Niels Raes with the GUARDEN project consortium
BMD was presented at the GUARDEN closing event
Last week, Niels Raes (Naturalis Biodiversity Center) presented the BMD project at the GUARDEN General Assembly in Brussels. The event provided a valuable platform for exchanging ideas among EU-funded biodiversity projects, including BMD, MAMBO, B-Cubed, and OneSTOP, highlighting the importance of collaboration in advancing biodiversity monitoring.
Pierre Bonnet, GUARDEN’s coordinator, welcomed the coordinators of these projects, alongside Jean Dusart from the European Commission's DG RTD and Paris Vasilakopoulos from the JRC's Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD). Bonnet remarked that the GUARDEN project is ready to deepen collaboration and support other projects, and highlighted the shared commitment they demonstrated:
"Our discussions confirmed a strong, shared commitment to advancing innovative, efficient, and scalable biodiversity monitoring—combining AI, Earth observation, bioacoustics, and citizen science—while ensuring that methods are interoperable and decision‑ready. Just as importantly, we recognised the need to accelerate the exchange of practices, data, and services across our projects and institutions: aligning on FAIR-by-design principles, open APIs and common indicators; piloting cross‑project workflows; and pooling infrastructures to reduce fragmentation and speed up policy uptake."
He also emphasised that GUARDEN is ready to deepen this collaboration and support all initiatives that could benefit from its entire production, aimed at ensuring that all data produced for monitoring European biodiversity becomes more connected, reusable, and more efficient.