What is the cost-effectiveness of different strategies for strengthening biodiversity science and acquiring baseline data for monitoring biodiversity in data poor areas of the world?

Biodiversity rich areas of the world, typically located in the tropics, have a marked deficit of trained personnel and adequate funding for monitoring, planning and prioritizing the conservation of its significant species and ecosystems. These pressing resource imbalances must be tackled through the combination of immediate remedies and long-term strategies for effective biodiversity protection, management, and capacity building.

A central problem is that the majority of tropical organisms remain unknown. Even among the better-known taxonomic groups (e.g. birds and mammals) new species continue to be described every year. For species that have already been described, there may be only limited knowledge on their distributions, no information on their relative abundances, and fewer data on their dynamics. Available data, such as those generated from specimens and deposited in natural history museums, are of limited use: sampling of tropical locations tends to be patchy, thus not adequately reflecting true patterns in the distributions of organisms.

Identifying and implementing cost-effective strategies to close these biodiversity-knowledge-scientific capacity gaps will be key for national reporting of progress towards the CBD 2010 Biodiversity Target and the Millennium Development Goals, ultimately seeking to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.

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