Reversing the biodiversity crisis demands precise quantification of spatial patterns, temporal trends, and understanding of global change drivers. Monitoring biodiversity’s trajectory is essential for EU environmental legislation.
MOTIVATE aims to enhance the reporting on European habitats and plant biodiversity. By integrating expertise from vegetation science, biodiversity modeling, remote sensing, and human geography, MOTIVATE will leverage a database of vegetation-plot time series from the ReSurveyEurope initiative to produce habitat- and species-specific biodiversity assessments. The project will develop workflows to upscale results using remote sensing and attribute drivers to observed changes. MOTIVATE will also establish pipelines for future data collection and invest in capacity-building for ongoing sampling.
Knowledge exchange among stakeholders will integrate biodiversity data with public perceptions, improving its use by decision-makers. A key mission is co-designing a data platform with national conservation agencies, linking local time series to spatial information and institutional reporting schemes. This will enhance data standardization and accessibility for conservation managers. In summary, MOTIVATE seeks a novel, integrated, transboundary, transdisciplinary, and transgenerational approach to biodiversity monitoring.
Our overarching hypotheses are that analyses of long-term trends of Annex 1 habitats through vegetation resurvey data will:
- WP1: Complement and improve results from recent national monitoring programmes.
- WP2: Reveal hotspots and coldspots of species abundance changes and range extensions.
- WP3: Provide ecosystem property trends when combined with remote sensing data.
- WP4: Identify habitat-, species-, and ecosystem property-specific drivers of change.
Further objectives are to:
- WP5: Provide a public online vegetation resurvey data sharing platform to motivate scientists.
- WP6: Include personal perceptions of vegetation surveyors for additional insights.
- WP7: Complement national monitoring programmes and facilitate reporting by delivering Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs).
