BioDT (Biodiversity Digital Twin)

The models simulate how species and ecosystems respond to land use, management and climate.^2,4,5 They ran on LUMI, in Kajaani, Finland.¹⁵ BioDT is a Horizon Europe project.²⁰

CSC is a Finnish non-profit state enterprise that provides IT services for research.¹⁷ Partners include the biodiversity data infrastructures GBIF and LifeWatch ERIC, the weather centre ECMWF and the IT4Innovations supercomputing centre in Ostrava.¹⁷ Data also comes through the research infrastructures DiSSCo, eLTER, GBIF and LifeWatch.²

The ten prototypes fall into four groups.³

• Species response to environmental change. A grassland model simulates individual plants on a square metre under mowing, fertiliser and weather.⁴ A forest model, so far for Finland and its birds, couples the LANDIS-II landscape simulator with HMSC species-community models and a decision tool for choosing management strategies.⁵ A cultural ecosystem services twin maps recreation potential alongside species distributions.⁶ For real-time bird monitoring, a Finnish phone app ("Muuttolintujen kevät") classifies bird song uploaded by the public and updates predictions of where birds are and when they sing.⁷ The app is part of a citizen-science campaign run with the broadcaster YLE.⁷
• Genetically detected biodiversity. Crop wild relatives maps where stress-tolerant wild relatives of crops grow, from GBIF and other occurrence repositories.¹⁰ A second tool helps choose where to sample environmental DNA next; environmental DNA is the genetic material organisms shed into soil and water.¹¹ A third computes phylogenetic diversity, a measure of how much evolutionary history a set of species spans, from GBIF occurrences and the Open Tree of Life.¹²
• Species interactions. One twin models African swine fever spread in European wild boar.⁸ Another models honey bee colonies across Germany with the BEEHAVE model, land-cover data and daily weather.⁹
• Species of policy concern. Projected invasion levels of alien plants across Europe's habitats under current and future climate.¹³

The twins run on a shared platform built from the LEXIS workflow system, Puhuri for login, HEAppE for supercomputer jobs and iRODS for data staging. It can be deployed at LUMI and IT4Innovations.¹⁴ The platform is built so that each twin can be described as a FAIR digital object, FAIR meaning findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.¹⁴

Eight of the ten prototypes open in a shared R Shiny web app, each marked early access and for research purposes only, not for decision-making or operational use.^{4,5,6,7,8,9,10,13} The phylogenetic diversity twin opens at GBIF's PhyloNext site, and the DNA sampling twin has no public link.^11,12 The forest twin is built from three tools that are on GitHub, and eight of the twins have papers in the RIO journal.^{4,5,7,8,9,10,11,12,13}

The first prototype, on honey bee performance in Germany, is publicly available.² The project's final event, "Biodiversity Digital Twins and the Destination Earth Ecosystem", was held in Rome and online on 3 April 2025.¹⁸ The project says its prototypes will be integrated into Destination Earth's data lake to continue the work.¹⁸ Related projects are DT-GEO, DTO-BioFlow, FAIRCORE4EOSC and interTwin.¹⁶