European species and habitat monitoring: where are we now?

Abstract  Biodiversity now is considered a highly valuable material, providing manifold services of high importance for the well-being of humankind. However, biodiversity globally is rapidly diminishing and, despite efforts to halt the loss of biodiversity, positive effects are hardly visible. Biodiversity monitoring, the close observation of our natural environment, is imperative to determine the state and trend of organism populations and their habitats. Therefore, it has become a centrepiece of nature conservation across the globe. However, monitoring activities are not centrally coordinated, differ vastly in their monitoring targets, sampling designs, and human resource needs. This special issue on biodiversity and monitoring presents an overview of the current state of biodiversity monitoring in Europe, gives suggestions for the integration of monitoring data to improve the geographical and taxonomic coverage, deals with general methodological aspects of monitoring biodiversity across different geographic scales, the involvement of the public in monitoring activities, and provides some monitoring case studies. The special issue is aimed to provide recommendations and suggestions for more standardized monitoring approaches, and is mainly based on the findings of the EU-project EuMon.