The Gonzalez Lab at the GEO BON Conference 2023

The GEO BON Global Conference 2023 brought together experts and stakeholders from around the world to discuss the theme of Monitoring Biodiversity For Action. A packed four day schedule saw people talk about science, policy, indigenous rights, finance and conservation. Co-hosted by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, this event happened one year on from the landmark adoption of the Global Biodiversity Framework which calls for a whole of society approach to preserving biodiversity and ecosystem services.

"I was there to present the advances we've made in understanding how the relationship between society and nature, referred to as ecosystem services, is changing" says Flavio, who won the runner-up prize for best talk. "It was an inspiring event with people clearly committed to taking science out of the lab and into the real world. I am passionate about my work because of the difference it can make for society and being at this conference was an opportunity to see how it can help a wide variety of people, from governments to local communities and indigenous people. My big take home from the conference is that there is a great demand from the public and private sectors for science to help transform our relationship with nature and protect biodiversity but we aren't quite ready to meet it yet, that's where our next big challenge lies."

Flavio Affinito presenting his PhD work at the GEO BON conference.

Micheal, who has been working on one of the GEO BON projects besides his PhD work, says: “My primary takeaway from GEO-BON 2023 conference is related to my work on the  BON-in-a-Box (BiaB) platform, which I have worked on during the last couple years and which we finally showed off publicly. I was struck by how well the main messages of BiaB resonated - that we need open tools for biodiversity monitoring and analysis. I also got to discuss some of my ideas for my post-doc, in particular the use of reinforcement learning for sampling optimization and adaptive monitoring, and gained a few new perspectives on RL that will influence my work going forward.”

Current and previous Gonzalez Lab members catching up at the GEO BON conference.
From left: Jacqueline Oehri, Michael Catchen, Siddhartha Khare

"The GEO BON conference provides a great opportunity for me to catch up with academic colleagues and learn from policymakers, conservation practitioners and all the others working related to biodiversity conservation.” says Wenyuan, a post-doc at the lab. “It is celebrated to see we are working together on achieving the prudent conservation goals albeit with challenges ahead. Those emerging excellent works also inspire my research on connectivity conservation. I appreciate this opportunity and look forward to the next GEO BON conference."

Wenyuan Zhang during one of the workshops at the conference.