Developing Finnish National Forest Inventory into comprehensive biodiversity monitoring with DNA-, audio- and image-based methods (NFI-BIODIV)

Main funder

Funder's project number: VN/14343/2022

Funds granted by main funder (€)

Funding program

Project timetable

Project start date: 01/07/2022

Project end date: 31/12/2024

Summary

Our main objective is to develop the framework of Finnish National Forest Inventory (NFI) into a comprehensive and standardized monitoring of biodiversity (NFI-BIODIV). Each year, NFI involves the monitoring of ca. 15,000 sites, which are organized in a regular network of clusters across Finland. The annual cost of this biomonitoring program is ca. X million euros, and thus ca. X euros per sample plots, covering all steps from collecting the data to analyzing the data to reporting the results. The current NFI scheme includes measurements of forest resources (volume, growth and quality of growing stock), forest health and forest carbon stocks. While the current NFI scheme also measures some aspects of forest biodiversity, most importantly vascular plants, it fails to cover forest biodiversity by large. In this project, we will test whether it is possible to build on this existing infrastructure to develop NFI into a much more comprehensive biodiversity monitoring scheme that includes a systematic survey of birds, bats, mammals, fungi, insects and soil micro-organisms. We aim to test the feasibility and demonstrate the potential of the new methods by applying them to 70 NFI sites and thus only a small fraction of the entire NFI scheme. We aim to demonstrate the comprehensive biodiversity monitoring can be conducted in a highly cost-efficient manner, with a total cost of ca. 500€ per site, covering all steps from collecting the data to analyzing the data, such as high-throughput sequencing. While we anticipate that this unit cost may in the future significantly decrease as technologies develop, it would still be too high to be applied to the full NFI program which includes 15,000 annual sample plots. However, what we consider to be feasible is the application of the extended NFI-BIODIV scheme to 1,500 sample plots annually, i.e., to 10% of the standard NFI-plots. While this would increase the total budget of the NFI only by xx%, it would truly revolutionize Finnish biodiversity biomonitoring, and place Finland at the leading forefront of global biomonitoring. Thus, our main objectives are to demonstrate the feasibility of this revolutionary biomonitoring approach, and to generate pilot data along with the analysis pipelines that will justify why these new methods should be adopted in the national biomonitoring programs in the long-term.

Principal Investigator

Other persons related to this project (JYU)

Primary responsible unit

Follow-up groups

Profiling area: School of Resource Wisdom (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.Wisdom