Biodiversity monitoring and assessment has come a long way in the last 20 years, but it remains poorly developed despite its critical importance.A range of targets have been agreed within Mulitlateral Environmental Agreements, such as those for 2020 within the Conference on Biological Diversity, but in trying to establish metrics and indicators we find that there are few, if any, agreed Essential Biodiversity Variables.Furthermore, there are serious mismatches of scale (from the local, to the national, regional and global), and of methodology (long term ecological monitoring rarely links to remote sensing approaches, or even to efforts to model biodiversity).Institutions tend to be highly competitive rather than collaborative, and even where collaboration is attempted it tends to take the form of layering new efforts on top of existing intitiatives.This presentation paints a highly relevant landscape of monitoring and assessment and proposes some ways through which progress might be more quickly made.It suggests that the most critical need in the short term is the production, every 10 years, of a standard land use map to an agreed catigorisation that is derived from remote sensing, but subject to appropriate ground-truthing.