MAMBO, in collaboration with its sister project GUARDEN, has published a policy brief addressing current challenges in biodiversity monitoring and outlining new solutions developed within the two projects.

The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 calls for ambitious and coordinated efforts to halt biodiversity loss. Current monitoring frameworks face significant limitations, including restricted spatial and temporal coverage, taxonomic biases, and slow data collection processes. These shortcomings create knowledge gaps and affect the timeliness and quality of decision-making at regional, national, and European levels.

Systematic and repeatable plant community inventories are identified as an important requirement to overcome these challenges. Structured surveys make it possible to track ecological shifts, distinguish between drivers of change such as climate pressures or land-use practices, and evaluate restoration projects supported under the EU Nature Restoration Law and other Green Deal initiatives.

MAMBO and GUARDEN are contributing to this effort by developing automated and cost-effective approaches to biodiversity monitoring. A new service has been integrated into Pl@ntNet, a citizen science platform widely used for plant identification. This service enables the identification of entire plant communities from vegetation plot images. Technical advances include the use of AI models to detect and quantify plant species composition, alignment of Pl@ntNet’s taxonomic backbone with global standards, and the development of both a web interface for practitioners and a RESTful API for developers.

These tools make biodiversity monitoring more consistent and accessible while facilitating uptake among existing networks, citizen science initiatives, and research infrastructures. They also support more efficient data collection and provide opportunities for wider public participation in biodiversity monitoring.

The policy brief highlights the potential of these solutions to support EU biodiversity policies, encourage citizen science involvement, and ensure interoperability with European biodiversity data infrastructures. It also notes the importance of continued investment to expand their use, refine performance, and adapt them to additional ecological contexts and technologies. Sustained support is considered necessary to maximise their contribution to evidence-based policymaking and biodiversity conservation in Europe.