News

The 23rd Congress of the Association for the Taxonomic Study of the Flora of Tropical Africa (AETFAT) took place in Accra, Ghana, from 3 to 8 August 2025. As part of Symposium 1 “Advancement of African Floras & new developments in plant identification”, the GUARDEN and MAMBO projects jointly presented recent achievements in biodiversity research from Madagascar. MAMBO’s contribution focused on methodological innovations in plant community ...

At the first eLTER Science Conference held in Tampere, Finland (23–27 June 2025), MAMBO coordinator Toke Thomas Høye (AU) delivered a keynote on automated species monitoring. His talk, part of the session “Advancing long-term ecological observations: integrating novel technologies for whole-system insights,”focused on using sensor networks and deep learning models for biodiversity observation. Prof. Høye presented how camera traps combined wit...

MAMBO, in collaboration with the GUARDEN project, has contributed to the development of a new policy brief highlighting the role of AI-powered tools in large-scale biodiversity monitoring. The brief introduces an innovative service integrated into the Pl@ntNet platform, enabling the identification of plant communities directly from field images. By using advanced image recognition models, this approach supports consistent, protocol-based data ...

The PlantCLEF 2025 challenge, part of the international LifeCLEF initiative, launched earlier this year with the goal of pushing the boundaries of automated plant identification. Supported by MAMBO and GUARDEN, the challenge focused on one of biodiversity monitoring’s most complex tasks: recognising multiple plant species from a single vegetation plot image. Participants were invited to develop AI models capable of identifying all plant specie...

In June 2025, the MAMBO drone and allometry workflow was presented at a focused workshop held in Bogotá, Colombia. The event, titled "Prioritising Research Agenda for the Paramos in Response to Global Environmental Change", was organised by Penn State University and funded by the U. S. National Science Foundation. The MAMBO drone processing workflow gained the attention of Colombian scientists keen to find a way of monitoring target plant spe...

MAMBO partners have helped create a new open dataset that reveals detailed information about vegetation structure across seven demonstration sites in five European countries: Mols Bjerge National Park (Denmark), Reserve Naturelle Nationale du Bagnas (France), Oostvaardersplassen (Netherlands), Salisbury Plain (United Kingdom), Knepp Estate (United Kingdom), Monks Wood (United Kingdom), and the island of Comino (Malta). Using airborne laser scanni...

As part of MAMBO’s collaboration with GUARDEN, a hands-on training session took place on 19 June 2025 at the AMAP laboratory in Montpellier, France. Organised by the CIRAD team, the session focused on two innovative digital tools GeoPl@ntNet and Pl@ntNet Plot, developed to support large-scale biodiversity monitoring using AI-powered plant identification. Led by Pierre Bonnet and Rémi Palard, the training gathered researchers and interns ...

In a major step toward building a more coordinated and effective biodiversity monitoring system, the European Commission has launched a €7 million call for tenders to pilot the EU Biodiversity Observation Coordination Centre (EBOCC). The initiative will test and implement key elements proposed by the Horizon 2020 project EuropaBON, coordinated by Professor Henrique Pereira from iDiv and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU). Th...

The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) participated in the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2025 in Vienna, presenting recent advancements in drone-based habitat monitoring and shrub biomass estimation under the EU-funded MAMBO project. А poster "Shrub species, cover and biomass from affordable UAV observations. pdf" was presented in the Remote sensing of biosphere processes and biodiversity session. It showcased a w...

On 13-14 May 2025, MAMBO, in collaboration with the GUARDEN project, co-hosted the DeepSDM symposium in Montpellier at the Agropolis Fondation. The event brought together researchers, data scientists, and biodiversity experts to explore the potential of deep learning for species distribution modelling (SDM). With over 65 participants attending in person and more than 120 total attendees including online participants, the symposium focused on t...

At the 2025 Alternet Conference on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (13–16 May, Aveiro, Portugal), MAMBO project coordinator Professor Toke Thomas Høye (Aarhus University) delivered a keynote address on the future of automated species monitoring. In his presentation, “Automated species monitoring from the Arctic to the tropics,” Høye showcased how MAMBO and other large-scale initiatives are advancing biodiversity monitoring by integrating d...

MAMBO partners have co-authored a paper on how airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used to measure habitat condition more consistently across multiple sites. The study outlines current challenges, such as differences in sensor equipment, varied survey designs, complex datasets and the difficulty of applying the same models in different locations. Managing the large amount of data these technologies produc...

A study dealing with the status assigned to species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) was published in the open-access archive arXiv with research input from MAMBO partners. The co-authors in question are Pierre Bonnet from The French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) and Alexis Joly from the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA). The paper explores...

A new MAMBO publication investigates the potential of large-scale plant identification models for the early detection of invasive alien plant species using high-resolution roadside imagery. The study, titled “Adapting a global plant identification model to detect invasive alien plant species in high-resolution roadside images”, is the result of a collaboration between MAMBO and the GUARDEN projects. The research addresses the critical need for...

A new MAMBO data paper presents a standardised set of LiDAR vegetation structure metrics derived from airborne laser scanning (ALS) data, offering valuable insights for cross-site ecological monitoring and habitat assessment across Europe. The study, led by Prof. W. Daniel Kissling and co-authored by Wouter Mulder, Jie Wang, and Yuxuan Shi, provides harmonised datasets for the project's seven demonstration sites in five European countries, enabli...