Ongoing losses of biodiversity and ecosystem functions are largely driven by anthropogenic stressors, including land use change, climate change, and pollution. High-resolution time series are a prerequisite to understand these changes, but are limited in space, time, and taxonomic coverage, and are often inaccessible.
In recent years, several valuable biodiversity time series data have successfully been mobilized and published in accessible repositories (e.g., BioTime), resulting in substantial improvements in our understanding of biodiversity change in the Anthropocene. Yet, there are still huge data and knowledge gaps, particularly in functional changes and notoriously understudied taxonomic groups like insects and fungi. Additionally, biodiversity monitoring is still insufficiently co-located with in situ measurements of ecosystem functions, environmental drivers, and social-economic implications, including nature’s contributions to people. Recent research infrastructures, including eLTER (https://elter-ri.eu/) and NEON (https://www.neonscience.org/), have started filling in these gaps.
This session aims to bring together biodiversity researchers, environmental monitoring experts, including larger research infrastructures, authorities, and NGOs. We seek contributions addressing:
• multi-decadal changes in biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and their drivers at local, regional, or global scales covering marine, freshwater or terrestrial ecosystems
• improved statistical methods to measure trends and link to associated drivers
• social-economic implications of biodiversity change
• potential ways forward to overcome current data limitations in the dimension, drivers and consequences of biodiversity change and impacts on functions in the Anthropocene.