How your Nature Park habitat maps are supporting global biodiversity research

Why we need to predict biodiversity change

Biodiversity underpins the health of our planet and our livelihoods, and we need to understand how we can take action to restore it. Most biodiversity indicators (such as the trends in extinction risk of pollinators) tell us whether we’ll meet international targets, but we need information on how to meet them. This is where the PREDICTS database comes in! It allows us to make informed decisions on how to improve biodiversity and put effort and resources in the right places. 

How does the PREDICTS project do this?

Scientists typically read and share their research through scientific papers in academic journals. The PREDICTS database, created by Adriana and her team, pulls together data from many scattered scientific papers to provide a global picture of local biodiversity change. This is all based on land use, and looking at how the different ways land is used affects local biodiversity.  

How it works

1. Adriana’s team hunts for individual scientific papers and requests the raw dataset from the authors. Raw data is the original data that scientists collect for their research, before any analysis is done.
2. Each raw dataset has information on both local biodiversity (this could be anything such as birds, insects, or plants, as long as they were measured in a consistent way) and land use (how an area is used by humans, such as an agricultural field, urban area or woodland). These datasets are combined across thousands of papers.
3. Once we know how biodiversity is likely to respond to land use, we don’t need to measure biodiversity everywhere, as it can be estimated just by knowing the land use of an area. The measure used is called the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII), which is the estimate of how much of an ecosystem’s natural biodiversity still remains despite human impacts.
4. Finally, Adriana uses statistical modelling to create maps like the one below to show how local biodiversity is responding to human impacts across the world.  

Estimated Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) in the year 2020. The BII is an estimated percentage of the original number of species that remain and their abundance in any given area, in response to human impacts. The darker the colour, the more intact is the natural biodiversity. © Biodiversity Futures Lab. 

How does this relate to the Nature Park? 

The habitat maps you are creating in the Nature Park are maps of land use – playing fields, car parks, playgrounds, meadows and ponds. In the same way that Adriana estimates biodiversity across the globe with land use data, we can take the habitat maps created by children and young people and estimate:

• The current biodiversity across all schools, colleges and nurseries – this work is about to begin, watch this space!
• The potential biodiversity gains we could achieve if certain habitat enhancements (ponds or flowers, for example) are created
• The current biodiversity of individual settings – we hope to design a tool so settings can see how much biodiversity is on their own site, and watch it improve.

All we need are complete habitat maps!

How can you jump from global maps to school sites? 

It’s simpler than it looks. A scientific paper from 2017 showed that methods used in global models can be successfully applied to much smaller urban spaces, such as museum gardens, to inform urban planning. We will be using a similar approach to model biodiversity across the Nature Park. 

Dr Adriana de Palma tells us more about how the Nature Park is supporting global biodiversity research.

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In your own words, how would you describe biodiversity?

"Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth. Everything from orchids to elephants, earthworms to antelopes, but it’s also more than that. Biodiversity encompasses how those different species interact with one another and how they interact with their environment. At an even lower level, it’s about how their genetic code varies. It’s every level of variation you can think of in life on Earth, and each level of variation is important for helping to maintain a healthy planet."

What did you want to be at six years old?

"I genuinely wanted to be a dinosaur! In the film The Land Before Time, I wanted to be Littlefoot. At 6 and for quite a few years after then!"

And at 14 years old?

"At 14, I wasn’t sure. At the time, biology and chemistry were my favourite subjects – that changed a little bit later as I went through a phase where I wanted to study classical art and literature. My parents encouraged me to study anything and everything that interested me – they didn’t go to university and saw education as an incredible privilege."

Wow, so it must feel quite incredible to be working at the Natural History Museum in London on this world-leading research! Tell us a bit more about PREDICTS. Why does PREDICTS ask authors for raw data? 

"We ask authors for the raw data they've collected so we can use it in the way we want to for our own research, such as calculating any measures of biodiversity that we’re interested in and comparing the sites that are of interest to us. Getting that raw data allows us to ask more questions than the original authors might have been interested in asking. We are also currently developing a framework to incorporate different strands of evidence e.g. PREDICTS’ raw data, meta-analysis, expert opinion, community science, even Nature Park schools’ data, to create more robust predictions, especially for local areas."

Why is it important for Nature Park settings to map their habitats? 

"You can look at it in two ways. First, your habitat data from your school, college or nursery allows you to understand exactly what’s happening to nature on your site, and that’s amazing! But second, if you add it into the collective pool of data, you’re improving our ability to predict what might happen in other schools as well with our tools. The more data we add in, our view of what’s happening in the world will become better and it will help clear the fog from the window.

Even though individual schools might have relatively small datasets, they come together to create this greater whole that goes towards informing better decisions at a much broader scale."

Thank you so much Adriana! It’s been amazing to understand how a single habitat map can influence decisions on improving biodiversity at such a global scale. 

If you haven’t created a map of the habitats on your site yet, get started now and be a part of this world-leading research.

Map your site