Ethical biodiversity monitoring

I am seeking partnerships with ecologists, monitoring specialists and technology teams to develop biodiversity monitoring approaches that are scientifically useful, affordable and accountable to participating communities. My contribution would build on work with Māori landowners, taonga species, biotechnology partnerships and governance of genetic resources and associated knowledge.

Monitoring can help demonstrate whether restoration is working and guide decisions about land use, investment and conservation. Its value depends on the questions it answers, the reliability of the evidence and the ability of people to use the findings. A potential project would examine how monitoring programmes can meet formal reporting needs while also responding to the priorities of landowners and communities.

Working with technical partners, we could connect locally meaningful indicators with established scientific measures. Depending on the consortium’s chosen focus, approaches might include environmental DNA, field observations, acoustic monitoring or other appropriate technologies. The project would assess costs, usability and reliability, and identify where community participation improves interpretation or supports sustained data collection.

I could contribute to the design of engagement, consent and benefit-sharing arrangements, including how information about culturally significant species is collected, accessed and reused. A research component could examine how scientific data-sharing requirements can be implemented alongside Indigenous governance expectations. These arrangements would need to be developed with participating knowledge holders and institutions.

Potential activities include co-design workshops, trials of monitoring approaches, training for community participants and evaluation of how findings influence management decisions. Outputs could include practical partnership agreements, guidance on responsible information use and monitoring approaches that communities can maintain beyond the project.

The consortium would need to address the topic’s specific focus on pollinators, soil biodiversity or freshwater monitoring for EU policy implementation. Within that framework, I could support comparative learning from Aotearoa and contribute expertise in community relationships and ethical governance. The ambition is to produce monitoring systems that strengthen both the evidence available to decision-makers and the ability of communities to care for the ecosystems on which they depend.