A planetary inventory of life

Traditional methods of detecting species are being increasingly replaced by semi-automated methods based on DNA barcoding, camera-traps, bioacoustic monitoring, and other such methods. This has created unprecedented potential for advancing our understanding of nature, but at the same time provides major challenges for data processing and interpretation for two reasons.

• First, there is the need for converting the information collected by automated samplers to the basic currency of biodiversity analysis: species-level occurrence and/or abundance.
• Second, current statistical techniques are inherently unsuitable for application to massive scales, both in terms of their underlying assumptions and in terms of their computational performance.

Otso will present pilot results of the ERC-synergy project LIFEPLAN (2020-2026) that samples biodiversity at spatial scales covering six orders of magnitude (from 10^-1 km to the global scale of 10⁴ km) and develops new statistical methods for big ecological data.

He will show that sampling fungal DNA from the air, arthropod DNA from Malaise traps, birds with autonomous recorders, and mammals with camera-traps provide a highly cost-efficient method for large-scale biodiversity surveys. The pilot results show previously undiscovered spatial and temporal patterns in the distribution of global biodiversity, both for its previously known and unknown components.

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Meeting ID: 650 4014 9237
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