AD4GD/ Pilots

Monitoring and optimization of biodiversity corridors

Lead: AU and CREAF

Environment: Rural and peri-urban

Location: Catalonia, Spain

CitSci approach: Volunteered observations

Context, stakeholders and challenges

The need for functional landscape connectivity is crucial for animal and plant dispersal. National, regional, and local governments require standardized metrics to make strategic spatial decisions for protected areas, zoning, agricultural practices, land remediation, and international reporting to the Convention on Biological Diversity. They also require accessible information products to facilitate dialogues with stakeholders in the landscape, such as farmers, who are more sensitive to local contexts.

Ambition

AD4GD aims to provide standardized metrics on the state and protection of biodiversity for national, regional, and local governments to make strategic spatial decisions about protected area networks, zoning, agricultural practices, and land remediation. The challenge is to quantify connectivity approaches, and it varies from graph-based models to remote sensing approaches.

The implementation plan involves working with stakeholders to identify existing data and protocols, co-designing FAIR computation services for connectivity, optimising the interoperability of these services with CitSci, administrative, and IoT data streams, prototyping transparent and reproducible reporting of resulting maps and metrics, and documenting and publishing services with metadata and semantic descriptions. The objective is to allow scaling to other geographic and climate contexts and use for projection/change analysis as required.