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JAKARTA: Indonesia's President Prabowo Subianto met with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday and offered his congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump by phone during an official visit to Washington.

“I will work very hard to strengthen Indonesian-United States relationship, and I would like to work towards this end that we have a strong cooperation,“ said Prabowo.

Prabowo, who has said he will pursue a non-aligned foreign policy, met with Biden in the Oval Office after posting a video of his call to Trump.

He arrived in Washington straight from China, where he had met with President Xi Jinping on his first overseas trip since taking office last month.

Washington sees Indonesia, the most populous country in Southeast Asia, as an important partner in a region where its rival Beijing has deep trade and investment ties. Indonesia is also the world's most populous Muslim-majority country.

While China is a key economic partner for Indonesia, Jakarta has also become a big buyer of U.S. arms, and it wants to sell the West more metals from its mines.

At the White House, Biden said the two leaders were discussing climate, conflict in the Middle East and the South China Sea.

Indonesia said on Monday it does not recognize China's claims over the vast majority of the South China Sea, despite signing a maritime development deal with Beijing.

“We continue to encourage Indonesia to work with their legal experts to make sure any agreement they make with (the People’s Republic of China) is in accordance with international law, especially the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea,“ said White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre at a press briefing.

TRUMP CALL

Prabowo's office said he made the call to Trump on Monday after arriving in Washington. It did not immediately respond when asked if he is scheduled to meet Trump in person.

“Wherever you are, I’m willing to fly to congratulate you personally, sir,“ Prabowo said in the video of the call posted on his social media accounts.

“We’ll do that, anytime you want,“ Trump replied.

Trump described his own election victory as amazing, and said it gave him a big mandate.

He also said the Indonesian president was “very respected,“ and praised his English, to which Prabowo, a former special forces commander, replied: “All my training is American, sir.”

Prabowo also met with several U.S. company representatives in Washington, his office said, including from Freeport McMoRan and energy company Chevron, and urged the companies to invest in Indonesia. (Reporting by Stanley Widianto in Jakarta and Jeff Mason in Washington; Writing by Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by John Mair, David Gregorio and Rosalba O'Brien)

PETALING JAYA: TM Global, the wholesale business arm of Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM), will expand its Klang Valley Data Centre (KVDC) in Cyberjaya and Iskandar Puteri Data Centre (IPDC) in Johor, addressing the growing demand for domestic and international data hosting services.

This is the next phase in TM’s strategic roadmap to grow its infrastructure ecosystem and position Malaysia as a preferred digital hub in Southeast Asia, aligning with its aspiration to become a digital powerhouse by 2030.

These expansions and TM’s partnership with Nxera to develop a hyperconnected, artificial intelligence-ready data centre, lays the foundation for digital services such as cloud, advanced analytics, AI and the Internet of Things.

Scheduled to begin commercial operations in 2025, the second phase of both KVDC and IPDC will deliver a combined IT load of about 20MW. The expansion will meet Uptime Institute’s Tier-III standards, and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Silver Rating for long-term sustainability, a globally recognised green building certification.

TM Global executive vice-president Khairul Liza Ibrahim said, “KVDC and IPDC are integral infrastructures in Malaysia’s digital ecosystem, serving as international gateways and interconnected points to support 5G networks. This second phase of our data centre expansion will feature sustainable designs, boosting our capacity to support hyperscalers,

OTT players, cloud and next generation AI providers, as well as enterprises.”

TM Global’s data centres are complemented by seven regional Edge Facilities located throughout the country. These support high-performance computing and co-location services to bring content closer to end-users with minimal latency.

“We have enhanced our data hosting services with a recent acquisition of the Facilities-Based Operator licence in Singapore, allowing us to provide seamless, secure data centre-to-data centre connectivity through our extensive domestic fibre optics network and international submarine cable systems. This enables us to meet the growing connectivity demands across the region, linking data centres from Thailand to Malaysia, Singapore, and Batam in Indonesia,” Khairul Liza said.

TM Global offers a comprehensive suite of platform-based services, including multi-edge computing and content delivery, to elevate data hosting solutions. These services are tailored to optimise performance and efficiency, ensuring a robust and reliable data-driven network for customers. Leveraging its extensive network infrastructure, TM Global equips carriers, enterprises, hyperscalers, over-the-top services, and next-generation AI application providers with the tools necessary to drive innovation and seamless digital integration.

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Spanish FM Jose Manuel Albares will host the meeting with EU officials and Arab-Islamic Contact Group for Gaza

In post # 2 of the VANS "The Circle" series, it's our turn now. In our "Meet The Teams" video, Daniel Fuhrmann introduces the kunstform BMX Shop Stuttgart and the team of riders that will take part in the VANS video contest .

Have fun with the video, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

Related links:

• all products of VANS
• all VANS "The Circle" videos on Youtube

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The first meeting of Work Package 5 (EU BON testing and validation of concepts, tools, and services) was held between 2^nd and 4^th April, 2013 in the Doñana Biological Station, in Spain. 23 people from 10 different institutions (7 of the EU BON consortium) worked towards building a draft on Principles and Guidelines for establishing and operating EU BON test sites.

During the meeting the members agreed on starting documenting each of the sites, using a common format to be decided in May on the Informatics Task Force meeting of WP2 (Data integration and interoperability) in Norway. A data inventory will also be built in each of the sites, adding monitoring protocols in stepwise fashion.

In addition the meeting served to get a better view of the variety of Ecosystems in Doñana as well as the monitoring protocols that are being conducted in this area. 

In 2013, the University of Potsdam will host the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The meeting (www.gfoe-2013.de) will take place from September 9 to 13, 2013 in Potsdam, Germany.

The guiding theme of the 43rd Annual Meeting is "Building bridges in ecology - linking systems, scales and disciplines".
Along the lines of this guiding theme, we will stimulate scientific discussions about all aspects in basic and applied ecological research contributing to better connect.

A joint EU BON WP3-WP4 meeting took place on 25-27 November 2013 in Solsona, Spain. The main aim of the meeting was to officially kick off WP3 and provide forum for discussion of the planned work. The two work packages were presented with their main aims, scope and objectives. The place of the two work packages in the broader framework of EU BON, and the cross-links between the two, were also discussed.

In the following interview Hannu Saarenmaa and Klaus Henle share insights from the meeting:

1) WP3 ‘Improving tools and methods for data analysis and interface’ and WP 4 ‘Link environment to biodiversity: analyses of patterns, processes and trends’ are two of the core work packages in EU BON that are expected to accumulate a lot of genuine data and develop new tools for data analysis and interface. Can you explain in short what will your main activities involve?

HS: I can contribute to the project and these WPs a large-scale modelling technology from the BioVeL project that can process hundreds of species. This would be an engine to compute the first real Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV).

KH: Our main activities will involve an analysis how available effort is best allocated in time and space to optimize results from monitoring. We will further assess how different sources of uncertainty influence conclusions derived from the analysis of monitroing data

2) What were the main results of the meeting in terms of the planned work and WP management?

HS: It was proposed to set up an EBV Task Force across the EU BON project.  If we can do that, it would really give a thrust for the project. If we could pick up the Database of Monitoring Schemes from the EUMON project, as discussed, that would give us access to some large datasets.

KH: One main result was the identification of the concrete responsibilities (e.g. data provision, data analysis for terrestrial, freshwater and marine biodiversity) within the workpackage and to identify explicitly links to other workpackages.

3) What novelty will the work in these two work packages bring and what will the major results be?

HS: If they can create a new Ecological Niche Modelling algorithm that can also deal with spatial patterns, that would be interesting.  Such a model actually exists in MigClim, but it is not yet widely used.

KH: We will get recommendations how monitoring can be optimized and a more comprehensive understanding of changes in biodiversity and their underlying causes

4) What are the immediate planned activities and when can the first results be expected?

KH: The most immediate planned activities it the screening of potentially available data needed for the analysis

5) How will the WP3/4 interact with GEO BON?

HS: The proposed EBV Task Force would need to interface very closely with GEO BON.

KH: We are engaged directly with key members of GEO-BON; e.g. we have regular meetings with Henrique Perreira.

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

A second WP4 (Link environment to biodiversity: analyses of patterns, processes and trends) meeting was held on 8 & 9 December 2014 in Brussels, to discuss progress towards objectives and set plans for future development.

Hot topics during the meeting were: GBIF data: who will use them, and how; development and use of methodology; collaboration between WP4 and the relevant WP3 (Improving tools and methods for data analysis and interface) and WP5 (EU BON testing and validation of concepts, tools, and services); as well ways to translate WP4 results for the use of policy and practice.

Image: Participants at the meeting;  Credit: Dirk Schmeller

A new policy brief featured a recent issue of Science for Environment Policy highlights a new study suggesting that the Aichi biodiversity targets, set by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, are unlikely to be achieved by 2020— despite some progress towards halting the global loss of biodiversity. The authors of the study call for policy responses to be strengthened if the ongoing loss of nature is to be stopped.

The loss of biodiversity affects the healthy functioning of ecosystems and the benefits they provide to people. The ongoing loss of the world’s natural diversity, which underpins all life, prompted Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in 2002 to pledge reductions in the global decline in biodiversity by 2010.

The 2010 targets set by the CBD were missed. Consequently, a new set of goals to curb the loss of species and ecosystem services, supported by the 20 Aichi targets, were adopted by 193 nations in 2010. The Aichi targets, to be achieved by 2020, are part of the global Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020.

A global panel of 51 experts, drawn from a wide range of institutions, has recently assessed mid-term progress towards meeting these targets. They based their assessment on an analysis of 55 indicators (for example, extent of wetlands) selected from 163 potential indicators, which are key measures of the world’s biodiversity. They built statistical models for each indicator, based on their status in 2010 and data trends and then projected changes to the indicators by 2020. The value for each indicator in 2010 was then compared with the projected value in 2020 to assess progression towards the 2020 Aichi targets.

Read more in the original SEP policy brief. 

Original Study: 

Tittensor, D.P., Walpole, M., Hill, S.L.L. et al. (2014) A mid-term analysis of progress toward international biodiversity targets. Science 346 (6206): 241- 244. DOI:10.1126/science.1257 484

A team representing the EU BON project travelled to the Joint Research Centre (Ispra, Italy) on 23-24 April 2015 to meet with representatives of various JRC Units dealing with biodiversity.

Working in close collaboration with policy Directorate-General, the JRC’s mission is to provide EU policies with independent, evidence-based scientific and technical support, throughout the whole policy cycle. Gregoire Dubois (JRC), who seats the Advisory board of the EU BON project, chaired the two-day meeting intended to establish concrete links between EU BON and JRC. 

The objectives of the meeting were hence to become familiar with JRC’s biodiversity work, present the EU BON project to JRC, and above all identify overlapping interests, so as to develop cooperation between the EU BON project and JRC. Stimulated by a number of presentations from both sides, long discussions took place, mainly centred around how can JRC and EU BON work together to ensure the long-term presence of EU BON and its products.

The annual EU BON General Meeting was successfully held from 1 to 4 June 2015 at the Clare College Conferencing, Cambridge, United Kingdom. 

The meeting was attended by a total of 85 participants with various organizational background and relation to EU BON. Among these were almost all EU BON alongside representatives of eight associate partners and many guests.

Participants at the EU BON General Meeting, 2015; Credit:  Dirk Schmeller

One of the highlights of the meeting was its very start with three inspiring keynote speakers. 

Among these, Bill Sutherland from the University of Cambridge started off to give an interesting speech about the progress and future plans on combining Biodiversity science and policy. Second was Gary Geller from the GEO secretariat who talked about GEO, GEOSS and GEO BON, its vision and goals. 
Later on, Johannes Peterseil from LTER-Europe shared some interesting thoughts about linking ecosystem research and earth observation through the cooperation between LTER-Europe and EU BON. 

During the meeting other relevant projects were also introduced to all participants. These were DataOne and Species 2000/Catalogue of Life and two new EU projects Ecopotential and Globis-B. 

The General Meeting included six thematic sessions on highly relevant EU BON topics, followed by many cross-task modules which led to better cooperation and communication between work packages and tasks. The exchange of experience gave new input to all work packages and set the milestones for the work ahead. 

Presentations from the meeting will be uploaded shortly.

PRESENTATIONS:

AGENDA - EU BON 3rd General Assembly

Keynote speakers: 

W.Sutherland - Biodiversity science and policy

G.Geller - GEO / GEOSS / GEOBON

J.Peterseil - Linking ecosystem research and earth observation

Other projects:

B.Wilson - DataONE

C.Flann - Species 2000 Catalogue of Life

C.Marangi - Ecopotential

W.Los - Globis-B

EU BON presentations:

C.Haeuser - EU BON core elements for an integrated biodiversity information system

U.Koljalg - Data mobilization strategy and show case

H.Saarenmaa - European biodiversity portal

Y.Gavish - Developing EU BON's site-specific portal

E.Regan - Stakeholder requirements

I.Geijzendorffer - Context of EU BON

Selection of pictures from the meeting:

From the 9th to 10th of December 2015 in Granada, Spain EU BON met representatives of LTER Europe. The aim of the meeting was to see where working programmes overlap and whether potential joint products can be identified. In addition the meeting was attended by GEO BON colleagues and included a vision of the upcoming GSEO initiative.

The first day was used to get to know each other and to present first ideas for joint developments. On the second day smaller groups concentrated on three possible joint working areas for the near future:

1) Extended test phase and application of WP3 tools and others

2) Technical/IT aspects, besides others, the use of DEIMS, PlutoF, datasets

3) Development of a manual/best practice for site-based long-term biodiversity observation and monitoring programme

Three working groups will be established and will start their work immediately.

The Final EU BON Meeting is scheduled to take place from 14-16 March 2017 at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and at the stunning backdrop of Botanic Garden in Meise.

EU BON invites all interested parties to mark the dates in their diaries and come to learn about the project’s results and outputs some of which are presented in this newsletter and some are yet to come.

More information is available on the Conference website: http://symposium.eubon.eu

Taking place from 14 to 16 March 2017, the Final EU BON Meeting served as a platform to present key outputs from the FP7 EU-funded project EU BON " Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network" which aims to advance biodiversity knowledge by building a European gateway for biodiversity information and by integrating and harmonising a wide range of biodiversity data.

Hosted by the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and at the stunning backdrop of Botanic Garden in Meise, EU BON partners met with stakeholders from research, European policy and citizen science to learn about the project's results and outputs and to discuss the future of a European Biodiversity Observation Network.

Credit: Donat Agosti

EU BON represents a joint effort of 31 partners from 15 European countries, Israel, the Philippines, Brazil and more than 30 associated partners. The project worked on the establishment and adoption of new data standards, the development of tools, the integration of advanced techniques for data analysis and the development of new approaches and strategies for future biodiversity monitoring and assessment.

Group Photo; Credit: D. Schmeller

At the Final Meeting participants had the opportunity to learn about and test products and services developed by project members during the period 2012-2017. These include a range of tools for data analysis, such as GeoCAT -- a tool that performs rapid geospatial analysis to ease the process of Red Listing taxa and AquaMaps -- a toolkit that models the distribution and makes predictions of where aquatic species occur naturally. Another group of tools -- the GBIF Integrated Toolkit and ARPHA-BioDiv facilitates the process of data sharing, integration and publishing.

Among the services presented, worthy of special mention is the EU BON Unified Taxonomic Information Service (UTIS) that allows the running of a federated search on multiple European taxonomic checklists by scientific name or vernacular name strings. These include the Pan-European Species directories Infrastructure (EU-Nomen), the European Nature Information System (EUNIS), the Catalogue of Life, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), the GBIF Checklist Bank and the Plazi Treatment Bank.

All these web applications are bound together under the umbrella of the EU BON European Biodiversity Portal, with highly relevant contributions to the aims of the Group on Earth Observation's Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON). Besides applied tools and software, the portal also serves as an online library for manuals, guidelines, factsheets, case studies, policy recommendations and other documents.

Learn more about these tools in our Final Brochure.

For live updates, follow EU BON on Twitter, or like us on Facebook. See the live Tweet feed from the meeting at #eubongm.

Pro-iBiosphere meeting 2 will be held from 11 to 14 February 2013 in Leiden. It will consist of three workshops on: e-platforms & e-tools for taxonomy Legacy literature – Semantic mark-up generation, data quality and user-participation infrastructure Prospective Literature – Toward Best Practices for data acquisition and curation using e-tools for taxonomy. More information can be found at: http://wiki.pro-ibiosphere.eu/wiki/Workshops_Leiden_February_2013

The European Union funded EU BON "Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network" project held its official Kick-off Meeting, taking place from 13 to 15 February 2013 in Berlin. An International Symposium "Nature and Governance – Biodiversity Data, Science, and the Policy Interface" preceded the kick-off (11-12 February 2013), to discuss the current landscape of monitoring and integration of biodiversity data, and stress on the relevance of EU BON on both European and global scales.

The EU BON project will be working towards advancement and development of the technological platform for GEO BON (Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network), which operates and systemizes biodiversity data on a global scale.

The German working group on vegetation databases is dedicated to building, maintaining, linking and analysing electronic archives of vegetation plot data and provides the national repository "VegetWeb", hosted by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN). The 12th workshop will be hosted by the new German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Leipzig, Germany. The central mission of iDiv is to promote theory-driven experiments and synthesis as well as data-driven theory. The concept of iDiv encompasses the detection of biodiversity, understanding its emergence, exploring its consequences for ecosystem functions and services, and developing strategies to safeguard biodiversity under global change. In this context, the combined synthesis of species abundance and distribution data together with information on species characteristics is seen as a high potential to advance our understanding of community assembly and plant diversity patterns. For this reason, important databases have already become part of iDiv's data research platforms, such as the German Vegetation Reference Database (GVRD), the plant trait databases TRY and BIOLFLOR and the Chorology Database Halle (CDH) on plant distribution data. In this workshop, we seek to explore the potentials of such databases for future research, with a specific focus on vegetation databases.
Further Information: http://www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/idiv_meeting_2013.html

The annual meeting of the European GBIF Nodes will be organised by GBIF Finland in Joensuu 6-8 March 2013.
The meeting is by invitation only, and available for staff of the GBIF Members in Europe. In addition, any EU-funded biodiversity research projects are welcome to attend as observers. 
Event web page: European GBIF Nodes Meeting 2013

In 2013, Doñana Biological Reserve will host the first meeting of WP5 EU BON testing and validation of concepts, tools, and services, focusing on the organization and planning of the forthcoming WP5 tasks. The meeting will take place in Palacio de Doñana, Huelva, Spain, from 2 to 4 April 2013.
The aim of the meeting is to bring together the experts in charge of the implementation of the WP5 tasks with the people responsible for the data architecture (WP2), the tools developers (WP3, 4) and the policy and dialogue responsible partners (WP6, 7, 8). The meeting aims at providing a precise definition of the responsibilities of the partners involved and discussing the organization of the work process.

Organizers: Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ & Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries - IGB
Place: Schloß Machern, Leipzig, Germany
Event web page: BioFresh Annual Meeting 2013

The OpenUp! meeting will be held in the new building of the National Museum in Prague  from April 24^th through 26^th, 2013. The second day (April 25^th) of the meeting is open for everyone, whereas the first and last days are for project participants and/or Steering Committee with officials from the EC only.

For more information please visit OpenUp! Meeting website - http://www.conferencepartners.cz/openup/index.htm

Pro-iBiosphere meeting 3 will be held from 20 to 24 May 2013 in Berlin. It will consist of three workshops on: 1) Coordination and routes for cooperation across organizations, projects and e-infrastructures 2) Measuring and constraining the costs of delivering services 3) Stakeholder requirements Second Management committee meeting and Advisory Board meetings will be held from 23-24 of May 2013. More information can be found at: http://wiki.pro-ibiosphere.eu/wiki/Workshops_Berlin,_May_2013