Selection of the monitoring and inventory projects: selection of species (groups), spatial and temporal extent: Milestone 18

B-Cubed aims to investigate the factors that determine the reliability of models, trends, and status by comparing structured monitoring data with unstructured data. These factors are related to both data quality and species characteristics. The rise of citizen science and remote sensing technology has brought about a new era of “big unstructured data” in biodiversity conservation. The actual potential of these data in accurately describing species status and trends from aggregated occurrence cubes needs to be studied.

This report focuses on selecting structured monitoring and inventory projects that will serve as reference datasets for comparing with results from data cubes based on unstructured data from GBIF. To aid and streamline this selection, general guidelines are developed for selecting monitoring projects and their associated datasets. These guidelines are often related to a balance between sample size (enough data spread along taxonomic, spatial, and temporal dimensions) and applicability (practical use of the data).

For Flanders (the northern part of Belgium), the monitoring programs are selected by INBO (https://pureportal.inbo.be/nl/). For South Africa, the selection is conducted by SANBI (https://www.sanbi.org/).

This report is the outcome of the first milestone of task 4.5 of B-Cubed. Both INBO and SANBI provide descriptions of the selected dataset(s) for this task. Besides the selected datasets, other useful monitoring projects are listed that can be used in the B-Cubed project. The report provides the most important context and references, along with clear links to download the data.