Conservation biologist Dimby Raharinjanahary spent years walking through Madagascar’s forests, counting some of the island’s most visible species, such as lemurs and birds. Raharinjanahary was head of monitoring and research for the country’s national parks service from 2012 to 2018, when monitoring still relied largely on tracking a handful of species as indicators of forest condition and ecosystem health.
“Conservation is based on a few target species. If you don’t see them, you say the forest is degraded,” he tells Mongabay. “But the opposite can also be true: you find them, and the forest is still degraded.”
Raharinjanahary, now director of monitoring at the Madagascar Biodiversity Center, is part of a global initiative called LIFEPLAN that is working to improve this. LIFEPLAN expands biodiversity monitoring beyond a few target species to include a much wider range of organisms, including hyper-diverse and still poorly known groups such as arthropods and fungi.
Across 83 sites worldwide, researchers affiliated with LIFEPLAN simultaneously tracked arthropods, fungi, mammals and birds. Their work built on an earlier effort, the Insect Biome Atlas, which mapped insect biomass in Sweden and Madagascar between 2019 and 2020, before expanding into a broader global program covering multiple groups of organisms. The expanded program is using identical methods, repeated year-round and across continents to compare biodiversity consistently across sites and, in turn, explore how changes in climate or human pressure may shape future ecosystems.
“These sequences represent things that nobody has ever seen before. Most taxa are unknown and that applies to anywhere in the world,” said Tomas Roslin, an ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and one of the leaders of the LIFEPLAN project.
Across the whole project, researchers have to date compiled 177 years’ worth of audio recordings, 21 million images from camera traps, 7,000 soil samples, 19,000 insects caught using Malaise traps, and 29,000 samples from cyclone samplers to assess fungal spores.
In Madagascar, the project took shape across more than 50 locations spanning the country’s full climatic gradient. Much of the work depended on local communities, who maintained a network of sampling tools — including insect traps, camera traps, audio recorders, soil samplers, and cyclone samplers — and regularly uploaded the data, Raharinjanahary said.
Fieldwork came with particular challenges. Inaccessible roads, limited cellphone network coverage, and, in the east of the country, heavy rainfall that sometimes damaged equipment. It was also difficult to recruit and train local staff with the necessary levels of literacy and ease with digital tools, he added.
LIFEPLAN has generated a revealing new picture of Madagascar’s insect diversity, with models suggesting around 255,000 species of arthropods.
In a forthcoming study, researchers led by Brian Fisher, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences in the U.S., used the data to test whether the environmental patterns, such as climate or physical barriers, that explain vertebrate diversity also apply to arthropods and fungi across the island.
“We did not anticipate how completely decoupled these mechanisms would be,” Fisher told Mongabay. “It means that a conservation strategy optimized for one group, for instance a network of protected areas designed around bird or lemur hotspots, will systematically fail to represent arthropod or fungal diversity.”
For arthropods, geographic distance is the dominant driver of diversity, Fisher said. This pattern means that every remaining patch of forest contains irreplaceable arthropod diversity, and that every area already lost has likely taken unique species with it, he said.
“Communities [of arthropods] change rapidly as you move across the island, regardless of climate, [while] fungi track climate, not geography.”
These findings are already starting to influence conservation planning in Madagascar. At a recent national biodiversity workshop, taxonomists met in discipline-based groups to discuss priority areas for future protection and exploration based on their most recent data.
Ahead of the workshop, entomologists used LIFEPLAN data to build models estimating how many unique insect species are likely to occur in different locations based on geographic distance. These models were then used to identify areas that would capture the greatest share of insect diversity.
“Based on our model for turnover, we know that the further you move from one forest patch to another, the greater the turnover of species,” Fisher said. Up to two-thirds of the species found at one location won’t be found at another site just 80 kilometers (50 miles) away, he said.
Using this approach, the team prioritized forest patches that are farthest from existing protected areas, Fisher told Mongabay. “We have generated a map of the top 50 priority sites for capturing species that are not represented in the current protected area network.”
Building the foundations of long-term biodiversity monitoring
Turning biodiversity monitoring into a sustained system requires both time and resources, but it can be scaled to site-level biomonitoring.
Fisher said a practical biomonitoring program covering 10 sites would cost roughly $75,000 to $150,000 per year, depending on site accessibility, laboratory processing and data analysis. “Over a five-year period, this generates a statistically meaningful baseline and the first detectable trend data.”
