Key global indicators of biodiversity decline, such as the IUCN Red List Index and the Living Planet Index, have relatively long assessment intervals. This means they, due to their inherent structure, function as late‐warning indicators that are retrospective, rather than prospective. These indicators are unquestionably important in providing information for biodiversity conservation, but the detection of early‐warning signs of critical biodiversity change is also needed so that proactive management responses can be enacted promptly where required. Generally, biodiversity conservation has dealt poorly with the scattered distribution of necessary detailed information, and needs to find a solution to assemble, harmonize and standardize the data. The prospect of monitoring essential biodiversity variables (EBVs) has been suggested in response to this challenge. The concept has generated much attention, but the EBVs themselves are still in development due to the complexity of the task, the limited resources available, and a lack of long‐term commitment to maintain EBV data sets. As a first step, the scientific community and the policy sphere should agree on a set of priority candidate EBVs to be developed within the coming years to advance both large‐scale ecological research as well as global and regional biodiversity conservation. Critical ecological transitions are of high importance from both a scientific as well as from a conservation policy point of view, as they can lead to long‐lasting biodiversity change with a high potential for deleterious effects on whole ecosystems and therefore also on human well‐being. We evaluated candidate EBVs using six criteria: relevance, sensitivity to change, generalizability, scalability, feasibility, and data availability and provide a literature‐based review for eight EBVs with high sensitivity to change. The proposed suite of EBVs comprises abundance, allelic diversity, body mass index, ecosystem heterogeneity, phenology, range dynamics, size at first reproduction, and survival rates. The eight candidate EBVs provide for the early detection of critical and potentially long‐lasting biodiversity change and should be operationalized as a priority. Only with such an approach can science predict the future status of global biodiversity with high certainty and set up the appropriate conservation measures early and efficiently. Importantly, the selected EBVs would address a large range of conservation issues and contribute to a total of 15 of the 20 Aichi targets and are, hence, of high biological relevance.

中文翻译：

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一套用于检测关键生物多样性变化的基本生物多样性变量

国际自然保护联盟红色名录指数和地球生命力指数等生物多样性下降的关键全球指标的评估间隔相对较长。这意味着，由于它们的固有结构，它们起到了回顾性而非前瞻性的后期预警指标的作用。这些指标在为生物多样性保护提供信息方面无疑是重要的，但也需要检测生物多样性关键变化的早期预警信号，以便在需要时能够迅速采取积极的管理响应。总体而言，生物多样性保护对于必要的详细信息的零散分布处理不力，需要寻找解决方案来汇集、统一和标准化数据。为了应对这一挑战，人们提出了监测基本生物多样性变量 (EBV) 的前景。这个概念引起了很多关注，但由于任务的复杂性、可用资源有限以及缺乏维护 EBV 数据集的长期承诺，EBV 本身仍在开发中。作为第一步，科学界和政策领域应就未来几年内开发的一系列优先候选 EBV 达成一致，以推进大规模生态研究以及全球和区域生物多样性保护。从科学和保护政策的角度来看，关键的生态转变都非常重要，因为它们可能导致持久的生物多样性变化，对整个生态系统产生有害影响的可能性很大，因此也会对人类福祉产生不利影响。我们使用六个标准评估了候选 EBV：相关性、对变化的敏感性、普遍性、可扩展性、可行性和数据可用性，并为八个对变化具有高度敏感性的 EBV 提供了基于文献的审查。提议的 EBV 套件包括丰度、等位基因多样性、体重指数、生态系统异质性、物候学、范围动态、首次繁殖时的大小和存活率。八个候选 EBV 提供了对关键和潜在的长期生物多样性变化的早期检测，应作为优先事项进行操作。只有这样，科学才能高度确定地预测全球生物多样性的未来状况，并尽早有效地制定相应的保护措施。重要的是，选定的 EBV 将解决广泛的保护问题，并有助于 20 个爱知目标中的 15 个，因此具有高度的生物学相关性。