GRID Sampling for a Global Rapid Biodiversity Assessment: Methods, Applications, Results, and Lessons Learned

Abstract

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).