Human activities threaten the ability of the living planet to provide vital services upon which human societies depend, creating urgency in our need for accessible, actionable information on biodiversity to identify greatest risks, prioritize responses and measure success of interventions in hotspots such as the Tropical Andes. Biodiversity observations range widely across time, space, and character. Current observation efforts operate in silos, at scales that impede our ability to effectively detect, understand and respond to pressing issues driven at scales beyond the scope of a nation.
A consortium lead by the GEO BON Secretariat at iDiv, in collaboration with NatureServe, the University of Córdoba (Spain) and several local organizations in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, will work towards establishing a sustained, user driven, locally operated, harmonized and scalable regional biodiversity observation network for the Tropical Andes region. This network will draw from several global initiatives and platforms, including GEO BON’s BON-in-a-Box, iNaturalist, GBIF and NatureServe’s Biodiversity Indicators Dashboard and optimize the use of existing observation efforts and data to improve our ability to proactively predict and respond to key conservation issues such as biodiversity loss, climate change, health, water and food security.
The TAO project will be funded for 3 years as part of the 3rd ERANet-LAC Multi-Thematic joint call 2017/2018, jointly funded by BMBF (Germany), ISCIII (Spain), MOH (Bolivia), SENESCYT (Ecuador), and CONCYTEC (Peru) and should begin in the first quarter of 2019.