1,4,10,7,11,- 1Conservation Biology, Institute of Biology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
- 2Biodiversity, Macroecology and Biogeography, Faculty of Forest Sciences and Forest Ecology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
- 3University of the Azores, CE3C/GBA - Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes & CHANGE - Global Change and Sustainability Institute, Rua Capitão João d´Ávila, Pico da Urze, 9700-042, Angra do Heroísmo, Portugal
- 4Plazi, Bern, Switzerland
- 5UMR PVBMT, Université de La Réunion, Pôle de Protection des Plantes, Saint-Pierre, France
- 6Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de La Réunion (OSU-Réunion), Université de la Réunion, CNRS, Saint-Denis, France
- 7Information Sciences, HES-SO/HEG Geneva, Switzerland
- 8Island Ecology and Biogeography Group, Instituto Universitario de Enfermedades Tropicales y Salud Pública de Canarias, Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain
- 9Island Ecology and Evolution Research Group, Instituto de Productos Naturales y Agrobiología (IPNA-CSIC), La Laguna, Spain
- 10Division of BioInvasions, Global Change and Macroecology, Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
- 11SIB Text Mining Group, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva Switzerland
- 12Plazi, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
- 13Centre of Biodiversity and Sustainable Land Use, University of Göttingen, Göttingen 37077, 14 Germany
- *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract
Islands contribute disproportionately to global biodiversity, harboring exceptional levels of endemic species. Simultaneously, they are highly vulnerable to anthropogenic pressures, with the magnitude and speed of human impacts making islands epicenters of species extinctions and species invasions. Our knowledge of changes in island biodiversity is scattered across journals, repositories, and data formats. Moreover, knowledge about island biodiversity is often diluted in global, continental, or national syntheses, limiting its inclusion in policy and decision-making. Mobilizing and integrating this literature is essential, as islands may provide early warning systems for ecological tipping points worldwide.
Here, we present a user-oriented workflow for finding, screening, and structuring biodiversity literature relevant to island ecosystem monitoring. The workflow integrates established evidence-synthesis practices following Collaboration for Environmental Evidence guidelines with AI-enabled tools to improve the scalability, efficiency, and reproducibility of the review process.
A comprehensive search across Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAlex yielded over 14,000 publications. Given the number of publications, a transformer-based binary classification model was fine-tuned using a 10% subset (1,500 articles) to rank publications by their relevance. The subset is the result of a restricted search string applied at the title and abstract level on OpenAlex. The subset was manually screened by island biodiversity experts relying on an ontology describing key concepts related to islands and Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), ensuring consistency throughout the screening and coding process. Title and abstract screening retained approximately 1,100 records, and full-text assessment resulted in a final list of 700 publications, from which structured information, including island location, geological type, EBV categories covered, and protocols, was extracted.
All selected publications have been transformed into machine-readable formats and deposited in Biodiversity PMC via the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) community on Zenodo, enabling systematic annotation and data extraction to improve transparency and replicability. We present insights into global patterns and gaps in island biodiversity monitoring, and discuss how to make island literature FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), and machine-actionable, can contribute to the Disentis Roadmap vision of liberating biodiversity knowledge from publications, thereby providing evidence for conservation planning and policy on islands and beyond.
Authors: Giorgia Camperio 1; Delphine Clara Zemp 1; Jordyn Downes 1, Wolf Wildpret 2; Paulo A.V. Borges 3; Donat Agosti 4; Claudine Ah-Peng 5,6 ; Léandre Catogni 7; Lea de Nascimento 8; Rui B. Elias 3; Brent C. Emerson 9; José Maria Fernández-Palacios 8; Rosalina Gabriel 3; Bernd Lenzner 10; Fabio Mologni 10; Jairo Patiño 9; Rüdiger Otto 8; Patrick Ruck 7,11; Felipe Lorenz Simões 12; Dominique Strasberg 5,6; Samantha Suter 1; Holger Kreft 2,13 & Nathaly Guerrero-Ramírez 2,13 Authors: Giorgia Camperio 1; Delphine Clara Zemp 1; Jordyn Downes 1, Wolf Wildpret 2; Paulo A.V. Borges 3; Donat Agosti 4; Claudine Ah-Peng 5,6 ; Léandre Catogni 7; Lea de Nascimento 8; Rui B. Elias 3; Brent C. Emerson 9; José Maria Fernández-Palacios 8; Rosalina Gabriel 3; Bernd Lenzner 10; Fabio Mologni 10; Jairo Patiño 9; Rüdiger Otto 8; Patrick Ruck 7,11; Felipe Lorenz Simões 12; Dominique Strasberg 5,6; Samantha Suter 1; Holger Kreft 2,11 & Nathaly Guerrero-Ramírez 2,11 Affiliations: 1 Conservation Biology, Institute of Biology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland 2 Biodiversity, Macroecology and Biogeography, Faculty of Forest Sciences and Forest Ecology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany 3 University of the Azores, CE3C/GBA - Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes & CHANGE - Global Change and Sustainability Institute, Rua Capitão João d´Ávila, Pico da Urze, 9700-042, Angra do Heroísmo, Portugal 4 Plazi, Bern, Switzerland 5 UMR PVBMT, Université de La Réunion, Pôle de Protection des Plantes, Saint-Pierre, France 6 Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de La Réunion (OSU-Réunion), Université de la Réunion, CNRS, Saint-Denis, France 7 Information Sciences, HES-SO/HEG Geneva, Switzerland 8 Island Ecology and Biogeography Group, Instituto Universitario de Enfermedades Tropicales y Salud Pública de Canarias, Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain 9 Island Ecology and Evolution Research Group, Instituto de Productos Naturales y Agrobiología (IPNA-CSIC), La Laguna, Spain 10 Division of BioInvasions, Global Change and Macroecology, Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria 11 SIB Text Mining Group, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva Switzerland 12 Plazi, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil 13 Centre of Biodiversity and Sustainable Land Use, University of Göttingen, Göttingen 37077, 14 Germany Affiliations: 1 Conservation Biology, Institute of Biology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland 2 Biodiversity, Macroecology and Biogeography, Faculty of Forest Sciences and Forest Ecology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany 3 University of the Azores, CE3C/GBA - Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes & CHANGE - Global Change and Sustainability Institute, Rua Capitão João d´Ávila, Pico da Urze, 9700-042, Angra do Heroísmo, Portugal 4 Plazi, Bern, Switzerland 5 UMR PVBMT, Université de La Réunion, Pôle de Protection des Plantes, Saint-Pierre, France 6 Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de La Réunion (OSU-Réunion), Université de la Réunion, CNRS, Saint-Denis, France 7 Information Sciences, HES-SO/HEG Geneva, Switzerland 8 Island Ecology and Biogeography Group, Instituto Universitario de Enfermedades Tropicales y Salud Pública de Canarias, Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain 9 Island Ecology and Evolution Research Group, Instituto de Productos Naturales y Agrobiología (IPNA-CSIC), La Laguna, Spain 10 Division of BioInvasions, Global Change and Macroecology, Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria 11 SIB Text Mining Group, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva Switzerland 12 Plazi, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil 13 Centre of Biodiversity and Sustainable Land Use, University of Göttingen, Göttingen 37077, 14 Germany
How to cite: Camperio, G., Zemp, C., Downes, J., Wildpret, W., Borges, P. A. V., Agosti, D., Ah-Peng, C., Catogni, L., de Nascimento, L., Emerson, B. C., Fernández-Palacios, J. M., Gabriel, R., Lenzner, B., Mologni, F., Patiño, J., Ruck, P., Simões, F. L., Suter, S., Kreft, H., and Guerrero-Ramírez, N. and the BioMonI (Biodiversity Monitoring of Island Ecosystems) and BioMoQA (Biodiversity Monitoring via Question Answering): Synthesizing evidence on island biodiversity monitoring: from scattered literature to structured knowledge, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-686, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-686, 2026.
