The OBSGESSION project was strongly presented at this year’s World Biodiversity Forum (WBF), under the theme Leading Transformation Together. The forum took place last week, between 14th and 19th June, in Davos, Switzerland, and brought together science, society, art and business, encouraging the creation of strong and vast leadership and networks for transformation. OBSGESSION was featured in the event with oral presentations, a poster and printed materials.

The kick-off of OBSGESSION’s participation was the second day of WBF, led by project partners from VITO and the University of Twente, who engaged in a session on biodiversity insights from space. They led an oral presentation titled Operationalising Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) through Remote Sensing and showcased project updates, which led the way towards reproducible and scalable Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) products that support policy frameworks and biodiversity monitoring. 

Following their talk, partners from the University of Zurich discussed their roadmap to operationalise the integration of uncertainties in biodiversity product generation in an oral presentation titled Integrating uncertainty into remotely sensed biodiversity products. 

In the next few days, project partners from CNRS had the opportunity to present their online decision-support tool for navigating between detection and attribution methods - NaviDAM in a presentation, during a session on advancing causal inference in biodiversity change detection. While partners from Pensoft Publishers showcased the importance of open science practices and FAIR data infrastructure in a session focused on communicating science to policy. During their talk, Pensoft highlighted OBSGESSION’s policy brief as an example of a successful approach to providing scientific evidence in an engaging and stakeholder-relevant way.  

The final OBSGESSION oral presentation was held by our project partners from SYKE, who led a talk on Standardised molecular methods in biodiversity monitoring for the implementation of international policies, where the project’s findings on environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring were highlighted. 

During WBF, the project was also presented with a poster, by project partners from the University of Twente, titled Utilising Remote Sensing Technologies to Upscale Microbial Environmental DNA Point Data for Large Scale Biodiversity Assessment, as well as printed materials on a co-shared booth with other EU-funded projects, including BioAgora, SELINA, CO-OP4CBD, and RESPIN.

WBF gave the opportunity for a wonderful few days full of networking, collaboration and knowledge exchange, where OBSGESSION’s updates and results were strongly presented, showing our contribution to Leading Transformation Together.