FS 3.183: Towards a global assessment of mountain biodiversity

Since the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, assessments of ongoing trends in the Earth System and its components have become a key source of scientific information for governments and decision-makers. As of today, no such assessment exists for mountain ecosystems and species. This is the case although both the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Agenda and the targets agreed upon in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework call for reporting on biodiversity protection also in mountains. With a first-of-its-kind global assessment of mountain biodiversity research and trends, the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) program is filling this gap. By doing so, it takes advantage of the increase in the amount, coverage, and accessibility of mountain biodiversity data, the growing volume of mountain biodiversity literature, developments in text annotation and analysis, and increasingly well-organized communities of experts. This session aims at convening mountain biodiversity scientists involved or interested in mountain biodiversity and ecosystem assessments to (1) review ongoing chapters of the GMBA global assessment, (2) present ongoing efforts to collect the data and literature needed for biodiversity assessments, and 3) discuss conceptual and methodological challenges and opportunities associated with data, literature or survey- based biodiversity assessments, with a focus on detecting and filling gaps in spatial data coverage. We welcome open data scientists working on text extraction, mining, and annotation methods in biodiversity research, as well as modellers.