Biodiversity Initiative for Planetary Stewardship

Harvard University Biodiversity Initiative for Planetary Stewardship (HUBS) advances four connected goals

• Discover, detect, and measure biodiversity using next-generation tools and integrated datasets
• Assess biodiversity’s role in ecosystem function and resilience under rapid global change
• Enable concrete conservation, restoration, and nature-based solutions with credible monitoring and forecasting
• Train and convene leaders across disciplines and sectors to scale evidence-based action

How the work comes together

HUBS integrates five mutually reinforcing platforms that turn biodiversity science into action.

1) Mapping nature and change through time

Using remotely sensed satellite, airborne and other environmental data layers the Center for Dynamic Biodiversity Mapping will build the data pipelines, computational infrastructure, and verification tools needed to make biodiversity change visible and measurable over time. The Center, which will serve as the biodiversity data nerve center of HUBS, will turn these observations into actionable monitoring data streams for verification of biodiversity targets, forecasts and educational tools.

Filling a critical gap for governments, NGOs, and the private sector working toward the UN Global Biodiversity Framework, the Center will produce multi-scale maps of forest and woodland biodiversity and canopy structure, detect change as it happens, and project future trajectories to guide conservation, restoration, and responsible investment. It will also serve as a convening and training hub, aligning Harvard expertise across biology, engineering, data science, policy, and practice and partnering with external leaders to ensure the work is usable in the real world.

2) A digital twin of Earth’s biodiversity

Millions of species remain unidentified around the world. At current rates of extinction, many will disappear before they are ever documented. Harvard is home to some of the most extraordinary natural history collections anywhere that collectively document how life has changed through time, but they are an under-utilized resource. By digitizing them in one globally accessible platform, the Harvard University Biodiversity Atlas will accelerate discovery, documentation, insight, and prediction.

By pairing integrated data for plants, animals, fungi and other domains of life with high-resolution imaging, genetic and genomic information, and spectral signatures, the Atlas will be a virtual collection that supports research across scales – from taxonomy and genomics to functional traits and ecosystem roles in changing environments. An early deliverable is a unified database of nearly 26 million specimens, with a longer-term plan to enrich records through high-throughput workflows and emerging approaches such as citizen science, remote sensing, and environmental DNA. The result will be faster identification, better forecasting, and deeper insight into what species do and how ecosystems work – supported by a collaboration model that aligns disciplines around shared standards and trains the next generation of biodiversity scientists.

3) Living forest ecosystem laboratory

The Harvard Forest Living Laboratory for Forest biodiversity and Ecosystem Function (LIFE) positions the 1,600-hectare Harvard Forest – and its century-plus legacy of monitoring and experimentation – as a global platform for understanding how biodiversity undergirds ecosystem resilience. It answers a critical question: How does biodiversity – ranging from microbes and insects to plants, birds, and mammals – sustain forest function as climate stress intensifies? Despite strong evidence that rising carbon dioxide, warming temperatures, and increasing drought are degrading forests, remarkably few in situ experiments test how these pressures interact and few large-scale monitoring systems can link changes in biodiversity to ecosystem processes.

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LIFE fills that gap by pairing next-generation monitoring tools – including spectroscopy, LiDAR, acoustic sensors, camera traps, and field inventories – with long-term experiments that simulate interacting climate stressors and ecosystem models that predict future trajectories. Building on Harvard Forest’s leadership in long-term, ecosystem flux measurements of the exchange of gases between the terrestrial land surface and the atmosphere, and continuous forest ecosystem datasets, LIFE will produce validated, comparable data, forecasts, and insights that inform forest management, restoration, and nature-based climate solutions. In doing so, LIFE will trainfellows and students through interdisciplinary, co-mentored research.

4) Urban solutions

Most people now experience nature primarily in cities, yet urban biodiversity is rarely measured with consistent standards and is often treated as an amenity rather than essential civic infrastructure. The Urban Biodiversity and Landscape Project will establish practical protocols to measure urban nature and its benefits, training students and practitioners, convening city leaders, and creating demonstrations that test interventions in the built environment and translate results into policy and practice.

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Utilizing the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, a 281-acre living museum in Boston’s Emerald Necklace, and a suite of parks from Boston’s urban core to exurban realms, the project will treat urban nature as essential civic infrastructure that links design, public health, ecology, policy, and law. In partnership with city officials and communities – who often lack baseline information needed for stewardship, planning, and natural resource management – the project will help reverse the long decline of designed public spaces and generate solutions cities can adopt and scale.

5) Governance and economics

Too often, we still cannot answer basic questions about biodiversity and conservation: Which interventions work; what do they cost; what tradeoffs do they create; and which governance arrangements and incentives are durable enough to scale? How do we value nature in ways that change behavior?

The Biodiversity Governance and Economics Collaborative is the bridge from science to policy, legal, and market action, connecting new measurement capabilities to the decisions that determine biodiversity outcomes: incentives, regulations, public finance, contracts, and conservation investments. Building on the strong science and data foundations encompassed within HUBS, the Collaborative will build an open biodiversity-policy evidence base with high-resolution indicators and credible baselines, enabling causal evaluation and monitoring that policymakers and practitioners can trust. It will assess the salience and cost-effectiveness of tools such as carbon and biodiversity credits, species protections, and mitigation frameworks, and design incentives that internalize biodiversity’s value with attention to enforcement, additionality, and equity. The result is practical: maps, datasets, planning and permitting tools for infrastructure and energy siting, and decision toolkits that help leaders choose what works, where, and for whom.

What success looks like

HUBS will deliver practical outputs that partners can use immediately, including:

• Integrated data products and verification pipelines that quantify biodiversity change and support credible monitoring, reporting, and accountability
• A comprehensive biodiversity atlas that expands global access to tens of millions of specimen records and accelerates biodiversity discovery and prediction
• Demonstration and training programs that grow the next generation of biodiversity leaders and translate evidence into stewardship.

HUBS positions Harvard and the Salata Institute as a trusted, interdisciplinary evidence base for biodiversity measurement and action – linking discovery to monitoring, and science to the policies, laws, and incentives that can deliver measurable biodiversity gains at scale.