LTER Portugal: participation in LIFEPLAN - A Planetary Inventory of Life
6 February 2023
The LTSER Sabor site in the Northeast of Portugal has been participating in the LIFEPLAN project for the last two years. LIFEPLAN is coordinated by Helsinki University, with several partners across the world aiming to assess the global diversity of a wide diversity of terrestrial taxa, including birds, mammals, insects, plants, and fungi.
Using the most recent advances in sampling methods, as well as in molecular, bioinformatic, bioacoustics and statistical analysis, the project aims to set the standards for next generation monitoring of biodiversity. Besides the field data collection, that ranges from biological samples to acoustic data, they have been participating in the creation of a reference library of bird sounds and local scale tuning of automatic identification algorithms.
At the end of 2022, the second field sampling campaign came to an end and the team started to plan the switching of sampling sites. This happens at the end of every year between a natural and an urban site, and should continue for the next four years, sampling for six years in total.
Thousands of insect, soil, pollen and spore samples, and millions of pictures and audio recordings, are being shipped and transferred through the cloud across the world to feed one of the most ambitious, globally distributed and systematically collected biodiversity datasets to date.
