Wednesday, July 8, 2026

2:30 PM - 4:00 PM

Room BE.0.17

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Details

Participants need to bring their own laptop for this workshop. The global decline in biodiversity has reinforced the need for robust indicators that track its changes to inform policy and management decisions. Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) are a set of standardized biological measurements led by the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) that harmonise observation data into data products supporting policy-relevant indicators to track and report biodiversity change across time, space, and levels of organization. GEO BON has defined six EBV classes, among which the Genetic composition class uniquely captures genetic diversity, one of the three fundamental pillars of biological diversity, as recognised by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Despite its central role in enabling species to adapt to changing environments, genetic diversity has long been overlooked in biodiversity monitoring and has only recently regained recognition as a critical component of biodiversity conservation. Although GEO BON acknowledges the growing potential of DNA-based data for estimating these EBVs, the standardised implementation of genomic tools and analysis workflows remains limited. Developing and adopting standardised genomic approaches is important to ensure that Genetic composition EBVs are estimated, interpreted, and presented in a harmonized and scalable manner. The scope of this workshop is to showcase how genomic data can be used to estimate genetic composition EBVs in a standardised way. Participants will first explore the EBV pipeline developed by the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) network through a guided demonstration using a toy dataset. Subsequently, participants from research agencies and practice will analyse and discuss together pre-computed results from a real dataset to explore how they can be combined into a single, policy-relevant measure. The interactive format, with dedicated time for questions and reflection from participants with diverse backgrounds and career stages, aims to generate ideas on integrating genomic EBVs into biodiversity monitoring, reporting, and conservation policy across Europe.

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Organiser