Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-29 09:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-09
Abstract
Supporting the Group on Earth Observations’ Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO-BON), the Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) is conceived as a set of distributed Critical Biodiversity Informatics Infrastructures (e.g., databases, web modeling services, broadcasting services) combined with interoperable web services to provide a large variety of end users including park managers, decision-makers and researchers with means to assess, monitor and possibly forecast the state and pressure of protected areas at the global scale.
DOPA has three main objectives:
1) Provide best available material (data, indicators, models) agreed on by contributing institutions, which can serve for establishing baselines for research & reporting;
2) Provide free web-based tools (databases, portals, modeling services) designed to generate the best available material but also for research purposes, decision making and capacity building activities for conservation;
3) Provide an interoperable and, as much as possible, open-source framework to allow institutions to get their own means to assess, monitor and forecast the state and pressure of protected areas and help these to further engage with the organizations hosting critical biodiversity informatics infrastructures.
Developed in collaboration by major institutions active in the field of biodiversity conservation (e.g., United Nations Environment Programme-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), BirdLife International, GBIF, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)), DOPA is designed to encourage a multi-scale cross-disciplinary approach to biodiversity without being exposed to excessive risks coming from mixing data from undocumented sources and/or with undocumented uncertainties.
The keynote will describe the DOPA project and highlight the work that is being done in relation to species informatics.