OKEON: A Community-Collaborative Terrestrial Biodiversity Monitoring Network in Okinawa, Japan

Datasets from natural history collections and biodiversity monitoring are a valuable source of information for assessing the impacts of global environmental problems such as climate change, habitat loss, and the spread of invasive species. The OKEON (OKinawa Environmental Observation Network) Churamori Project described here is a terrestrial monitoring network led by a university institution, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), which aims to investigate how these various global environmental problems affect local nature. The documentation of biodiversity has continued without pause from 2015 to the present, and includes insect specimens, automated wildlife images, soundscape data, and weather data at study sites covering a variety of land use categories, from subtropical forests to urban areas. Our emphasis in this project is on collaborative networks, which include not only the researcher network but also local networks (Fig. 1). The role of the researcher network is to collaborate with us to set the direction of the project and make recommendations to maintain data quality, while the role of the local network is to allow the use of the research sites and to collaborate with us to create opportunities and methods to share the results of this project with the general public. Since all 24 OKEON research sites are not owned by the university, but leased by others, we set up the sites after discussions with the local network (museums, government officials, landowners, etc.) as well as within the research network. This project is a monitoring project conducted for research, and all raw data cannot be made available to the public. However, one of the objectives of the project is to transform the results such that they can be used by the local community and disseminated outside the university, rather than used solely for academic research at the university. The following are three categories of examples for how the project results may be used: Academic research: Some studies have been conducted that are only possible because of OKEON's continuous monitoring. For example, an evaluation was conducted to determine if there is an effect of land use on changes in the seasonality of organisms and the rate of recovery from natural disturbances such as typhoons (Kass et al. 2023, Ross et al. 2023). Research is also underway to use DNA metabarcoding techniques to analyze insect diversity from the vast amount of insect samples obtained in all seasons on Ok