Research News
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Our models of biodiversity change drivers show the importance of multivariate assessments and scale.
We modelled environmental drivers of long-term biodiversity change for fish, birds, macroinvertebrates, and phytoplankton of the German and Dutch Wadden Sea. Trying to capture the innate complexity of biodiversity change, we modelled four metrics of biodiversity.
Our results are very different for each organism group. The patterns vary depending on what biodiversity metric or driver you look at. This emphasises how biodiversity monitoring can't only consider solo metrics, multiple metrics must be considered in concert.
Our results also emphasise that successful biodiversity targets have to be formed for local scales - chasing only global scale targets will fail in capturing the many nuances that biodiversity change brings with itself.
Lastly, our study hinges on continuous time series from our awesome stakeholders. Biological time series need to be paired with consistent environmental data to be able to better address the biodiversity change puzzle.
Picture "Algal Buffet" by Jan-Claas Dajka