OOS 42-4 - Efficient monitoring of biodiversity and evaluation of conservation initiates in tropical forests

Revenues from carbon finance such as through REDD+ designed to mitigate climate change provide an exciting opportunity to protect tropical forest biodiversity, although protecting carbon doesn’t necessarily protect biodiversity. A challenging aspect of such initiatives is efficient biodiversity monitoring as these surveys are expensive and time-consuming, particularly in demanding environments such as tropical forests. Technological advancements such as bioacoustics could potentially be the solution. To test this, we studied the status of biodiversity within a conservation landscape managed under the Gola-REDD+ initiative in Sierra Leone. We used a combination of bioacoustics, eDNA (from streams and malaise traps), and remote sensing technologies from 150 paired sites, under a hierarchical modeling framework, to study their respective efficacy, complementarity, and redundancy in measuring tropical forest biodiversity. With developing economies and tropical countries unevenly bearing the responsibility of forest protection and restoration, our results will help evaluate the effectiveness of carbon finance initiatives to serve the dual objective of conserving globally threatened biodiversity whilst banking carbon.