Humans are rapidly impacting biodiversity around the globe both on land and in the sea, leading to the loss of ecosystem function as well as the goods and services they provide to society. Decades of biodiversity manipulation experiments, conducted primarily at the lab and field site scale, have shown that diversity promotes ecosystem functioning and ecosystem resilience to environmental change. However, at regional and global scales, relatively little is known quantitatively about how much and what kinds of biodiversity can be lost before this resilience is eroded, and the extent to and rate at which ecosystems are approaching critical tipping points. High-resolution and timely global data on Earth's biodiversity are crucial for understanding and predicting changes to Earth’s life support systems, yet existing data are sorely lacking in spatial coverage, are nonsystematic, and arriving too slowly to keep pace with accelerating environmental changes. Fortunately, parallel developments in biodiversity science and spectroscopic remote sensing show that new satellite observations could directly provide frequent global monitoring of one key dimension of biodiversity, the functional diversity of terrestrial and aquatic plants and plant-like organisms (e.g. corals, phytoplankton). Through a series of NASA-funded activities, diverse teams of terrestrial and marine biodiversity scientists and remote sensing experts have come together to propose a Global Biodiversity Observatory that would integrate repeated functional diversity maps from a spectroscopic satellite mission with in situ observations of phylogenetic relationships, functional traits and species distribution. Such an observatory would enable revolutionary progress on a wide range of biodiversity science areas, support policy goals of assessing and mitigating dangerous biodiversity loss, and improve predictions of future changes by advancing the developing of the next generation of Earth System models.
Results/Conclusions
In this talk, we will: (1) outline the sparsity and biases in existing global terrestrial and marine biodiversity data, (2) summarize the current status of spectroscopic remote sensing of functional diversity (instruments/algorithms) and its use in diverse terrestrial and biosphere models, (3) describe the envisioned Global Biodiversity Observatory and ongoing research addressing the scale mismatch between organisms and the likely ~30 meter spatial resolution of a future spaceborne mission.