IMCC8
April 26, 2026
Building transdisciplinary long-term biodiversity monitoring for effective marine conservation
| Date | Time | Event | Venue | Room | Mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-11-13 to 2026-11-17 (precise date TDB) | TBD | 8th International Marine Conservation Congress | Edinburgh International Conference Center (EICC) | TBD | hybrid |
Concept Note (Eng | Span | Fra) · Executive summary (Eng | Span | Fra) · MIRO board
Laurent Bernadou (Belmont Forum | CNRS) · Eric Pante (CNRS)
Marine conservation increasingly depends on biodiversity monitoring systems capable of detecting ecological change across large spatial and temporal scales. Yet many monitoring initiatives remain fragmented, short-term, or limited to species inventories, constraining their capacity to reveal the mechanisms driving biodiversity responses to global change. This panel will introduce the emerging BIODIVERSITY 3 initiative of the Belmont Forum, an international partnership of funding agencies, international scientific councils, and regional consortia dedicated to promoting transdisciplinary and transnational research to help understand, mitigate, and adapt to global environmental change. Belmont Forum funding opportunities—known as Collaborative Research Actions (CRAs)—are co-designed with the global research community and societal actors to identify research priorities addressing major sustainability challenges. The goal of this session is to ensure that the marine conservation community is heard in shaping the scientific priorities of the BIODIVERSITY III CRA. Panelists and participants will discuss key needs for biodiversity monitoring in marine ecosystems, including long-term observations, integration across biological levels of organization, emerging technologies (eDNA, omics, automated monitoring), and connections between biodiversity science, policy, and societal action. Insights from this discussion will help inform the co-design of future international research initiatives supporting biodiversity conservation.
Understanding how marine biodiversity responds to environmental change requires long-term, mechanistic monitoring of ecosystems, yet such programs remain rare and insufficiently coordinated at international scales. Short-term studies often fail to capture ecological variability or detect reliable population trends, which may require monitoring over decades to emerge. The proposed session addresses a critical challenge in marine conservation: transforming biodiversity monitoring from isolated scientific observations into integrated socio-ecological knowledge systems that support decision-making. BIODIVERSITY 3 emphasizes the need to combine natural sciences with social sciences and stakeholder engagement in order to understand biodiversity dynamics within complex socio-ecosystems and to co-design conservation solutions. Such approaches are essential for implementing global biodiversity commitments—including the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and Sustainable Development Goals related to ocean conservation. Long-term monitoring also provides the empirical foundation for identifying ecosystem tipping points, assessing conservation effectiveness, and guiding adaptive management. By bringing together experts working at the intersection of biodiversity monitoring, conservation science, and stakeholder engagement, this panel will highlight pathways to strengthen monitoring systems and ensure that biodiversity data translate into actionable conservation outcomes.
Duration: 90 minutes.