2025 US-UK Scientific Forum on Measuring Biodiversity for Addressing the Global Biodiversity Crisis

Every year, the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) jointly convene the US-UK Scientific Forum to help the scientific leadership of the United Kingdom and the United States forge an enduring and productive partnership on pressing topics of worldwide scientific concern.

The 2025 forum took place on 21-22 May and focused on Measuring Biodiversity for Addressing the Global Biodiversity Crisis. Assessing biodiversity is fundamental to understanding the distribution of biodiversity, the changes that are occurring and, crucially, the effectiveness of actions to address the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Such assessments face multiple challenges, not least the great complexity of natural systems, but also a lack of standardised approaches to measurement, a plethora of measurement technologies with their own strengths and weaknesses, and different data needs depending on the purpose for which the information is being gathered. Other sectors have faced similar challenges, and the forum looked to learn from these precedents with a view to building momentum towards standardised methods for using environmental monitoring technologies, including new technologies, for particular purposes. It explored ways to ensure interoperability between different outputs and confidence that observed changes in biodiversity are the result of real changes in what is being measured, and advance the integration of biodiversity monitoring with evaluation to help ensure conservation at a variety of scales can be more effective.

Recordings of all the talks are available below.

Introductory session

Session 1: What are the problems?

Session 2: Making measurements matter

Session 3: Interoperability of biodiversity measurements

Session 4: Delivering change

2025 US-UK Scientific Forum Planning Committee

Co-Chairs

Bill Sutherland CBE FRS, University of Cambridge, UK
Gene Robinson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Committee Members

Neil Burgess, UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, UK
Julia Patricia Gordon Jones, Bangor University, UK
David Tilman, University of Minnesota, USA
Pam Soltis, University of Florida Biodiversity Institute, USA
Scott Edwards, Harvard University, USA