Woman looking at a camera trap in the forest.
Alma Hodzic looks through the images captured by the wildlife camera.

A global project offers new insights into biodiversity

News published:  21/11/2025

Fieldwork for the ambitious Lifeplan project has now been completed. Over six years, teams across the world have collected vast amounts of data on life on Earth. The audio recordings alone would be enough to create a playlist lasting 172 years. The results will change how we view biodiversity.

‘Most species are unknown and rare. Thanks to Lifeplan, we can now include them when measuring biodiversity and predicting how it will change,’ says Tomas Roslin, Professor at SLU.

He leads Lifeplan together with David Dunson from Duke University and Otso Ovaskainen from the University of Jyväskylä. The trio received more than EUR 12 million from the European Research Council (ERC) to map species diversity across locations, to identify patterns and to build models.

Mind-boggling amounts of data

Teams in more than one hundred countries used identical methods to collect samples, including insect traps, camera traps, audio recorders, soil samples and cyclone samplers.

Examples of what has been gathered include:

  • 21,787 week-long insect samples
  • 20 million camera images
  • 90 million minutes of audio
  • 7,600 fungal spore samples

If all DNA sequences from fungi and insects were printed in font size 12, the line would reach to the Moon and back 15 times.

AI and modelling

Naturally, no human could go through all this material within a single lifetime. The researchers therefore used AI and built advanced statistical models.

One major insight is that almost all species are so rare that they have been recorded at only one or a few sites, and in just a handful of individuals. By grouping closely related species, models developed by Lifeplan can still show how different environmental changes affect them.

‘Until now, rare species have mostly been ignored – which is a problem, as they represent most of the life on Earth. Being able to include them changes how we understand biodiversity.’

Tomas Roslin. Photo: Jenny Svennås Gillner

Practical benefits

The project has succeeded in its overarching goal: we may now point anywhere on the world map and predict what biodiversity is present there today and how it will be affected by changes in land use or climate. This knowledge will be useful for authorities, organisations and researchers in the future.

One example of a practical application is a phone app with which users can record bird sounds from their surroundings. Five per cent of Finland’s population have already downloaded this app. The app can be used to make comparable recordings around QR codes placed at fixed sites – an activity that supports research and environmental monitoring, while also offering a potential new hobby for nature enthusiasts.

‘Today, most species-identification apps are created by companies or organisations that keep tight control over their data. We want to create open resources that everyone can use and contribute to,’ says Tomas Roslin.

Two exciting discoveries from Lifeplan

Unexpected patterns among fungi

Until recently, most of our knowledge concerned fungi in the soil. This environment is dominated by mycorrhizal fungi living in close association with plants. When researchers analysed airborne fungal spores, they found that two other groups dominate: wood saprotrophs (i.e., fungi feeding on dead wood) and plant pathogens.

A particular surprise was the extent to which the local fungal flora differs between climate zones – even though a fungal spore can, in principle, travel anywhere in the world.

The amount and diversity of airborne spores vary greatly between seasons. Seasonal variation is greatest at the poles and smallest at the equator. Intriguingly, different fungal groups reach their highest diversity at different latitudes.

Airborne DNA reveals predictable spatial and seasonal dynamics of fungi, Nature

Human noise hinders animal communication

The natural soundscape varies predictably with the latitude, with the time of the day and with the day of the year. Sounds from human traffic and machinery, however, are far less predictable. In urban green areas, soundscapes are dominated by mechanical and human noise, but still contain many sounds produced by birds and other animals – although the species composition differs from that of nearby, less human-influenced environments.

The study shows that we need to actively manage our audible environments to protect both animal communication and people’s experience of nature.

Human contributions to global soundscapes are less predictable than the acoustic rhythms of wildlife, Nature Ecology & Evolution

Translated using AI but edited by humans afterwards

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