Predicting biodiversity change across scales

Thomas F. Johnson – University of Sheffield

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework set out an ambitious agenda to protect and restore biodiversity and the services biodiversity provides. This pioneering agenda was so ambitious, that much of the science it relied on was deficient or contested. For instance, many of the indicators to track progress are still incomplete and in development, and even in the more mature targets, established indicators like the Living Planet Index struggled to receive community endorsement despite being derived from some of the richest biodiversity data available. In this seminar, Dr. Johnson will argue that we need to reimagine the indicator interface, moving away from producing aggregate indicators that describe error-prone and biased datasets, towards general models that can simultaneously predict dynamic biodiversity patterns at global and local scales. He will highlight how recent advances in quantitative ecology make this formidable challenge a little less imposing, and discuss how we can (and can’t currently) wrangle these complex biodiversity datasets. Ultimately, Dr. Johnson will argue that advances in ecological forecasting, and prediction more generally, are primed to revolutionise the indicator interface and shape the next wave of biodiversity policy.