EU-wide monitoring methods and systems of surveillance for species and habitats of Community interest

The EuMon Project attempts to provide a European framework that standardizes, focuses and coordinates existing monitoring programs by comparing and integrating existing methods and monitoring schemes of species and habitats of community interests. The most successful methods in terms of cost effectiveness, regional robustness will be selected and tested for their European wide applicability. EuMon will pay special attention that existing monitoring programs can incorporate these methods and will give recommendations how new and successful monitoring programs can be established. Special consideration for implementing monitoring programs will be paid by studying the social effects of monitoring regimes, because the relationship between amateurs and professionals are meant to be most important for implementing a successful monitoring regime.

The establishing of the NATURA 2000 network is one of the main actions on a European level to halt biodiversity loss. Therefore it is a prerequisite to evaluate its ability to maintain biodiversity. Additionally EuMon will develop methods to name the responsibility of EU Member states for the species and habitats of Community interests living under their protection. A comprehensive database on monitoring schemes and recommended methods will be established and made accessible via an Internet portal. The EuMon consortium combines the expertise of 16 partners from 11 countries.

The main achievement of EuMon in the second year of the project is the technical implementation of the database on species and habitat monitoring schemes and on participatory monitoring networks on the webpage of EuMon (eumon.ckff.si) and the concerted effort of all the partners, jointly trying to reach as many monitoring organizations in Europe as possible.

In 2006, the EuMon consortium had to prepare 15 deliverables. The group investigating the role of volunteers in participatory monitoring networks (PMNs) has been doing intensive field research on four selected PMNs, and a quick assessment of another four PMNs in four European countries (Slovenia, UK, Lithuania, Poland). One interesting result already emerging is that PMNs organizations note that the number and/or the expertise of volunteers are not sufficient for conducting the necessary work.

In work packages 2 and 3 on monitoring schemes of species and habitats, several deliverables have been due with this report. EuMon has collected an exciting amount of metadata on monitoring schemes and continues to receive even more. A preliminary analysis ( http://eumon.ckff.si/create_report.php ) shows that biodiversity monitoring in Europe is strongly biased toward birds and butterflies, whereas lower organisms such as fungi and lichens, despite their important functions in ecosystems and their large proportion of European biodiversity, are covered poorly by the existing monitoring programs.

EuMon has also achieved to develop a method for the determination of national responsibilities and conservation priorities. The main methodological problem has been the consideration of the huge variation in data quality between species groups, regions and nations. Here, a standardization of monitoring data has to be brought forward, as partly achieved for the reporting in the Habitats Directive. The new method developed by EuMon is different in several aspects to already existing methods. Firstly, it clearly separates national responsibilities and conservation status and combines them only for setting priorities. The national responsibilities are determined in consideration of the importance of a nation's population for the global survival of a species. This makes the concept easily understandable, readily usable in automatization processes, and is adjustable to any geographic / political scale.

EU Biodiversity policy and EuMon

Despite the intention to halt the loss of Europe's biodiversity by 2010 and the extensive EU biodiversity policy has not been implemented with sufficient pace and extent. The infringement cases opened are in 38% of the cases due to insufficient implementation of EU-law in biodiversity and nature protection. Therefore, the European commission called for a new approach to be adopted quickly. That approach contains the call for four key supporting measures, (1) ensuring adequate financing, (2) building partnerships, (3) strengthening EU-decision making, and (4) building up public education, awareness, and participation.

EuMon can contribute partly to these measures (Fig. 1). It can help to make decisions how to allocate money for nature conservation and also strengthen nature conservation laws and thereby the EU-decision making by defining national responsibilities for species and habitat conservation. Hence, it would be possible that countries with a large and important proportion of biodiversity receive relatively more money for conservation actions. The collection of metadata on monitoring schemes also involves addresses of monitoring institutions and could help to interlink these organizations and enable cooperation between them. It further allows the public to search for institutions close to their living place and may therefore help to involve the public in the monitoring efforts. These would lead, together with the recommendations of EuMon, how to involve the public in monitoring, to a larger involvement of the public. From that, one can expect a positive feedback on public education, awareness, and participation.

Figure 1. The four key supporting measures of European biodiversity policy and what EuMon can do for it

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