ViBRANT to provide the tools to measure decline of species within IPBES?

What follows is my reading of IPBES documents and need be followed up with a direct exchange. So, keep this in mind.

IPBES will provide global assessment of the fate of biodiversity and ecoystem services. Those will be based on the analysis of reports, that means there will be no IPBES-internal data collecting activities, but a lot of data mining and analyses of existing reports. Changes of species will only included, if their is information on them.

This is the chance for http://scratchpads.eu/. Why not provide a standard report form that suits IPBES, and link this to activties to update them according to the review cycle in IPBES. lets say, this is four year, so it would be interesting to motivate scratchpad users to make an effort to update their pages to that point in time.

It would also be an interesting experiment to see, how much information ought be available, to make statements on the distribution for the study of the global dynamic of biodiversity.

The impact might not be with those species that are widely known and ducmented, and not those that are very rare. But there ought be a middle ground that is not yet used in such exercices and that could also be recollected.

http://scratchpads.eu/ could play a role by opening up such assessemnts for groups that are not yet covered with such data. For example, if you would do ants, all the most recent publications could be taken, the treatmens and materials examined extracted and made acessible, and in a subsequent step, more material could be added through the scratchpads.

I could for example imagine, that this could complement what IUCN's SSC does by assessing the global diversity and threat of mammals, amphibians.