Marine Biodiversity Monitoring for Europe

EuroMarine is a European, marine science network launched in 2014 and designed as a bottom-up organisation to act as a voice of the European marine scientific community. EuroMarine achieves its goals through competitive calls for proposals such as the long-term scientific working groups (LTSWG). The aim of the LTSWG is to provide the EuroMarine community with recommendations on how to best contribute to the international and European initiatives for restoring and sustainably exploit our Oceans as well as to advance the research on emerging topics related to marine sciences.
The Marine Biodiversity Observation Network for Europe (MBON Europe) LTSWG will spearhead coordination of active monitoring of marine biodiversity by organisations in Europe. Long term time series are essential to recognise and understand trends that may be due to natural or human activities, especially climate change. MBON Europe will formalise coordination between organisations through MoU, collate information on what monitoring is being done and how, discuss how to harmonise methods, facilitate data publication, synthesise and develop a strategy for improved coordination. This will contribute to the Objective 1 of the Mission “Restore our Oceans and Water” as well as to the enabler Ocean and waters knowledge system. It will also contribute to the UN Ocean Decade, SDG 14, Global Biodiversity Framework, GEO BON and MBON global; include citizen science initiatives; and complements priorities in the Biodiversa and Horizon Europe programmes. On a global scale, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) was established to foster marine biodiversity monitoring. It has established activities in the USA and Asia-Pacific. Our group would form a European sister hub, “MBON Europe”. Formal recognition by MBON would be an early goal of this LTSWG.
A new Horizon Europe project is designing a Marine Protected Area (MPA) network that is optimized for being representative of biodiversity (i.e., “MPA Europe” 2023-2026). A coordinated MBON Europe network will be able to help existing projects and new proposals find partners active in particular locations and/or habitats for their research. MBON Europe will provide a ready-to-go network of organizations actively doing such monitoring and who could contribute to such research projects.
We expect the following outcomes from MBON Europe:
• a MoU signed between MBON Europe participants and EuroMarine; an online spreadsheet of information on what biodiversity is being monitored where and when in European seas by EuroMarine members;
• a regularly updated map of where and what kind (habitats, taxa, methods) of marine biodiversity monitoring is underway in European seas by EuroMarine members;
• a scientific paper published that synthesizes the current status of biodiversity monitoring in European seas;
• a strategy to ensure that the delivery of coordinated marine biodiversity monitoring is optimized in the long term;
• time-series data on marine biodiversity from EuroMarine members published through EurOBIS, OBIS, EMODnet and GBIF;
MBON Europe will benefit the science by getting formal institutional recognition of marine biodiversity monitoring. This will support numerous UN Sustainable Development Goals such as UNSDG14, and other targets. It is hoped in the longer term, MBON Europe will help to develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) for biodiversity monitoring.