Effective conservation starts with open scientific data
Actions to protect the planet’s biodiversity today rely on how ecosystems have responded to changing climate and land use in the past, but the data are not easy to find.
As a community effort, a European network of scientists is collecting data generated by researchers around the globe to support effective conservation actions. The goal is to provide public access to information on the response of ecosystems to land uses in the last decades and centuries but also to changing climate in the last millennia. This is analysed in the field of “palaeoecology” and allows identifying trends during long periods of time that help plan effective conservation and adaptation to climate change.
“Much of the palaeoecological data are currently dispersed across different repositories, databases and largely not publicly available. We’ll bring much of these data into the public domain, harmonise their taxonomy and format using community coordinated practices, and make them relevant to nature conservation”” say the project leaders Thomas Giesecke, a palaeoecologist at Utrecht University (Netherlands) and Sandra Nogué Bosch, a biogeographer at CREAF (Spain).
This initiative called PalaeOpen is expected to gather more than 200 scientists and stakeholders from Europe to identify data gaps in continental conservation. “We will develop this action to determine access, ownership, and transparent appropriate conditions to share historical ecological data to guide future policy in biodiversity and conservation of our ecosystems”“, says Xavier Benito Granell, a researcher at the Institute of Agrifood and Technology Research, IRTA (Spain).”Working on a fair and open data sharing is particularly relevant to freshwater ecosystems, which have experienced one of the most dramatic declines across all habitats, by 85% since 1970”, says Stefan Engels at Birkbeck University (United Kingdom) and a working group lead.
As palaeoecology involves many sub-disciplines and data management is a branch of science itself, participants in PalaeOpen are contributing to different working groups from terrestrial to aquatic ecosystems, data storage and management, each of them with their own challenges. “When we talk about terrestrial environments, we refer to remains of plants and pollen, bones of vertebrates, charcoal, and insects, but also to abiotic data that characterize soil erosion. In certain data communities, such as pollen, only a minor fraction of data remains inaccessible to the public, but for vertebrates and macrofossils, the entire process of data mobilization, harmonization, and integration must be undertaken from scratch”“, add Petr Kuneš at Charles University (Czech Republic) and a working group lead.
Scientists, practitioners and policy makers won’t be the only beneficiaries of PalaeOpen. Graciela Gil-Romera, a researcher at the Pyrenees Institute of Ecology (Spain) is leading educational and outreach activities to promote ecological heritage. “We have many ideas about how to bring scientific knowledge in an attractive and easy way that everyone can enjoy. For example, we are working on the creation of Wikipedia articles for as many places in Europe as possible where data is available, to link them to the OpenStreetMap app. The idea is that while we search for directions to find a place, we learn about its ecological value”“, she says.
PalaeOpen is funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) and integrates 27 European countries. The network promotes inclusivity and values diverse knowledge from scientific experts to local practitioners and policy makers to create a real change in research culture.
PalaeOpen website: https://bit.ly/PalaeOpen