Project updates
News 29.08.2024
Online consultation: key questions in comparative mountain biodiversity research
Mountain biodiversity and ecosystems have been studied for decades, resulting in an immense and rapidly growing corpus of literature. If all this work was at the tip of our fingers, together with effective tools to analyze it across scales and taxonomic groups, we could ask and answer many research questions.
In June 2024, 30 workshop participants formulated a first set of questions and hypotheses. Example included: "Do ongoing changes in snow cover depth and duration have comparable effects on life history traits of mountain rodents across mountain ranges worldwide?" or "Is biodiversity loss faster in mountains than in the lowlands?".
Starting today, we are reaching out to the global mountain biodiversity research community at large with an opportunity to contribute with additional research questions and hypotheses. If you are interested in contributing, please take the time to fill our online form until September 13th, 2024. We will acknowledge your contribution in our planned publication and keep you informed on our progress towards accessing and analyzing global mountain biodiversity literature for collaborative science. For the purpose of this exercise: biodiversity is defined as all living variation, from genes and traits, to species and to ecosystems.
News 20.06.2024
Workshop "Towards a global assessment of mountain biodiversity"
June 12 to 14, 2024, experts in mountain biodiversity met in Davos for the first "global assessment of mountain biodiversity" workshop. The aims of the workshop were to (i) refine research questions and hypotheses as well as policy needs underlying a global assessment of mountain biodiversity knowledge and trends and (ii) refine the design, methods, and tools for a global assessment of mountain biodiversity knowledge and trends based on theses questions and hypotheses. Besides a technical presentation on the use and applicability of the GMBA mountain inventory on the first day, the workshop was organized around short input presentations followed by discussion rounds amongst specifically invited scientists and the audience. To be truly global, the sessions on the second day started early in the morning with perspectives from Oceania and China, followed by a stop in Europe, Central Asia, and Africa, and a final halt in the Americas. The third day's inputs focussed on the technical tools at our disposal to increase the discoverability of knowledge, effectively annotate resources, and deal with the challenges of taxonomies. In addition to these inputs, participants convened in working groups to effectively address the two main aims of the workshop.
Diversified participation
Following a hybrid format, the workshop brought together 14 participants (9 women and 5 men) on site at the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) in Davos and approximately 30 online. On site participants came from Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Nepal, Ukraine, Norway, and Switzerland. Online participants, of which 40% were women, came from another 23 countries (11 from the Global South), including typically underrepresented countries such as Russia, Iran, or Pakistan. Of all participants, 50% were early career scientists who obtained their highest degree after 2020 or who are currently undertaking a PhD or a post-doc.
We thank the Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) in Davos for the opportunity to use their facilities and the Swiss National Science Foundation for financial support to the workshop. The workshop inputs and outputs will become available soon.
Final workshop program (PDF, 198KB)News 12.03.2024
First expert videoconference: setting the stage
On March 12th, possible corresponding lead experts from Africa, South and North America, Asia, Oceania, and Europe met online for the very first time to discuss the scope of the assessment. Following up on these discussions, the decision was made to structure the assessment following taxonomic groups and ecosystems and to organize the contents within the chapters by geographic units. This was an important step forward towards clarifying the overall organization of the work and contents.