Turning biodiversity commitments into continuously updated evidence

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) establishes 4 goals for 2050 and 23 targets for 2030. Achieving them depends not only on setting targets, but on being able to measure change, understand where it is happening, evaluate whether actions are working, and make that evidence available to the people responsible for decisions and implementation.

The GBF therefore includes a monitoring framework with headline, binary, component, and complementary indicators, alongside an enhanced approach to planning, monitoring, reporting, and review. National monitoring, reporting, review, and information systems are identified as primary sources of information for monitoring implementation.

That creates a practical challenge.

Biodiversity evidence is generated by many people, organizations, projects, communities, governments, researchers, consultants, Indigenous Peoples and local communities. It comes from field observations, surveys, assessments, monitoring programs, spatial datasets, existing research, remote sensing, and other sources. It is often collected using different methods, stored in different places, and analyzed repeatedly for different reports and decisions.

eOceans helps connect that work.

It provides a system for designing projects, defining methods, collecting and importing data, managing observations, applying quality control, analyzing results, creating maps and visualizations, producing reports, and sharing evidence. As new information is added, results can be updated rather than recreated from scratch.

The result is not simply more biodiversity data.

It is a more practical way to turn the data and expertise already being generated into repeatable, traceable, shareable evidence about change.

The GBF needs evidence that can keep up with change

A biodiversity target is only useful if progress can be assessed.

For example, understanding whether an ecosystem is being maintained or restored requires information about its extent and condition. Understanding whether threatened species are recovering requires observations over time. Assessing whether protected areas are effective requires information about biodiversity, pressures, management, and outcomes.

The GBF monitoring framework reflects this complexity. Its indicators draw on information about ecosystems, species, pressures, sustainable use, protected areas, restoration, pollution, climate impacts, finance, knowledge, capacity, and participation.

The challenge is therefore not just collecting a measurement once.

It is building the ability to:

• define what is being measured

• establish appropriate baselines

• collect data consistently

• connect observations to places and time

• preserve the methods and context behind the data

• validate and quality-check observations

• combine new observations with existing datasets

• repeat analyses as new information arrives

• identify change and trends

• communicate results to different audiences

• retain the knowledge and evidence needed to revisit decisions later

This is where eOceans fits.

Five ways eOceans supports GBF implementation

1. Build the data infrastructure behind biodiversity monitoring

The GBF operates across scales, from individual sites and ecosystems to national and global assessments.

The underlying evidence is similarly distributed.

A protected area may have its own monitoring program. A conservation organization may collect species observations across multiple sites. An environmental consultant may conduct surveys for a development project. A government agency may maintain long-term monitoring. Communities and Indigenous Peoples may hold knowledge and observations that are essential to understanding change.

eOceans allows these projects to be structured around their own objectives, methods, locations, teams, and data while creating a consistent system for managing the resulting evidence.

Data can be collected directly through field workflows or brought in from existing datasets. Project teams can define their methods, maintain metadata, apply quality control, run analyses, generate maps and reports, and continue adding observations over time.

This makes eOceans useful as an evidence layer between biodiversity monitoring and the decisions that depend on it.

2. Preserve the knowledge behind the data

A biodiversity record is more useful when we know where it came from, how it was collected, what method was used, who collected it, and what limitations apply.

That context can easily disappear.

Projects change. Staff move on. Spreadsheets are stored on individual computers. Analysis is repeated by different people. Methods evolve. Reports become static snapshots of work that continues long after publication.

eOceans keeps project methods, observations, metadata, quality-control processes, analyses, and outputs connected.

This supports continuity when people change and makes it easier to revisit earlier evidence when new questions arise.

It also supports the broader intent of GBF Target 21, which calls for the best available data, information, and knowledge to be accessible to decision-makers, practitioners, and the public, while recognizing the rights and requirements surrounding traditional knowledge, including free, prior and informed consent.

Preserving knowledge does not mean making everything public.

eOceans is designed around control over data and sharing. Project owners determine what remains private, what is shared with specific people or organizations, and what is published.

3. Connect fragmented biodiversity evidence

Biodiversity does not follow project boundaries.

A species can move between protected and unprotected areas. A pressure can affect multiple ecosystems. A restoration project may need information about conditions outside its immediate site. Multiple organizations may be monitoring the same species or ecosystem using different approaches.

Yet the resulting evidence is often fragmented.

eOceans can connect observations, spatial information, environmental data, existing datasets, analyses, and reports within and across projects.

That makes it easier to ask questions across time and space without requiring every project to abandon its own methods or workflow.

For example, teams can combine:

• field observations

• species and biodiversity surveys

• habitat information

• environmental measurements

• human activity and pressure data

• existing research datasets

• spatial boundaries

• monitoring and assessment results

The goal is not to make every dataset identical.

It is to make the relationships between data, methods, places, observations, and results easier to understand and use.

4. Automate the work around scientific judgment

Implementing the GBF requires scientific and technical capacity.

GBF Target 20 explicitly calls for capacity-building, technology transfer, innovation, and stronger scientific research and monitoring capacities.

But increasing capacity does not necessarily mean hiring more people to perform repetitive technical work.

Much of the work surrounding biodiversity science is repeatable:

• setting up databases

• standardizing incoming data

• applying validation rules

• checking observations

• connecting records to spatial boundaries

• calculating common metrics

• generating maps

• updating tables and graphs

• preparing recurring reports

• publishing results

• maintaining multiple versions of the same analysis

eOceans automates these parts of the workflow so that scientists and practitioners can spend more time on the work that requires their expertise.

The goal is not to automate scientific judgment.

It is to automate the work surrounding it.

That distinction matters for biodiversity monitoring, where methods, uncertainty, local context, and interpretation remain essential.

5. Keep evidence current

Traditional biodiversity reporting often creates a snapshot.

A monitoring program produces data. Someone analyzes it. A report is prepared. The report is published.

Then the next survey begins.

The evidence may continue to change, but the report does not.

eOceans is designed around continuously updated projects.

As new observations enter a project, analyses, maps, visualizations, and reports can be updated. Teams can return to the same evidence system rather than rebuilding the workflow for every reporting cycle.

This changes the relationship between monitoring and reporting.

Instead of:

Collect → analyze → report → start again

the workflow can become:

Collect → validate → analyze → share → update → repeat

That is particularly relevant to a framework designed to monitor progress toward 2030 targets rather than simply document activity once.

Where eOceans connects to the GBF Targets

eOceans does not replace the GBF monitoring framework, national biodiversity strategies, official indicators, or the expertise required to implement them.

Instead, it can support the evidence workflows behind many of them.

Target 1 — Spatial planning

Target 1 calls for biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning and effective management processes addressing land and sea-use change.

eOceans can connect observations, biodiversity information, spatial boundaries, pressures, and monitoring results to support site- and landscape-level evidence.

Target 2 — Ecosystem restoration

Restoration requires evidence of baseline condition, interventions, change, and outcomes.

eOceans can support repeatable monitoring workflows that track ecological change over time and provide evidence for evaluating restoration outcomes.

Target 3 — Conservation and protected areas

Protected and conserved areas require more than a boundary.

Evidence is needed to understand biodiversity, threats, management, use, and outcomes.

eOceans can support monitoring and assessment programs associated with protected and conserved areas, including repeated field observations, spatial analysis, reporting, and long-term knowledge retention.

Target 4 — Species and genetic diversity

Target 4 addresses threatened species recovery, genetic diversity, and human-wildlife conflict.

Species monitoring can involve repeated observations across locations, seasons, observers, methods, and projects.

eOceans can organize these observations and connect them to effort, location, time, environmental conditions, and other relevant information so trends can be assessed consistently.

Target 5 — Sustainable use of wild species

Sustainable use depends on understanding both wildlife and human activity.

For fisheries and other forms of wildlife use, eOceans can connect observations of species with effort, location, activities, environmental conditions, and management information.

The GBF monitoring framework includes the proportion of fish stocks within biologically sustainable levels as a headline indicator for Target 5.

Target 7 — Pollution

Pollution monitoring requires measurements that can be compared across locations and through time.

The GBF monitoring framework includes indicators relating to coastal eutrophication, pesticide concentration and toxicity, wastewater treatment, plastic debris, and pollution impacts on biodiversity.

eOceans can support the underlying monitoring and evidence workflows that generate and organize these observations.

Target 8 — Climate change and ocean acidification

Climate impacts on biodiversity are spatial and temporal.

eOceans can connect biodiversity observations with environmental and human-activity data to help teams examine changes and potential relationships over time.

Target 20 — Capacity, technology and scientific cooperation

eOceans directly supports the capacity-building intent of Target 20 by making complex data workflows easier to establish, repeat, maintain, and share without requiring every team to build its own technical infrastructure.

Target 21 — Knowledge and information

Target 21 calls for the best available data, information, and knowledge to be accessible to decision-makers, practitioners, and the public, and its monitoring framework includes indicators related to biodiversity information and the growth of accessible species occurrence records.

eOceans is designed around exactly this transition:

observations → evidence → analysis → information → action

while maintaining the provenance, methods, permissions, and context behind the evidence.

Target 22 — Participation and access to information

Biodiversity monitoring is not only the work of institutions.

Target 22 calls for full, equitable, inclusive and effective participation in decision-making and access to justice and information related to biodiversity, with specific recognition of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, women and girls, children and youth, persons with disabilities, and environmental human rights defenders.

eOceans can support projects that bring different contributors into structured monitoring and evidence workflows while allowing project owners to define roles, methods, permissions, and appropriate sharing.

From reporting to an evidence system

The GBF is ultimately about change.

Are ecosystems being restored?

Are threatened species recovering?

Are protected areas delivering outcomes?

Are pressures decreasing?

Is biodiversity being maintained?

Are actions working?

Those questions cannot be answered by a report alone.

They require evidence that can be collected repeatedly, connected across time and space, evaluated using appropriate methods, and revisited as conditions change.

The CBD's monitoring framework recognizes this need by linking indicators to ongoing monitoring and by emphasizing national monitoring, reporting, review, and information systems as primary sources of implementation information.

eOceans provides infrastructure for the work underneath that process.

Your data. Your methods. Your expertise. Your evidence.

eOceans helps turn them into a continuously updated system that can support monitoring, assessment, reporting, collaboration, and decision-making.

The GBF sets the direction. Evidence shows whether we are getting there.

The Global Biodiversity Framework provides a shared global direction and a framework for measuring progress.

The work of making that measurement real happens in thousands of places, through thousands of projects and people collecting, managing, analyzing, interpreting, and communicating evidence.

eOceans helps connect that work.

Build the evidence. Keep it current. Share it when it matters.

Make sense of your world, continuously.

—> Get powered by eOceans®.