The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, a core part of the European Green Deal, is a major attempt to fight the current biodiversity crisis. In order to track progress towards achieving its goals and to enhance evidence-based decision-making in policy and practice, biodiversity monitoring is of utmost importance. Effective biodiversity policy and impactful conservation and restoration action in Europe are currently hampered by spatially and temporally fragmented, taxonomically biased monitoring efforts that lack integration. Effective improvements of data collection, data flows and reporting need to be tailored to the needs of policymakers and other data users at sub-national, national, and European levels.

In this session, we present potential avenues to enhance and harmonize biodiversity monitoring across Europe: assessing user and policy needs; mapping current monitoring initiatives; identifying essential monitoring variables; enhancing monitoring to support the Nature Directives, Climate and Soil Policies, and Bioeconomy Strategy; Ultimately, we propose to create a Europa Biodiversity Observation Network (EuropaBON) to deliver an integrated, co-designed monitoring framework. We close the session with a presentation of the new European biodiversity partnership Biodiversa+ to aid in the implementation of the EuropaBON and a presentation on NaturaConnect – a new initiative that aims to design a resilient and coherent Trans-European Network for Nature and People.