Authors: Morán Ordóñez, Alejandra; Martí Pino, David;Villero, Dani;Herrando, Sergi;Brotons, Lluís;

The EUROPABON biodiversity database (monitoring.europabon.org), is a web-based platform explicitly describing current workflows of monitoring efforts delivering biodiversity information in Europe. This database is a key tool to understand how biodiversity data collected in monitoring schemes across Europe flows through different institutions and programs and gets processed to produce Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), Ecosystem Services Variables (EESVs) and /or other European policy-relevant indicators.

For a given monitoring network, the database collects information about three distinctive elements: 1) the biodiversity data collected in monitoring programs (e.g. taxa, spatio-temporal resolution); 2) the “integration nodes”: platforms/projects/institutions processing the biodiversity data to generate EBVs, EESVs or any other indicators (e.g. funding available, type and spatial level of data processing) and 3) data flows (e.g. flow frequency).

Preliminary analyses of the database suggest, most integration of biodiversity data at the European level is carried out by non-governmental bodies and that there is a geographic and taxonomic bias in monitoring efforts across Europe, with data on plants and birds dominating over other taxonomic groups. Data from systematic monitoring programs are most commonly integrated to generate EBVs, ESSVs and indicators at the European level; however, only a small fraction of these data is open access.