Knowing what is happening to biodiversity right now, across landscapes and ecosystems, is harder than it sounds. Species are difficult to identify, surveys are uneven, and the journey from a field observation to usable information is long. By the time data is cleaned, verified and published, the situation on the ground has often already moved on.

This is the core problem explored in a new policy brief developed jointly by MAMBO and five other EU-funded Horizon projects: B-Cubed, BMD, OneSTOP, GUARDEN, and AURORA. The brief argues that closing this gap is not just a technical challenge but an institutional and cultural one too, requiring changes to how biodiversity data are collected, shared, incentivised and used.

MAMBO's own work speaks directly to these priorities. The project has been exploring how technologies like bioacoustics, automated imaging and AI-assisted identification can dramatically speed up the observation process but also where the bottlenecks persist even when the technology is there. Raw data volume is not the problem; what matters is whether that data can be validated, standardised and made accessible quickly enough to be useful. MAMBO's approach emphasises integrated workflows that connect fast observation to fast evidence, and makes the case for treating uncertainty as something to document and work with, rather than a reason to delay publication.

The full policy brief is available on Zenodo and via our website.