More than one year after B-Cubed’s kick-off meeting, partners gathered again in Montpellier, France. Hosted by the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, the two-day meeting (28 & 29 May) focused on reviewing progress and planning next steps.

The meeting began with an overview of B-Cubed’s April hackathon, featuring ten projects and 86 participants from 46 affiliations. Check out our aftermovie for a closer look.

Discussions then shifted to understanding the EU and international biodiversity policy landscape. Results from this work are already becoming available, with two in-depth reports coming out soon.

From capacity building and policy alignment, presentations moved on to the project’s software to create species occurrence cubes. A prototype has already been developed based on specified requirements and will be refined through user feedback before its public release on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

Participants of the B-Cubed meeting, day 2

Continuing the topic of software development overall, we delved into B-Cubed’s software development guide, featuring hands-on instructions, examples, tutorials and recommendations for a consistent open source development cycle.

This was followed by a presentation on the progress WP4 is making in modelling past, current and future biodiversity, with some publicly available results including: 

• A quixotic view of spatial bias in modelling the distribution of species and their diversity

• A simulation framework for biodiversity data cubes

• Disentangling the relationships among abundance, invasiveness and invasibility in trait space

WP5 concluded the WP reports with updates on developing workflows for known indicators, phylogenetic diversity indicator calculation and indicators on alien taxa impacts. 

The meeting also addressed next steps, including our case studies, cloud computing and FAIR data products. We discussed providing tailored training for different types of B-Cubed stakeholders, supporting the adoption of invasion indicators, enhancing synergies within the broader biodiversity initiative landscape, and delivering evidence-based policy recommendations based on B-Cubed’s work.