4th European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON) Stakeholder Roundtable: Pathways to sustainability for EU BONs network of collaborators and technical infrastructure

摘要

The 4th EU BON Stakeholder Roundtable aimed to present current achievements and products of the project EU BON, which can be assigned to three categories: firstly to tools and infrastructure, secondly to the consortium and its network of collaborators and thirdly to (biodiversity) monitoring and scientific forecasting. The last Stakeholder Roundtable - in contrast to the former Roundtables which addressed European policy (Wetzel et al. 2016), citizen science and the EU BON citizen science gateway (Vohland et al. 2016, Runnel et al. 2016) and local research networks (Vohland et al. 2016b) – focused on sustainability issues of the different components of the European biodiversity observation network. The guiding question of the Roundtable was how to achieve sustainability for the products of EU BON after the project will end. It was also discussed what - among the many different products such as tools, software, scientific knowledge, models and infrastructure - are the most essential components of the project for the specific stakeholders (e.g. agencies, citizen science, researchers) and what is needed for the future (adjustments, sustainability for development, funding). One of the central questions was how the essential components could be sustained, by which institutions or networks and how they can be used in the best way for the European and national policy and research needs (e.g. monitoring, reporting) as well as for the global level (e.g. for the Group on Earth Observations, GEO). Finally, and not to forget, another essential aspect was how a European Biodiversity Network as a whole, with its different components, can be further sustained for fulfilling its goals as a central infrastructure for generating biodiversity data and information on a European scale. Here we report the outcomes and discussions of the meeting and also highlight the main messages.