Ward 8 voters on Tuesday sent incumbent Trayon White back to the D.C. Council for a third term, even as the embattled lawmaker faces a federal bribery case that clouds his political future.

Last season, Maryland beat Indiana so bad that the Hoosiers fired their offensive coordinator less than 24 hours later. How much things can change in just one year, as Indiana is at 4-0 in 2024 as they await the Terrapins on Saturday.

McLaren driver Lando Norris will start Sunday's Brazilian Grand Prix from pole with Formula One championship leader Max Verstappen in 16th after struggling in his Red Bull during a rain-affected qualifying session that was marred by five crashes.

Formula 1 drivers have criticized the president of the sport's governing body, the FIA, and asked to be treated like adults in an escalating row over swearing in news conferences.

The numbers are trickling in, and between the presidential elections of 2020 and 2024, President-elect Donald Trump saw dramatic increases in support at the ballot boxes from Hispanics, youth and Black people -- traditionally all voters who stick with Democrats. This has the Democrat Party trembling in its big black boots.

Last week, a majority of Americans voted for common sense. It was a repudiation of the outrageous - a call for the restoration of policies that serve families not the special interests of politicians.

Latinos left the Democratic party in a mass exodus last week, costing Kamala Harris the presidency.

A doctor accused of criticizing the war in Ukraine in front of a patient was convicted Tuesday of spreading false information about the Russian military and sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison, part of an unrelenting Kremlin crackdown on dissent.

The people who claim they want to "save democracy" have a funny reaction when things don't go their way.

Starting in the Obama administration and continuing through Vice President Kamala Harris' run for president, the Democrats have pledged to bring the American people back together.

Spencer Shrader is next up in the New York Jets' kicking shuffle.

Preston Mattingly, a son of former star first baseman and manager Don Mattingly, was promoted to general manager of the Philadelphia Phillies on Friday under president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' Infowars broadcasts could end next week as he faces a court-ordered auction of his company's assets to help pay the more than $1 billion defamation judgment he owes families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

The Vatican and Microsoft on Monday unveiled a digital twin of St. Peter's Basilica that uses artificial intelligence to explore one of the world's most important monument's while helping the Holy See manage visitor flows and identify conservation problems.

Denver Nuggets power forward Aaron Gordon is expected to miss multiple weeks with a strained right calf, two people familiar with the injury told The Associated Press.

Utah Jazz forward Taylor Hendricks underwent successful surgery on Wednesday to repair a fractured right fibula and dislocated ankle.

Joel Embiid is expected to play this week for the Philadelphia 76ers - barring another setback, and there is always that chance with the 7-footer - after he won Olympic gold, signed a contract extension, slogged through a knee injury, was the root of two NBA investigations, scuffled with a columnist and was hit with a technical foul for waving a towel from the bench.

The World Health Organization said mpox cases in the region of Congo where a new and more infectious variant was first detected appear to be "plateauing," even as the virus continues to increase in other regions of the country, as well as in Burundi and Uganda.

The Justice Department is suing to block UnitedHealth Group's $3.3 billion purchase of Amedisys, citing concerns the combination would hinder access to home health and hospice services in the U.S.

Declaring the U.S. the "greatest sports nation in the history of the world," President Joe Biden welcomed U.S. Olympians and Paralympians at the White House on Monday to recognize their achievement in this summer's Games in Paris.

The president of the suspended Russian Olympic Committee said Tuesday he plans to step down after six years in charge.

The Canadian Soccer Association says an independent review confirmed the Paris Olympics drone-spying scandal was not an isolated misstep.

The Brazilian initiative PPBio (The Program for Research on Biodiversity) launches a new book based on over a decade of experience in implementing the biodiversity monitoring system RAPELD in the Brazilian Amazon. Richly illustrated and written in simple language, the book "Biodiversity and Integrated Environmental Monitoring" addresses the issues that led to the system development, covering topics such as the spatial organization and representation of biological diversity, environmental monitoring, and data management.

Monitoring of biodiversity is not merely an academic endeavor. Although scientific aspects such as representation of biodiversity and biodiversity data integration, management and preservation are of a great importance, it is also essential to think about the political context in which decisions will be made and how to incorporate political stakeholders and decision makers.

"As this important book makes clear questions about biodiversity are far from purely scientific. Biodiversity matters. Our needs to assess it embed in a complex of questions posed by managers, policy makers and those who live in or otherwise benefit from biodiversity.",  explains Dr Stuart L. Pimm in the preface of the book. "So how do we ensure that data collected now will be useful for purposes we cannot yet imagine at some unexpected time in the future? Or provide comparison to some other place that we might survey some day?"

Those and many more questions regarding biodiversity data management and policy involvement are discussed in the new book "Biodiversity and Integrated Environmental Monitoring".

The FP7 CLIMSAVE project ("Climate Change Integrated Assessment Methodology for Cross-Sectoral Adaptation and Vulnerability in Europe") finished at the end of 2013. The project developed the CLIMSAVE Integrated Assessment Platform which is a unique user-friendly, interactive web-based tool that enables stakeholders to interactively explore the complex multi-sectoral issues surrounding impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to climate and socio-economic change within the agriculture, forest, biodiversity, coast, water and urban sectors.  Two versions of the tool have been developed: one for Europe and one for Scotland.

Hoffmann A, Penner J, Vohland K, Cramer W, Doubleday R, Henle K, Kõljalg U, Kühn I, Kunin WE, Negro JJ, Penev L, Rodríguez C, Saarenmaa H, Schmeller DS, Stoev P, Sutherland WJ, Tuama1 EO, Wetzel F, Häuser CL (2014) Improved access to integrated biodiversity data for science, practice, and policy - the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON). Nature Conservation 6: 49–65. doi: 10.3897/natureconservation.6.6498

The "Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network" EU BON General Meeting took place between 30 March - 3 April 2014 in Heraklion on Crete, to present major project results and set objectives for the future. The meeting was preceeded by a review paper recently published in the open access journal Nature Conservation, to point out EU BON researchh interests and objectives for the future of biodiversity protection.

This is a group photo of the participants in the recent EU BON General Meeting in Crete, Greece.

The 2014 General Meeting brought together keynote speakers Jörg Freyhof (GEO BON, Executive Director), Marc Paganini (European Space Agency), Jerry Harrison (UNEP-WCMC) with the entire EU BON consortium to discuss collaborations between the project and other important initiatives in the areas of earth observation, particularly in remote sensing and in situ approaches to biodiversity data collection, as well as in the use and analysis of biodiversity data for forecasting and scenario building, and environmental policy.

"The high potential for satellite Earth Observations to support biodiversity monitoring is growing but is yet to be fully realised. The recent efforts of GEO BON, supported by the GEO Plenary and the CBD Conference of the Parties, to define a set of minimum essential observational requirements to monitor biodiversity trends will give considerable impetus for space agencies and for the remote sensing community to focus their work on a small set of well defined earth observations products that will serve the needs of the biodiversity community at large. In that context ESA is firmly engaged in supporting the development of these emerging Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs). EU BON together with ESA can be pioneers in the early development and demonstration." comments Marc Paganini, European Space Agency, on the future collaboration between the two initiatives.

The world's biodiversity is in an ongoing dramatic decline that despite conservation efforts remains unprecedented in its speed and predicted effects on global ecosystem functioning and services. The lack of available integrated biodiversity information for decisions in sectors other than nature conservation has been recognized as a main obstacle and the need to provide readily accessible data to support political decisions has been integrated into the CBD's "Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020" and the Aichi targets. The recently published EU BON review paper points out how the project will use its potential to improve the interaction between citizens, science and policy for a better future of biodiversity protection.

EU BON aims to enable decision makers at various levels to make use of integrated and relevant biodiversity information adapted to their specific requirements and scales. Disparate and unconnected databases and online information sources will be integrated to allow improved monitoring and evaluation of biodiversity and measures planned or taken at different spatial and temporal scales. This requires strong efforts not only with regard to technical harmonization between databases, models, and visualization tools, but also to improve the dialogue between scientific, political, and social networks, spanning across several scientific disciplines as well as a variety of civil science organizations and stakeholder groups.

The project is focusing mainly on the European continent but contributes at the same time to the globally oriented Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), which itself contributes to the Group of Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). EU BON will build on existing information infrastructures such as GBIF, LifeWatch and national biodiversity data centres in Europe, and will integrate relevant biodiversity data from on-ground observations to remote sensing information, covering terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats.

Original Source:

Hoffmann A, Penner J, Vohland K, Cramer W, Doubleday R, Henle K, Kõljalg U, Kühn I, Kunin WE, Negro JJ, Penev L, Rodríguez C, Saarenmaa H, Schmeller DS, Stoev P, Sutherland WJ, Ó Tuama É, Wetzel FT, Häuser CL (2014) Improved access to integrated biodiversity data for science, practice, and policy - the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON). Nature Conservation 6: 49–65. doi: 10.3897/natureconservation.6.6498

Temperature is a main driver for most ecological processes, and temperature time series provide key environmental indicators for various applications and research fields. High spatial and temporal resolutions are crucial for detailed analyses in various fields of research. A disadvantage of temperature data obtained by satellites is the occurrence of gaps that must be reconstructed. Here, we present a new method to reconstruct high-resolution land surface temperature (LST) time series at the continental scale gaining 250-m spatial resolution and four daily values per pixel. Our method constitutes a unique new combination of weighted temporal averaging with statistical modeling and spatial interpolation. This newly developed reconstruction method has been applied to greater Europe, resulting in complete daily coverage for eleven years. To our knowledge, this new reconstructed LST time series exceeds the level of detail of comparable reconstructed LST datasets by several orders of magnitude. Studies on emerging diseases, parasite risk assessment and temperature anomalies can now be performed on the continental scale, maintaining high spatial and temporal detail. We illustrate a series of applications in this paper. Our dataset is available online for download as time aggregated derivatives for direct usage in GIS-based applications (Reconstructed MODIS Land Surface Temperature Dataset - http://gis.cri.fmach.it/eurolst/).

Source: Metz M, Rocchini D, Neteler M. (2014) Surface Temperatures at the Continental Scale: Tracking Changes with Remote Sensing at Unprecedented Detail.Remote Sensing 6(5): 3822-3840. doi: 10.3390/rs6053822

To read more about the courses and to register, visit the official DEST webpage: http://www.taxonomytraining.eu/content/modern-taxonomy-course-programme-2013-2014

EU BON is happy to announce that Memoranda of Understanding have been signed with four new associated partners. The EU BON family is now joined by DataOne (Observation Network for Earth), USA; Fondation pour la Recherche sur la Biodiversité (FRB) / ECOSCOPE, France; Atlas Florae Europaeae (AFE), Finland; and the Natural Environment Centre / SYKE (Finnish Environment Institute), Finland. Welcome to all!

DataOne (Observation Network for Earth)

Natural Environment Centre / SYKE (Finnish Environment Institute)

The Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) promotes the conservation of biodiversity by various measures, e.g. by assessments of the conservation status of species and natural habitats or by research on methods of management and restoration of habitats. An important field of research is the significance of ecosystem services and their interactions with biodiversity. SYKE's tasks also include finding solutions to problems with invasive species, assessment of the environmental impacts of genetically modified organisms and permits for international trade in endangered species.

EU BON is pleased to welcome a new associated partner Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) Europe to its family!

Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) is an essential component of world-wide efforts to better understand ecosystems. This comprises their structure, functions, and long-term response to environmental, societal and economic drivers. LTER contributes to the knowledge base informing policy and to the development of management options in response to the Grand Challenges under Global Change.

From the beginning (around 2003) the design of LTER-Europe has focussed on the integration of natural sciences and ecosystem research approaches, including the human dimension. LTER-Europe was heavily involved in conceptualizing socio-ecological research (LTSER). As well as LTER Sites, LTER-Europe features LTSER Platforms, acting as test infrastructures for a new generation of ecosystem research across European environmental and socio-economic gradients.

EU BON is happy to announce a new addition to our growing family of associated partners. In April 2015, the project has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the German Federation for Biological Data (GFBio).

GFBio is a project that brings together national key players providing environmentally related biological data and services to develop the ‘German Federation for Biological Data' . The overall goal is to provide a sustainable, service oriented, national data infrastructure facilitating data sharing and stimulating data intensive science in the fields of biological and environmental research. 

The federation will build on proven data archiving infrastructures and workflows such as those of PANGAEA for environmental data and the resources of Germany's major natural history collection data repositories. The new infrastructure will improve and integrate these existing components within a common technological and organizational framework.

Our family of Associated Partners has grown with three new members that joined us this month. EU BON has signed MoUs with the GLOBal Infrastructures for Supporting Biodiversity research (GLOBIS-B), the Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources of the National Research Council of Italy (IGG-CNR) and ECOPOTENTIAL: Improving Future Ecosystem Benefits through Earth Observations, The hand over took place during the 9th GEO European Projects' Workshop in Copenhagen (15 – 16 June 2015).

   
Left: EU BON coordinator Christoph Hauser and Anke Hoffmann handing over the MoUs to our partners from IGG-CNR and ECOPOTENIAL  Antonello Provenzale, Carl Beierkuhnlein and Palma Blonda; Right: Handing over the MoU to Daniel Kissling - scientfic coordinator of GLOBIS-B; Credits: Anke Hoffmann
 

The GLOBIS-B project is a new H2020 project aiming to bring together biodiversity scientists with research infrastructure operators and legal interoperability experts to address the research needs and infrastructure services required to calculate Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV) at a global scale.

ECOPOTENTIAL makes significant progress beyond the state-of-the-art and creates a unified framework for ecosystem studies and management of protected areas (PA). ECOPOTENTIAL focuses on internationally recognized PAs in Europe and beyond in a wide range of biogeographic regions, and it includes UNESCO, Natura2000 and LTER sites and Large Marine Ecosystems. Best use of Earth Observation (EO) and monitoring data is enabled by new EO open-access ecosystem data services (ECOPERNICUS). 

IGG-CNR conducts studies based on mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, geodynamics and geophysics, aimed at understanding the processes occurring both in the interior and at the surface of the Earth, and providing the fundamental knowledge for the applications (technological use of geomaterials, mitigation of the natural risks and correct management of the Earth resources for a sustainable development).

The 9th GEO European Projects Workshop took place on 15 and 16 June 2015, in Copenhagen, Denmark. A special session dedicated to biodiversity and ecosystems was held as a part of the meeting, where EU BON and other topic relevant projects were presented.

The session was started by Gary Geller with an introduction and overview. Particularly the importance of the long-term sustainability of the projects and the linkages to the overall aims of GEO were stressed, as well as the opportunity of the session to find further synergies among the GEO-related projects.

Participants at the biodiversity and ecosystems sessions during the 9th GEO European Projects Workshop; Credit: Florian Wetzel

EU BON was presented at the meeting by the project coordinator Christoph Häuser, who outlined the core elements for an integrated biodiversity information system. There is the challenge to provide a sound framework to overcome the fragmentation of available biodiversity information to obtain better information for political decision making.  EU BON with its 31 partners tackles this challenge and its main objective is to serve as a European contribution to GEO BON.

Other projects presented during the session were EU H2020 projects ECOPOTENTIAL and GLOBIS‑B, both already in the list of associated partners of EU BON.  The third H2020 project presented here was SWOS, a Satellite-based Wetland Observation Service.

One of the major outcomes of the session was the agreement that further follow-ups of the discussions are needed and that the projects should have further exchange among each other.

The report ‘EU 2010 biodiversity baseline - adapted to the MAES typology (2015)’ presents a revised overview of the EEA's EU 2010 biodiversity baseline report.

The revision is necessary because the typology of ecosystems used in the 2010 report has since been altered by a working group of biodiversity experts. The revised report provides recalculated information on the state and trends of the different biodiversity and ecosystem components, based on the new typology of ecosystems.

Find the report here.

What are the threats for biodiversity from global to local spatial scales? How might human beings succeed in fighting biodiversity loss?

EU BON partners, Annapaola Rizzoli and Duccio Rocchini give a TEDx talk on extreme biodiversity in space and time at 2200 metres in the Pale di San Martino on September 6, organized by TEDxTrento (soon will be also available with English subtitles).

Learn more here.

Biodiversity Observation Networks (BONs) have recently become a hot topic on the scene of natural sciences. But what is their role in advancing our knowledge of biodiversity and associated ecosystem services?

A new paper in the Biodiversity journal uses the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON) as an example, to explain how they can fill in gaps and address existing barriers in knowledge through implementing an integrated biodiversity information framework.

Biodiversity supports essential ecosystem services that are key to human well-being. The ongoing global biodiversity decline is a threat to humans, particularly in developing countries.

The Aichi biodiversity targets of the United Nations' Strategic Plan for Biodiversity set ambitious goals for protecting biodiversity from further decline, but gaps in knowledge still sit in the way of monitoring progress, hindering the assessment of the current status and future trends of biodiversity.

There is an urgent need for a paradigm shift with regards to how biodiversity data are collected, stored, shared and streamlined in order to tackle many sustainable development challenges ahead.

Solving issues of biodiversity knowledge gaps and data reuse are a main focus of the EU BON project and provide a European contribution to GEO (Group on Earth Observations) and the wider Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

The EU BON project aims at addressing the need for a shift towards an integrative biodiversity information framework, starting from collection to the final interpretation and packaging of data.

At the centre of the EU BON's efforts is promoting and adopting existing standards of good practice and integrating data within a single biodiversity portal in order to make it discoverable, accessible and digestible. The aim of the portal is to collect and standardize existing data sources, as well as to work towards translating and visualizing the collected raw data to show trends and prognoses useful to policy and society.

"Biodiversity data, information and knowledge are diverse, dispersed and disparate. It is hard for a non-specialist to make sense of raw data and often separate data sets and gaps in data prevent effective policy reporting. This is why progress towards the Aichi targets is often hard to calculate, and where BONs can play a central role by working towards standardization to achieve true interoperability of data sets." explains the lead author Dr. Florian T. Wetzel,Museum für Naturkunde (MfN), Berlin.

"For advancing with the biodiversity challenge and the Aichi Targets globally, regional BONs are needed, and this is where EU BON attempts to make a difference for Europe" adds Dr. Christoph L. Häuser, EU BON coordinator and Deputy Director General at MfN, Berlin.

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Original Source:

Florian T. Wetzel, Hannu Saarenmaa, Eugenie Regan, Corinne S. Martin, Patricia Mergen, Larissa Smirnova, Éamonn Ó Tuama, Francisco A. García Camacho, Anke Hoffmann, Katrin Vohland & Christoph L. Häuser (2015): The roles and contributions of Biodiversity Observation Networks (BONs) in better tracking progress to 2020 biodiversity targets: a European case study, Biodiversity, DOI: 10.1080/14888386.2015.1075902

We are happy to announce the latest member of our Associated Partners list - MUSE (Museo delle Scienze). 

MUSE, or the Science Museum is an auxiliary body of the Autonomous Province of Trento. Its task is to interpret nature, starting from the mountains, using the eyes, tools, and applications of scientific research, taking advantage of the challenges of the contemporary world, stimulating scientific curiosity and the pleasure of knowledge, giving value to science, innovation, and sustainability. 

We look forward to more institutions and projects joining our Associated Partners family.

From 9 to 11 November in Vienna, Austria the EU H2020 project Detecting changes in essential ecosystem and biodiversity properties – towards a Biosphere Atmosphere Change Index: BACI has organised a special workshop titled "Remote sensing applications related to land use/change" with the aim to facilitate co-design and co-production of knowledge with regard to innovative applications of remote sensing products.

EU BON project partner Duccio Rocchini was among the invited lecturers at the event. His talk titled "Like in a Rubik’s cube: Recomposing Biodiversity Information by Remote Sensing Data" introduced some experience from EU BON.

The overarching objective of BACI is to tap into the unrealized potential of existing and scheduled space-borne Earth observation data streams to detect changes in ecosystem functioning and services that have repercussions for essential biodiversity variables, land use potentials, and land-atmosphere interactions.

Europe's main zoological taxonomic index - Fauna Europaea presents its updated and modernized website at http://www.fauna-eu.org/. Scientific names and distributions of all living, currently known, multicellular, European land and freshwater animal species are available in one authoritative database.Fauna Europaea offers key information on:

• Taxonomical index for European land and freshwater species
• Information on the geographical distribution of many species
• Database on taxonomic experts in Europe
• References on literature of European species taxonomy and distribution
• A browsable taxon tree

Fauna Europaea provides access to its rich and quality-checked data via this public web portal that also links to other key biodiversity services. It is installed as a taxonomic backbone in a wide range of biodiversity services and actively contributes to biodiversity informatics innovations in various initiatives and EC programs. Fauna Europaea started in 2000 as an EC funded FP5 project and provides a unique taxonomic reference for many user-groups such as scientists, governments, industries, nature conservation communities and educational programs. Fauna Europaea was formally accepted as an INSPIRE standard for Europe, as part of the European Taxonomic Backbone established in PESI. Today it is hosted by the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin.

The Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) network has the aim to measure and compare plants, terrestrial mammals, ground-dwelling birds and climate using a standard methodology in a range of tropical forests, from relatively pristine places to those most affected by people. TEAM currently operates in sixteen tropical forest sites across Africa, Asia and Latin America supporting a network of scientists committed to standardized methods of data collection to quantify how plants and animals respond to pressures such as climate change and human encroachment.

A recent TEAM network paper published in PLOS Biology deals with the standartization of methods in assessing biodiversity trends in tropical forest protected areas.

Abstract: 

MUSE (Museo delle Scienze) joined EU BON's Associated Partners family in November 2015. We are now happy to present some more information about the museum and its initiative - the TEAM network.

MUSE is involved in biodiversity monitoring both locally in Trento Province, southeastern Alps, and globally. In particular, its Tropical Biodiversity Section runs a long-term biodiversity research and monitoring programme in the Udzungwa Mountains of Tanzania, an outstanding site for biological diversity and endemism. In 2009, this site became the first in Africa to enter the TEAM Network, a global programme for the standardized monitoring of biodiversity across the tropical moist forests.

 
Camera trap images from the MUSE site in Tanzania; Credit: MUSE – Science Museum 

Started in 2002 by Conservation International (CI), the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network (http://www.teamnetwork.org/ ) – grew to a coalition in 2009 that includes CI, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Wildlife Conservation Society. TEAM has collected and made publicly available more than 2.5 million photos from camera traps in tropical forests across the planet. With support from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, formerly Hewlett Packard Company, the TEAM Network is now able to analyze this global data set in near real-time and provide data-driven insights for improving natural resource management.

A major analysis of TEAM data was recently published in PloS Biology and caught vast media coverage as it represents the first standardized assessment of its kind for population trends of tropical forest mammals and terrestrial birds (http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002357). TEAM researchers monitored 244 species of ground-dwelling mammals and birds in 15 protected areas spanning tropical regions in Central and South America, Africa and Southeast Asia. They analyzed more than 2.5 million pictures captured by more than 1,000 camera traps and found that 17% of the animal populations they monitor increased in number while 22% remained constant and 22% decreased. The Wildlife Picture Index (WPI) Analytics System was developed in partnership with Hewlett Packard Company.

WPI is an index that summarizes the occupancy trends at community level and is an official indicator to monitor progresses against the Aichi Targets under the CBD (http://www.bipindicators.net/wildlifepictureindex).

In 2015, MUSE – Science Museum established in a Natural Park in the Brenta Dolomites (near Trento) the first site in Europe of systematic camera trapping that adopts the standardized protocol developed by the TEAM Network. This entails the sampling of 60 camera trap locations within an area of 200-250 km2 for 30 days each year, to derive data that are suitable to occupancy analysis and that can allow, as demonstrated by the recent paper in PLoS Biology, to assess population trends using state-of-the-art ecological methods.

MUSE’s scientists hope that this protocol may attract the interest of other partners within the EU BON family that may be keen to replicate this sampling at other sites in Europe.

ECSA – the European Citizen Science Association is the latest addition to our ever growing group of associated partners. The Memorandum of Understanding handover took place at the reception of the ECSA Conference at the Museum für Naturkunde on 19 May 2016.

ECSA is a network of Citizen Science initiatives, research institutes, universities, museums, other organisations and individuals from 20 EU countries, Switzerland, Israel and the US, who are working together with the mission to connect citizens and science through fostering active participation. ECSA is a registered non-profit association administered by a Secretariat hosted at the Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Research (MfN) in Berlin, Germany. 

See the full list of associated partners here.

Photo: Signing the MoU between ECSA Chair of Data, Tools and Technology Committee Dr. Jaume Piera and EU BON's Project manager Anke Hoffmann; Credit: Hwaja Götz

The 10th GEO European Projects Workshop that took place from 31 May - 2 June, in Berlin, was a success for EU BON in many ways. Among the significant achievements was signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the ConnectinGEO project to add this important initiative to our ever-growing list of associated partners.

The MoU handed over by EU BON coordinator Dr. Christoph Häuser to Dr. Joan Masó, coordinator of ConnectinGEO.

Handing over the MoU between Christoph Häuser, EU BON (left) and Joan Masó, ConnectinGEO (right); Credit: EU BON

ConnectinGEO is under the umbrella of GEOSS and the EU funding with the aim of linking existing coordinated Earth observation networks with the science and technology (S&T) communities, the industry sector and the GEOSS and Copernicus stakeholders. The goal is to facilitate a broader and more accessible knowledge base to support the needs of the GEO Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs) and their users. A broad range of subjects from climate, natural resources and raw materials, to the emerging UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be addressed.

The EU project EKLIPSE has joined our family of associated partners. The MoU was signed by Dr. Carsten Neßhöver, UFZ, on behalf of EKLIPSE project Coordinator Dr. Allan Watt (NERC-Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Edinburgh, UK) and Dr. Anke Hoffmann, on behalf of EU BON Coordinator Dr. Christoph Häuser, during the 2016 GEO BON Open Science Conference & All Hands Meeting in Leipzig, Germany.

Dr. Carsten Neßhöver and Dr. Anke Hoffmann at the handing of the MoU; Credit: EKLIPSE

EKLIPSE is a EU project that will set up a sustainable and innovative way of knowing, networking and learning about biodiversity and ecosystem services. EKLIPSE is an unusual project in several ways, particularly:

• The project is funded for four years to develop a sustainable mechanism  that will be in place for many years to come.

• The development of the support mechanism through the project is facilitated by project partners. Their role is to facilitate linkages between science, policy and society, through different actions, such as knowledge synthesis, identifying research priorities, and building the Network of Networks  that will support the other actions.

Are protected areas working when it comes to promoting biodivesity? A new study, published in Nature Communications, shows that local biodiversity is actually higher within, rather than outside protected areas.

Abstract: 

Protected areas are widely considered essential for biodiversity conservation. However, few global studies have demonstrated that protection benefits a broad range of species. Here, using a new global biodiversity database with unprecedented geographic and taxonomic coverage, we compare four biodiversity measures at sites sampled in multiple land uses inside and outside protected areas. Globally, species richness is 10.6% higher and abundance 14.5% higher in samples taken inside protected areas compared with samples taken outside, but neither rarefaction-based richness nor endemicity differ significantly. Importantly, we show that the positive effects of protection are mostly attributable to differences in land use between protected and unprotected sites. Nonetheless, even within some human-dominated land uses, species richness and abundance are higher in protected sites. Our results reinforce the global importance of protected areas but suggest that protection does not consistently benefit species with small ranges or increase the variety of ecological niches.

Original Source:

The original article is openly accessible at:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12306

A new EU BON derived paper, publsihed recently in the journal Remote Sensing, introduces eHabitat+, a habitat modelling service supporting the European Commission’s Digital Observatory for Protected Areas.

Abstract:

Protected areas (PAs) need to be assessed systematically according to biodiversity values and threats in order to support decision-making processes. For this, PAs can be characterized according to their species, ecosystems and threats, but such information is often difficult to access and usually not comparable across regions. There are currently over 200,000 PAs in the world, and assessing these systematically according to their ecological values remains a huge challenge. However, linking remote sensing with ecological modelling can help to overcome some limitations of conservation studies, such as the sampling bias of biodiversity inventories. The aim of this paper is to introduce eHabitat+, a habitat modelling service supporting the European Commission’s Digital Observatory for Protected Areas, and specifically to discuss a component that systematically stratifies PAs into different habitat functional types based on remote sensing data. eHabitat+ uses an optimized procedure of automatic image segmentation based on several environmental variables to identify the main biophysical gradients in each PA. This allows a systematic production of key indicators on PAs that can be compared globally. Results from a few case studies are illustrated to show the benefits and limitations of this open-source tool.

Original Source: 

Martínez-López, J.; Bertzky, B.; Bonet-García, F.J.; Bastin, L.; Dubois, G. Biophysical Characterization of Protected Areas Globally through Optimized Image Segmentation and Classification. Remote Sens. 2016, 8, 780. DOI: 0.3390/rs8090780

On the 1st of April, between 9:30 and 16:30, the BiodiversityKnowledge project organises a conference where outcomes will be presented and widely discussed with policy makers, science and other stakeholders at the European parliament in Brussels. As final result, BiodiversityKnowledge will present a stakeholder’s document outlining a recommended design on how such a Network of Knowledge could operate and produce added value.

EU BON will be also presented at the confernce as one of the knowledge providers of the Network of Knowledge.

To counteract biodiversity loss, efforts have considerably increased over the past years to strengthen the science-policy-society interface on biodiversity and ecosystem services. There is indeed an active landscape of projects, institutions, organisations and individuals in Europe involved in this interface, all aiming to improve the knowledge flow so that decisions at different policy levels (from European, to national and local levels) are based on the best available knowledge.

With the 7th Environmental Action Programme and the start of Horizon2020 and its focus on innovative solutions for society, the need for more concerted activities in this context become even more important.

In this context, BiodiversityKnowledge (FP7 KNEU), an EU-funded coordination action has been set up to help to map, mobilise and organise this landscape focusing on the knowledge holders’ community. For this the project has been developing and testing a prototype Network of Knowledge since 2011 with more than 300 active participations of representatives of the biodiversity and ecosystems services knowledge community. Stakeholders involved ranged from practitioners and researchers to policy-makers.

Please find the conference agenda attached below.