Introduction

The historic Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which supports the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and builds on the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) previous Strategic Plans, sets out an ambitious pathway to reach the global vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050. Among the Framework’s key elements are 23 targets for 2030. In order to track the progress on the targets, a number of indicators were agreed upon for each target. The B3ALIEN software provides a technical solution to track Target 6: “Reduce the Introduction of Invasive Alien Species by 50% and Minimize Their Impact.” It mainly focusses on the headline indicator: rate of invasive alien species establishment, but can provide input to some of the complementary indicators.

Decision makers at local, regional, national and international levels need accurate and reliable information about status, trends, threats, and they need data presented in an actionable and understandable format, with measures of uncertainty. Furthermore, we need synthesized data products that can be combined with other environmental data, such as climate, soil chemistry, land use, altitude… B3ALIEN is built upon the concept of data cubes developed in the Horizon Europe Biodiversity Building Blocks for Policy project (b- cubed.eu). It uses the solid foundations of the GBIF infrastructure, where tools such as the GBIF Taxonomic Backbone and the Global Registry of Introduced and Invasive Species are available by default. Readily available occurrence data is used to determine and estimate accurately the rate of introduction of alien species..