Postdoc Co-design European Diversity Monitoring

Biodiversity loss has severe impacts on ecosystem services and humans. Many EU-level policies and initiatives demand unbiased, integrated and regularly updated biodiversity and ecosystem service data. However, efforts to monitor biodiversity are spatially and temporally fragmented, taxonomically biased, and lack integration. The advertised position will be part of the international consortium Europa Biodiversity Observation Network  (EuropaBON) which aims to bridge these gaps by designing an EU-wide framework for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services to support biodiversity policies in Europe. Are you interested in co-designing this future framework for biodiversity monitoring in Europe? Do you have experience with sampling designs of monitoring schemes, coordination of citizen science projects, or calibrating remote sensing data with in-situ observations? Then we may be looking for you.

Designing an EU biodiversity monitoring framework:

To co-design a cost-efficient framework for the future monitoring of biodiversity across Europe, we need to identify the core variables to be measured (i.e. Essential Biodiversity Variables, EBVs), the statistical sampling design for deriving robust trends, and a feasible and cost-efficient way for implementation. EuropaBON is built around a diverse set of stakeholders to identify user and policy needs for biodiversity monitoring aligned with the new European Green Deal. Together with the stakeholders, EuropaBON assesses current monitoring efforts to identify gaps, data and workflow bottlenecks, and analyses the cost-effectiveness of different schemes. This will be used to co-design an improved biodiversity monitoring system across Europe, building on a good statistical design, and making use of remote sensing, novel technologies and citizen science to become more representative temporally, spatially and taxonomically.

EuropaBON project:

EuropaBON is a H2020 coordination and support action. It started in December 2020 and it will finish in November 2023. It consists of 15 partner organisations across Europe covering universities and research institutes, governmental or public institutions, private companies and NGOs. All partners in EuropaBON have high-level and complementary expertise in the different areas of the project, ranging from networking and cost-effectiveness analysis, biodiversity monitoring, modelling and analysis, to stakeholder engagement, policy support and dissemination. The project is structured into five work packages. WP1 oversees the coordination and management of the project. WP2 is the hub of the project and focuses on stakeholder engagement. WP3 centers on the assessment of existing monitoring capability in Europe whereas WP4 will co-design a cost-efficient framework for the future monitoring of biodiversity across Europe. WP5 will demonstrate in a set of showcases how workflows tailored to the European biodiversity directives and cross-cutting policies can be implemented. The current EuropaBON network includes >350 members from >200 organisations and 44 countries. The outputs of EuropaBON will contribute to design and investigate the feasibility of setting up a center to coordinate monitoring activities across Europe. 

Embedding;

The position is based at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics  (IBED) of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. You will be part of the Biogeography & Macroecology  (BIOMAC) lab which is embedded in the Department Theoretical and Computational Ecology (TCE) of IBED.

What are you going to do?

You will:

• Develop designs for a robust sampling of Essential Biodiversity Variables across Europe
• Produce a synthesis report with suggestions for improving existing (and suggesting new) data flows in the context of reporting to the European biodiversity policies
• Interact with project partners to identify workflow bottlenecks, to specify essential biodiversity and ecosystem service variables, to analyze the cost-effectiveness of monitoring schemes, and to describe the potential of novel technologies for filling existing biodiversity monitoring gaps
• Engage with stakeholders to identify improvements for data sharing, biodiversity monitoring workflows, and standardized data collection methods 
• Participate in international EuropaBON stakeholder workshops and in regular EuropaBON meetings and networking events;
• Produce high quality scientific outputs in the form of journal publications and contribute to relevant high-level policy and practice reports