Building an agenda and community of biodiversity data science

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Human activities are rapidly altering the environment, through habitat loss to overharvest and climate change, among many other drivers of change. Managing for and adapting to these widespread changes requires both robust scientific evidence of the patterns of ecological change and the means to track these changes globally and at the resolution relevant to species, the environments in which they live, and human communities that depend on them. Such knowledge will be crucial to enhancing predictions of future change, enabling planning and prioritization of conservation and restoration interventions, and monitoring the effectiveness of such actions. Currently this type of data, information and knowledge is generated from a wide diversity of sensors and sources, with varying data formats and scales, driven largely independently by diverse questions. There are large gaps in the coverage of biodiversity monitoring data that would enable detection of change and that would facilitate data science approaches to deriving relevant information. Integrative understanding of biodiversity patterns and change is rarely realized at scale. This project will help coalesce this knowledge; set a research agenda with clear priorities that inform future investments in technology to monitor biodiversity, management decisions, and conservation actions; and help expand and support the scientific community tasked with advancing this work. The workshops will be particularly timely in building capacity to address the widespread need to discover and understand the diversity of life.The project will convene a series of workshops that will assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and big next steps for observations and data integration for biodiversity research, monitoring, and conservation for organisms and ecosystems. Workshops will engage a diverse team of experts across disciplines, career stages, and ecosystems of study. Through discussions, horizon scanning, synthesis and, where needed, analyses, the workshop teams will develop a framework and set of priorities for biodiversity monitoring and conservation that help set a research agenda for the coming decade. The project will convene leaders in the science and technology needed to address the biodiversity crisis. Workshop products will include a vocabulary and framework for biodiversity conservation and restoration data science needs, a catalog of biodiversity data and tools, and a white paper reporting workshop findings. Workshop connections will also form the seeds of future collaborations and build a broader network of biodiversity data scientists.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.