RECOGNISING that wildlife is an essential component of natural ecosystems and contributes important ecosystem services to people including adequate carbon storage, seed dispersal, pollination, soil integrity and fertility, and food, among others;

CONCERNED that according to the latest Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report, “around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history”;

NOTING that the collection of in-situ biodiversity data has dramatically increased in the last decade due to the popularisation of passive automatic data collection sensors such as camera traps, sound recorders, drones and eDNA collection devices;

CONCERNED that despite a large amount of in-situ biodiversity data being collected with these new technologies, most of these data are not shared or used in conservation due to the lack of technical capacity to process and analyse them, lack of adequate tools for data management, and lack of trusted data repositories that are available at local to global scales;

AWARE that in order to properly and transparently manage wildlife, conservation managers and policy makers need data on wildlife populations that are current (real-time or near-real-time), primary (in their original form), geographically representative (covering most of the spatial distribution of a species), with the right temporal granularity (sampling intervals that are at least 10% of the expected generation time of a species), and readily available to the conservation, science and public community at large;

NOTING that this information is essential for the development of knowledge and management products required to measure progress and set concrete targets towards the conservation of wildlife at local, national, regional and global scales;

RECOGNISING the role of the network of experts organised under the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) and the Red List Unit of the Secretariat for the delivery of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species; and

MINDFUL and WELCOMING of the emergence of various wildlife and biodiversity in-situ data-sharing platforms such as GBIF, eBird, iNaturalist, eMammal and Wildlife Insights among others;