EU BON is a European Union contribution towards building the GEO BON – Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Biodiversity Observation Network. A recent development of GEO BON is to define so called Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV).  These are automatically computed indices that can be used to assess the state of biodiversity in many topics, such as trends and abundance of species.  Unlike biodiversity indicators, which are data products used in policy support for long time, and are partly based on subjective assessment, EBVs will be just computed from contents of a large number of disparate data sources, like the Essential Climate Variables of the IPCC are. However, EBVs are still on the drawing board, and need to be piloted.

The priority of GEO BON is to have an operational system by 2015 when GEO first 10-year implementation plan comes to an end.  Operationalising the production of EBVs is one such goal that GEO BON and EU BON are working on.  The work has begun to make an inventory of the relevant monitoring programmes and their data sources in Europe.  The gaps in and between them will be analysed, as well as the impact of these gaps for modelling.  Data flows from the data sources can be gradually automated.  Automation and integration has been already achieved for occurrence data through the efforts of GBIF.  Darwin Core standardization process has been instrumental in this, but for production of the EBVs, we need extension of Darwin Core to ecological monitoring data.  Such efforts are underway through LTER-Europe, vegetation survey programmes, and EU BON, which is currently making a review of the relevant standards. This will enable then closer integration of occurrence and biological survey data, which is a necessity for production of the EBVs automatically.

Another area where EU BON is working on is creating a unified platform for data sharing for the multitude of biodiversity monitoring programmes in Europe.  Lack of such platform is a source of unnecessary heterogeneity of biodiversity data, which must be tackled.  In doing that, EU BON will be building on existing solutions from other parts of the world.  In particular, solutions from the DataONE network in USA will be in focus, when EU BON is putting together a new generation of data sharing tools.  These tools must be capable of sharing in standard form not only primary occurrence data, but also biological survey data, and ecological measurement data.