Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) have emerged as a crucial tool for monitoring biodiversity change and provide a framework for standardized and integrated data that align with national and global conservation targets. While EBVs have static definitions, they offer considerable flexibility in their specific data products, allowing regions with diverse geographies, biota, and cultures to develop unique implementation strategies. To guide EBV data products for Japan, we compare data availability and gaps with Finland, a country with similar environments. We review the status of primary data for EBVs in terrestrial ecosystems in these two countries and then compare them with Europe. Phenology and model-based approaches have emerged as cost-effective methods covering multiple EBV classes and assessing changes across diverse biomes and temporal scales. We found that Japan had adequate or surplus data for many EBV classes, particularly for species distributions, phenology, and environmental disasters, and we also note additional data unique to Japan. However, we also identified gaps in Japan such as data for products in Genetic Composition, Species Traits, and Ecosystem Structure EBV classes relative to Finland and Europe. We then discuss how EBVs can contribute to calculate indicators for Japan, such as the “30 by 30,” and highlight the remaining data gaps to realize them. Lastly, we provide our perspectives on calculating EBVs at the national scale, focusing on Japan. As countries and regions develop EBV products, comparative regional analyses help elucidate key commonalities and differences that can inform more coordinated and effective responses to the global biodiversity crisis.

Although water availability strongly controls gross primary production (GPP), the impact of soil moisture content (wilting point) is poorly quantified on regional and global scales. In this study, we used 10-year observations of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) from the GOSAT satellite to estimate the wilting point of a semiarid grassland on the Mongolian Plateau. Radiative-transfer model inversion and soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer simulation were jointly conducted to distinguish the drought impacts on physiology from changes in leaf-canopy optical properties. We modified an existing inversion algorithm and the widely used SCOPE model to adequately evaluate dryland features, e.g., sparse canopy and strong convection. The modified model with retrieved parameters and calibrated to GOSAT SIF predicts realistic GPP values. We found that (1) the SIF yield estimated from GOSAT shows a clear sigmoidal pattern in relation to drought, and the estimated wilting point matches ground-based observations within ~0.01 m3 m-3 for the soil moisture content, (2) tuning the maximum carboxylation rate improves SIF prediction after considering changes in leaf-canopy optical properties, implying that GOSAT detected drought stress in leaf-level photosynthesis, and (3) the surface energy balance has significant impacts on the grassland’s SIF; the modified model reproduces observed SIF radiance well (mean bias = 0.004 mW m-2 nm-1 sr-1 in summer), whereas the original model predicts substantially low values under weak horizontal wind (unstable) conditions. Some model-observation mismatches in the SIF suggest that more research is needed for fluorescence parametrization (e.g., photoinhibition) and additional observation constraints.