1 of 9

Biodiversity monitoring and biosurveillance are fellow travellers

Francis Banville & Timothée Poisot �Université de Montréal / GEO BON One Health working group�timothee.poisot@umontreal.ca�https://poisotlab.io/ https://viralemergence.org/

Comment on peut réutiliser le travail qui est fait sur le biodiversity monitoring pour mieux suivre les maladies infectieuses, qu’est-ce qu’on y gagne, et est-ce qu’on a les outils?

---

Abstract:

The One Health approach sees advances in the health of ecosystems, humans, plants, and animals as mutually beneficial. In recent years, the One Health community has been calling for more integration of environmental expertise in what was traditionally a veterinary medicine–dominated field. In parallel, the field of biodiversity monitoring has made substantial progress, in response to both a mounting biodiversity crisis and the adoption of the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework (which focuses on integrating monitoring of biodiversity as a core component of our global ability to take evidence-driven policy decisions). Therefore, a tight integration between the fields of biodiversity monitoring and biosurveillance is not only achievable, but also mutually beneficial. In this presentation, I will review important lessons learned in establishing the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework, and how they directly translate to the surveillance of zoonotic diseases. I frame these advances in terms of concrete steps that can be taken to further integrate the two fields.

2 of 9

Disease surveillance is a biodiversity problem

More than 70% of emerging infectious diseases result from zoonotic spillover

Climate change is re-distributing species (and their pathogens) in space

Biodiversity is threatened by human impacts

Changes in land-use create more human-wildlife contacts

Poisot et al. (2025) BioScience

3 of 9

Lesson learned: variables for monitoring

Pereira et al. (2013) Science

Le concept d’EBV est super important et pourrait se décliner aux maladies infectieuses - GEO BON et le WG One Health peuvent contrbuer à cet effort + tu peux faire un aparté sur ta présentation.

--

EBV:

Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) are a set of standardized biological measurements that help scientists study, report and manage changes in biodiversity across time, space, and biological level. They bridge the gap between raw biodiversity data and derived policy-relevant indicators, and have the potential to serve as a foundation for biodiversity monitoring programs around the world (Pereira et al. 2013).

Essential variables to understand climate, biodiversity, and other environmental changes have already been developed (e.g. Essential Climate Variables, Essential Ocean Variables).

EBVs can be used to measure biodiversity change (e.g. range shift, community turnover, population decline). When combined with pressure information (e.g. agriculture, deforestation, climate exploitation, tourism intensity), they can help us better explain and forecast biodiversity change. This can then be used in environmental assessments.

https://geobon.org/ebvs/what-are-ebvs/

4 of 9

Lesson learned: data clearinghouses

Widely accepted data standard

Community practices on data analysis

Part of the education curriculum

Multilateral, open governance

GBIF.org

5 of 9

Lesson learned: multi-scale, federated monitoring

Gonzalez et al. (2023) Nature Comm.

6 of 9

What’s next: biodiversity inspired biosurveillance

Prediction of reservoirs distribution (and uncertainty)

Reliable host-virus association datasets

Locations for adaptive, multi-purpose monitoring

Go find Michael Catchen and chat about this!

+

=

7 of 9

Practical tool: PHAROS and the wdds data standard

FAIR sharing of wildlife infection data (with embargo!)

Includes negative data

Rich data specification (with automatic validation)

Multipurpose: biodiversity conservation and human disease surveillance

Compatible with DarwinCore & HumboldtCore

pharos.viralemergence.org

Du côté maladies infectieuses, lancement de la plateforme PHAROS, qui est ce qui ressemble le plus à GBIF pour les données de maladies de la faune. Beaucoup d’emphase sur des formats de données qui répondent aux besoin des équipes sur le terrain, mais aussi aux besoins d’analyses.

--

PHAROS: The Pathogen Harmonized Observatory (PHAROS) is an open-access database of wildlife disease surveillance. The platform's objectives are to enable data sharing across borders and projects in real-time; to incentivize the sharing of negative data; and to help bring open science into fields like One Health and disease ecology. PHAROS is as much a data rescue project as a forward-looking database: for decades, researchers have immortalized genetic sequence data while the line list data from animal disease surveillance is lost to the grey literature, supplemental files, or unpublished spreadsheets. With your help, we hope we can change that. Data submitted to PHAROS must:

Be collected from wild animals
Include information on host and pathogen identity (not necessarily to species level)
Include a location in longitude-latitude format
Include a complete date

wdds: The Wildlife Disease Data Standard is meant to be a minimal representation of the data elements necessary to describe observations of interactions between hosts and parasites. Because its a minimal representation, there will be data elements not included in the data standard that are of interest to researchers as well as parts of the standard that are more broad than the researcher may like. This vignette will explain best practices for extending and modifying the data standard.

FAIR: Findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability

Data specification: In computing, a data definition specification (DDS) is a guideline to ensure comprehensive and consistent data definition.

The Darwin Core is a body of standards intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity.

Humboldt Core is a community-developed standard for representing critical information about scope, method and completeness of biological inventories.

8 of 9

Practical tool: BON in a Box

Provide free and open-source tools to collaborate on the reporting of indicators

Central marketplace for reporting and monitoring pipelines, community driven

Built to be extensible: ongoing experiments with wildlife disease data

boninabox.geobon.org

9 of 9

Take-home messages

Shared practical challenges: too much to monitor, not enough resources

Unique challenges for biosurveillance: more regulation on access to information

Sharing is caring: Needs to put resources (technology and good practices) in common and not re-invent the wheel

Think about integration and synergies: wildlife disease observation networks can be built on top of biodiversity observation systems

Reach out!