Monitoring of Biodiversity Changes in the Landscape Scale

The monitoring and evaluation of changes in biodiversity is a subject for many biological and ecological disciplines. Biodiversity loss has become a social and political issue over the last few decades, and protection of biological diversity has emerged as one of the main subjects within national nature conservation policies as well as international conventions, conservation targets and political programmes (e.g. the Convention on Biological Diversity, Target 2010, SEBI 2010, CITES, Ramsar Convention, European Landscape Convention). The establishment of a monitoring scheme based on an appropriate set of indicators is vital for precise assessment of the effectiveness of measures applied within biodiversity protection (e.g. action plans for endangered species, agro-environmental and landscape protection programmes). Many indicators of biodiversity change have been proposed, but their representativeness and applicability frequently suffer from poor available data or local circumstances. The concept of species and landscape diversity evaluation using a fixed set of indicators has been developing in other European countries for some two decades, but this approach is still sporadic in the Czech Republic.

This paper provides a review of the current state of this topic in the Czech Republic, discusses the concept of establishing a future national biodiversity monitoring network, and proposes a self-contained set of indicators covering all organizational and spatial levels. These proposals will enable scientifically based and sufficiently accurate evaluation of existing trends in biodiversity and its projection into the future based on foreseeable land-use changes.