Today I will be presenting our SoilTemp project at the World Biodiversity Forum in Davos, Switzerland. That place might ring a bell from many a global convention, and the conference name even sounds familiar to the World Economic Forum hosted here. In fact, we are here with a same ambitious goal: bringing together some of the worlds’ experts on biodiversity towards a globally coordinated effort to save as much of it as we can.

High ambitions, for sure, but high stakes as well.

An important line of thought throughout the conference, however, is that there is surprisingly much about the sheer numbers of biodiversity that we simply don’t know yet. Especially in remote areas like mountains, and for more ‘obscure’ organisms like soil micro-organisms, we simply do not know yet what is out there, let alone how much of it we are loosing as a result of global change.

The good news is that this issue is more and more being voiced, and global efforts to monitor, map and predict global biodiversity are increasingly popping up. Many great examples of those were presented here this week.

Tomorrow, I will be showing how I think our work with SoilTemp can help in that regard: we are working hard to provide the necessary climatic baseline data to aid that mapping and predicting. Indeed, without good, accurate and most importantly relevant climate data – and all of that is also still rather patchy across the globe – it is even harder to get an idea of the fate of our worlds’ biodiversity.

For those in Davos, very much welcome to my talk at 16h15!