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As explained in the comments, this deliverable includes two closely related concepts.

BON focus

• A manuscript was submitted in August that explores challenges to BON expansion and ways to address them (Andrew Gonzalez, GEO BON co-lead, is first author with roughly 60 co-authors). It discusses how additional geographic BON coverage can enable reliable EBV estimates. These can then be used to generate CBD indicators and deliver them to CBD and the broader biodiversity community.
• GEO BON received a grant from Microsoft to facilitate enhancement of BON-in-a-Box V1.0 to V2.0. BON-in-a-Box is a collection of tools and other resources to guide national governments and other organizations as they develop their Biodiversity Observation Networks.

Global system focus

• The concept of a global biodiversity observation and information system is very ambitious and remains in the exploratory stage.
• A small group continues to explore and help socialize the vision and its value, and foster conversations. The group has discussed a proposal for an activity on this topic with the organizers of the 2022 World Biodiversity Forum.
• The concept is a component of a manuscript, now in preparation, that discusses the recent and ongoing explosion in availability of EO data, and how these data can best be used to support science and societal applications.

There are two closely related concepts to this deliverable; these are summarized separately here.

Background-1. A BON is a collaboration among partners who agree to share knowledge and know-how to evaluate changes in biodiversity, including data, products, protocols and methods, data systems, and software. BONs seek to establish standardized processes for sustained, operational measurements of biodiversity to understand how biodiversity is changing so as to provide information needed by governments and intergovernmental bodies for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. BONs can be national or regional in scale, or topically based such as the Marine BON, and they often emphasize in situ data collection, though also work to utilize Earth observations and integrate the two. One of GEO BON’s core goals, directly tied to this deliverable, is to expand the areal and topical coverage of BONs and the level of interaction among them.

Background-2. A concept having heavy overlap with BONs is sometimes called the Global Biodiversity Monitoring System (or Global Biodiversity Observation System, or Observation and Information System…). It tends to be somewhat more oriented towards satellite-based observations than BONs, though has a similar focus on integrating them with in situ and airborne data as well as improved data sharing. More flexibility and increased breadth in the range of product generation is another element. This is a concept that has been discussed for several years in different venues; it is probably accurate to say that there is general agreement on the value of such a system, and that the best approach is a system of systems via a federation of partners. However, progressing global concepts requiring collaboration among funding-limited partners is challenging.