For the handful of people who get the chance to observe Earth from space, the impact is often profound. Called the “overview effect,” astronauts report being deeply moved by the experience, as the planet’s fragility and beauty became apparent. Others, such as actor William Shatner, said they were overwhelmed with grief.
Now scientists are proposing the creation of a new system that they hope will use the view from space to transform our understanding of Earth’s changing ecology and its complex systems.
By combining satellite data and imagery with on-the-ground technology such as camera traps, acoustic monitoring and DNA barcoding in every country on Earth, scientists say the creation of a new multibillion international scheme will enable countries to effectively track the health of the planet. and protect food, water and material supplies for billions of people.
In 2022, governments pledged to transform their relationship with nature towards the end of the decade. From halting extinction caused by human behavior to restoring nearly a third of the planet’s degraded ecosystems, countries have signed up to 23 targets to halt the rapid decline of life on Earth.
But a growing number of scientists warn that data on the health of the planet’s seas, soils, forests and species is so flawed that it will be impossible to know whether we have been successful in meeting the agreed targets. Despite great progress in monitoring the climate, information about the earth’s biodiversity is relatively poor, they say. To overcome the problem, researchers proposed the creation of a new system to monitor the biosphere, similar to how people monitor the weather, regularly “taking the pulse of the planet”.
Canada, Colombia and several European countries are among the countries developing their own biodiversity monitoring networks – known as BONs – which researchers say should be combined into a global observing system. A BON system brings together raw data on seas, soils, forests and species to provide an overview of a nation’s biodiversity health – which can then be combined at a planetary level.
“The uncertainty in our knowledge of where biodiversity is changing is so great that even if we met the goals, we wouldn’t be able to measure it,” said Andrew Gonzalez, a professor of conservation biology at McGill University, who co . -chairs GEO BON, a global biodiversity observation network that aims to make the initiative a reality.
“We won’t even know if we hit the target. I’m not sure everyone is quite ready for that conclusion, but that’s the harsh reality,” he says. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, as the saying goes. And if you can’t predict it, you can’t protect it. These things really matter.”
This year the world’s space agencies are coming together to improve their biodiversity monitoring. There are several limitations of the current data, researchers say. Analysis of 742 million records from nearly 375,000 species in 2021 found widespread gaps and biases: just 6.74% of the planet was sampled, with high altitudes and deep seas particularly unknown. Some of the biggest gaps were in the tropics, despite these areas being home to large swathes of life. Europe, the USA, Australia and South Africa accounted for 82% of all records, and more than half of records focused on less than 2% of known species.
The data gaps are not limited to animals. In 2023, Kew Gardens 32 planet “dark spots” identified – including Fiji, New Guinea and Madagascar – which are known to be rich in plant biodiversity but have poor data records. Fourteen dark spots were in the Asia-tropical region, six were in the Asia-temperate region, nine in South America and two in Africa. There was one in North America.
Alice Hughes, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong, says the poor data coverage means that places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has most of the second largest rainforest on earth – home to large numbers of species – are getting poor understood despite significant threat. Geospatial data can be used to monitor loss from space, says Hughes, but new technologies such as eDNA and other methods have opened up new ways to monitor ecosystem health.
Other techniques, such as acoustic monitoring and DNA barcoding allow better understanding of ecosystems and identify some of the millions of species yet to be discovered. Innovations in scanning technology allow researchers to check an entire forest for disease and identify species distributions. But scientists say there is still more to be done to look at Earth’s systems as a whole.
“When you go to a doctor, you don’t want them to just look at you and say, ‘yeah, you look healthy’ or, ‘you look a little pale,'” says Hughes. “They take measurements. There are many different ways to use this data, but basically it will allow us to take the pulse of the planet.”
Maria Azeredo de Dornelas, a professor of biology at the University of St Andrews, says: “We need a larger observing system that allows us to measure biodiversity the way we measure the weather. We probably don’t need it as often like the weather, but we have to do it.
“There is the potential to do it really well. It will need international cooperation because it is not the kind of thing that one country or even continent can do. The planet’s biodiversity doesn’t really care about political borders.”
