologies to advance biodiversity conservation include acoustic devices and sensors, optical devices, remote sensing, telemetry and tracking tools, olfactory devices, and genetic monitoring techniques.

In the past few years, several tech and intelligence firms, such as NatureMetrics, have developed innovative methods for monitoring nature in less invasive ways, both on land and in water, through genetic tracking.

The use of environmental DNA (eDNA) is increasingly promoted as a non-invasive way to measure biodiversity uplifts by analysing DNA samples from the environment, allowing for the detection of a wide range of organisms without direct observation or disturbance.

Furthermore, the field of bio-acoustics, which involves using the sounds made by animals to gain insights about wildlife in a particular environment, has developed into a scalable way to track biodiversity, leveraging the more recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data processing/storage.

Notably, Italian-based climate tech company 3Bee will soon start piloting its newly verified biodiversity monitoring protocol using bioacoustics and remote sensing to assess and quantify site-level biodiversity improvements.

However, despite the benefits, many barriers to digitalisation still exist, IUCN underlined, as their costs remain an obstacle for many management programmes, especially in developing countries.

Advanced technology innovations may also fail to capture the cultural elements of a site or may exclude untrained groups, IUCN said, advising that a combination of high-tech solutions and traditional techniques is to date the best option for managing PAs and OECMs.

In light of that, the guidelines are calling for collaboration with Indigenous Peoples to identify the most important biodiversity assets and indicators.

“Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge should be utilised in combination with scientific data for the best understanding of the state of biodiversity in the protected area or OECM.”

By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com

*** Click here to sign up to our twice-weekly biodiversity newsletter ***