Project

Biodiversity of the Coastal Ocean: Monitoring with Earth Observation (BiCOME)



Project Start: October 2021 | Project End: October 2023
Project Funder: ESA
Principal Investigator: Dr Victor Martinez-Vicente
Project Website: https://bicome.info

BiCOME will develop a better understanding of how the community structure and function of coastal ecosystems will respond to the anthropogenic and natural drivers in a changing climate.

Increasing pressure on nature due to anthropogenic drivers is leading to a reduction of global biodiversity and its associated benefits at the planetary scale. In coastal environments, the most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss are: fishing, land and sea use, climate change and pollution. These drivers have accelerated in the last 50 years are predicted to continue. In order to guide further action, it is therefore urgent and important to develop “fit-for-purpose” observation tools.

These observations should be capable of assessing and monitoring how the community structure and function of coastal ecosystems will respond to the anthropogenic and natural drivers in a changing climate. This can be achieved using combination of observations of Essential Biodiversity Variables with environmental variables and estimates of direct drivers.

​The BiCOME project will develop and demonstrate that Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) for scientific and monitoring applications, can be obtained from state-of-the-art remotely sensed reflectance and that they can be scalable globally. To help us gain a better understand how the community structure and function of coastal ecosystems will respond to the anthropogenic and natural drivers in a changing climate.

The project is one of three studies that form part of the European Space Agency’s ‘Biodiversity+ Precursors’ on Terrestrial, Freshwater and Coastal ecosystems.