Monitoring schemes for species of conservation concern in Flanders (northern Belgium).

Biodiversity is declining worldwide and this has a potential impact on the ecosystem services it delivers. This has recently been shown for both vertebrates (WWF 2020), freshwater megafauna. 

International and regional legislations require authorities to report regularly on the state of species of conservation concern in their region or country (e.g., the EU Birds and Habitats Directives). Monitoring schemes for species across a variety of taxonomic groups are being set
up to estimate abundance…

Biodiversity is declining worldwide and this has a potential impact on the ecosystem services it delivers. This has recently been shown for both vertebrates (WWF 2020), freshwater megafauna. 

International and regional legislations require authorities to report regularly on the state of species of conservation concern in their region or country (e.g., the EU Birds and Habitats Directives). Monitoring schemes for species across a variety of taxonomic groups are being set
up to estimate abundance trends. In Flanders (northern Belgium), until recently there were 14 established monitoring schemes covering eight taxonomic groups mainly for species of the EU Birds and Habitats Directives. After the publication of a list of species of regional conservation concern with a monitoring requirement, a quality and effectiveness check of the established monitoring schemes was executed. Some were optimised to make them more cost-effective (e.g., lower number of sampling points, lower sampling frequency). In addition, we checked for priority species that were not covered by any of the existing monitoring schemes and designed new schemes for the remaining 88 species. An important criterion for the new monitoring schemes is its applicability/feasibility by trained citizen scientists. Therefore, information needs and minimum data requirements were listed and distribution data were compiled for each species. For rare species, all known sites were to be monitored, while for more widespread species, a subset of monitoring sites was selected through a Generalised Random Tessellation Stratified sampling strategy (GRTS). Finally, for each species, a detailed monitoring protocol was generated, periodically evaluated and systematically optimised. Additionally, a web portal and mobile application were developed for entry and reporting of the monitoring data. In the future, new monitoring techniques (e.g., environmental DNA (eDNA) and other molecular
identification methods (metabarcoding), automated species detection using cameras, pheromones, conservation dogs) will also be considered for integration in the monitoring schemes for elusive species. The way in which new monitoring schemes were designed for
species of conservation concern in Flanders can serve as a useful example for other countries and regions.