Italian authorities say a network of European art forgers who painted fake Warhols, Banksys and Picassos and then tried to sell them to unsuspecting buyers with the help of complicit auction houses has been dismantled.

The European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON), a European project on biodiversity data, was launched in December 2012. The Belgian Biodiversity Platform attended the symposium connected to the EU BON kick-off meeting in Berlin, Germany, on 11-12th February 2013.
The symposium entitled ‘Nature and Governance: Biodiversity Data, Science, and the Policy Interface’ highlighted the importance of biodiversity data for policy-making and research.  The complexity of producing and collating data on an international scale involving different methods and disciplines was well illustrated. The importance of the accessibility of biodiversity data within an integrated system was well demonstrated - the sum of all contributions will in the end enable monitoring, forecasting and policy-making.
EU BON will create a substantial part of the Group on Earth’s Observation’s Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) and will operate in support of biodiversity sciences and policy initiatives, such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
EU BON will build on existing components, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), LifeWatch infrastructures and national biodiversity data centers. As Belgian GBIF node, the Belgian Biodiversity Platform can provide an important support to the development of EU BON. The Belgian partners in the EU BON project are the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), and the National Botanic Garden of Belgium (Botanic Garden).
We will follow with interest the development in the EU BON project and will continue publishing data through GBIF. If you would like to support this initiative by having your data published on GBIF, please contact André Heughebaert (GBIF node manager), Dimitri Brosens or Kristina Articus (Biodiversity Experts).

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 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:

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: 

Recently published the GEO Handbook on Biodiversity Observation Networks presents a powerful resource that will provide valuable guidance to those committed to protecting, sustaining and preserving biodiversity across the planet. The practical experience which GEO BON has accumulated through its own actions, and through the efforts of its network partners, is a valuable resource to biodiversity information systems everywhere—from those just starting out in places where there has previously been little information, to large operations holding vii enormous amounts of data and wishing to know how better to use it. 

The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) is a voluntary international partnership of 102 governments and 92 participating organisations which share a vision of a future in which decisions and actions for the benefit of humankind are informed by coordinated, comprehensive and sustained Earth observations. GEO achieves its mission largely through self-organising communities focused on important Earth observation domains where decision-making will benefit from data that is shared broadly and openly. These communities form connected systems and networks, creating a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

During its first ten-year implementation period, 2005–2015, GEO identified biodiversity as a key ‘Societal Benefit Area’, resulting in the formation of the GEO Biodiversity Observation Network, GEO BON. As GEO moves into its second, ten-year implementation period, GEO BON is recognised as one of its strongest communities. It has helped to mobilise and coordinate the data and information needed for an effective response to the global threats faced by organisms, species and ecosystems. In collaboration with international treaty bodies such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, GEO BON has worked with national conservation agencies and non-governmental organisations at scales from regional to global. These efforts have revealed both the benefits of working together and the challenges of such a complex, but urgent task, not least of which is filling the remaining large gaps in data and information. 

The 4th EU BON roundtable took place on 17 November 2016 in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. Focused on the topic "Pathways to sustainability for EU BONs network of collaborators and technical infrastructure" the 35 participants discussed key questions with regards to the sustainability of the EU BON network and products, and shared their rich expertise, coming from different backgrounds ranging from science to policy.

The Roundtable brought together key European users and stakeholders, such as the European Environment Agency, UNEP GRID, and the GEO secretariat, including 27 different institutions and organisations, as well as European funded projects, infrastructures and networks that share the EU BON objectives of assembling biodiversity and ecosystem-related data and knowledge, such as Lifewatch, the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA), ECOPOTENTIAL, EKLIPSE and others.

Credit: Florian Wetzel

In her welcome address, Katrin Vohland, head of the Science Programme "Public Engagement with Science" and task lead for stakeholder engagement in EU BON explained that key lessons learnt are that:

1. stakeholder identification may yield unexpected results as in the case of EU BON where next to scientifically based organisation less practitioners but more citizen scientists seem to become stakeholder;

2. early and continuous connections are necessary, as for example to other EU initiatives and projects;

3. target group specific communication avoiding acronyms helps; and

4. the idea of teal organisations may support overcoming the limitations to  make networks economically sustainable - which are important but non-monetary assets.  

While former Roundtables addressed European policy, citizen science and the link to practitioners, this final EU BON Stakeholder event discussed the future and sustainability of the European biodiversity observation network and its products and tools.

Key questions for the participants were:

• How can the many different EU BON products be sustained and further developed after the project ends in May 2017?

• Which institutions will host the products in the future and what key products could be further developed by EU BON to meet European and global policy and research needs (e.g. for monitoring, reporting)?

• How can a European Biodiversity Network as a whole be sustained in order to serve as a central infrastructure and pool of expertise for generating biodiversity data and information on a European scale?

Ideas and plans were developed to secure the sustainability and long term re-use of EU BON products. More information on the outcomes of the meeting can be found below in the minutes and the presentations given during the day.

The report form the meeting was officially published in RIO Journal as a part of the dedicated EU BON outputs collection:

Wetzel F, Despot Belmonte K, Bingham H, Underwood E, Hoffmann A, Häuser C, Mikolajczyk P, Vohland K (2017) 4th European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON) Stakeholder Roundtable: Pathways to sustainability for EU BONs network of collaborators and technical infrastructure. Research Ideas and Outcomes 3: e11875. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.3.e11875

For further information please contact:

Dr. Katrin Vohland, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin,  Email: katrin.vohland@mfn-berlin.de

Dr. Florian Wetzel, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin,  Email: florian.wetzel@mfn-berlin.de

Presentations from the meeting: 

1. EU BON_RT_Katrin Vohland

2. Key achievements _ Christoph Häuser

3.1 EUBON Products_ Lauren Weatherdon

3.2 EU BON products and stakeholders_David Rose

4. EU BON and modelling tools_Bill Kunin

5. CS and EU BON tools_Bernat Claramunt

6. Businessplan_Sustainability_Dirk Schmeller

7 .EKLIPSE_EUBON_Carsten Nesshöfer-Dirk Schmeller

8. EEA - EEA_EU BON_Beate Werner

9. LifeWatch_Wouter Los_Christos Arvanitidis

10. Thoughts on Sustainability_Gary Geller

11. Biodiversity data, gaps and effors_Florian_Wetzel

12. EUBON-portal_Tim Robertson

After a successful networking session in Bangkok, Thailand the SUSTAIN EU-ASEAN project is organising another networking session for interested institutions and research projects in Brussels, Belgium. The event will take place on 28 March 2014 in Brussels, Belgium.This meeting is helpful if you

• want to get to know and network with fellow environment research projects (in the areas of climate change, resource efficiency and raw materials) with an ASEAN focus and/or relevant research results for the region
• want to identify and harness synergies with other projects (possible future cooperation; sharing of results and work, etc.)
• want to get in touch with the SUSTAIN team, communicating what kind of support your research efforts would benefit from

The SUSTAIN EU-ASEAN project generally has to offer

• networking and project twinning support: find and coordinate with similar projects!
• R&D services for results take-up: get support in approaching potential investors!
• communication and exposure support: make your results visible for potential users!

Get in touch here, if you are interested in joining the meeting. The pre-meeting agenda is available as an attachment below,

Read more about the event on the SUSTAIN EU-ASEAN website.

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.

The aim of the event is to inform and guide prospective applicants preparing project proposals, to facilitate sharing of ideas and experiences. It will give participants the chance to network and to find partners for their projects.

ICT-16 is part of Horizon 2020's ICT work programme 2014-2015

The activities supported under this topic contribute to the Big Data challenge by addressing the fundamental research problems related to the scalability and responsiveness of analytics capabilities (such as privacy-aware machine learning, language understanding, data mining and visualization). Special focus is on industry-validated, user-defined challenges like predictions, and rigorous processes for monitoring and measurement.

The current outline of the draft agenda can be found HERE

Registration

The registration to the event is now open and is on the first-come-first-serve basis. Click HERE to register. The closing date is 8 January 2015.

After the registration you will have the possibility to upload a presentation for the ICT-16 networking and partner finding session which will take place in the afternoon (max 3 slides for 3 minutes presentation).

In parallel to the ICT-16 networking session a workshop on multilingual data value chains will be organised. Therefore, you should pay attention to which part of the event you enrol.

Please note that bilateral meetings with EC Project Officers to discuss proposal ideas (proposal clinics) will *not* be possible, in compliance with H2020 regulations.

More information available here.

European Geosciences Union
General Assembly 2015
Vienna | Austria | 12 – 17 April 2015

http://www.egu2015.eu/home.html

One Workshop partiicluarly relevant for EU BON: ESSI2.17 Aggregation, consolidation and coordination of Earth observation networks. Harmonization and gaps

Convener: Joan Masó
Co-Convener: Ivette Serral

Abstract
We are investing in many efforts in creating pan-European or global EO thematic networks but are managed independently and coordination between them is limited. Europe is investing in the Sentinel constellation an at the same time, several initiatives are setting out to create, maintain and operationalize networks of in-situ sensors. These observation networks are usually conceived with a specific purpose in mind (e.g., air quality monitoring in the main cities or coastal water contamination), and they often lack a general coverage, are scattered irregularly in the territory, and sometimes are removed when the measurement campaign ends. There is a need for integrating systems and coordinating them more efficiently, explore synergies and make progress in harmonized and extend them.
Some initiatives aim to coordinate several themes into a single observation set. This is the case of the Critical Zone Exploration (the Earth’s outer layer from vegetation canopy to the soil and groundwater that sustains human life). The CZEN (Critical Zone Exploration Network; http://www.czen.org) is a network of field sites investigating processes within the Critical Zone.

This session is asking for presentations on the coordination between observation network examples and solutions to overcome technical and political barriers that help to reduce the cost and increase value by combining and sharing structures. Papers discussing gaps or redundancies in the current Earth observation networks are also welcome.

http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2015/session/18560

The conference covers scenarios and modelling applications in marine, freshwater and terrestrial systems, across all relevant disciplines of natural and social sciences. It is open to scientists and experts working in the field, policy makers and practioners. The conference focuses on: (i) Exploring recent advances in modelling human impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services, (ii) Addressing the use of scenarios and models for decision support, (iii) Mobilising observations of biodiversity and ecosystem services for model development and testing, (iv) Capacity building for developing scenarios and models and for their use in decision making, (v) Horizon scanning and addressing gaps in knowledge.

More information available on the conference website.

The 4th EU BON roundtable will take place on Thursday, 17 November 2016 at the premises of the Museum fuer Naturkunde in Berlin with the motto "Pathways to sustainability for EU BONs network of collaborators and technical infrastructure".  

One of the key questions will be how to achieve sustainability for the many different products of EU BON, such as tools, software, models and infrastructure after the project ends. It should be discussed how a European Biodiversity Observation Network and its essential components could be sustained after the project will end in May 2017, by which institutions or networks and how the products can be used in the best way for European policy and research needs.  

Anipo, a French-based network of musicians, has launched an initiative aimed at cracking down on stolen instruments. Anipo encourages musicians to install a chip on ... Read more

The post Musicians’ network aims to clamp down on instrument thefts appeared first on CMUSE.

Bayer’s EcoCommercial Building Network, dedicated to bringing together varied disciplines in the pursuit of high-performance buildings, has expanded its expertise in the public sector for governmental and institutional projects.

After experiencing an increase in crime, The University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine, Trinidad, home to more than 39,000 grad and undergrad students, was in the market for a professional grade CCTV surveillance system to improve the security of its students and assets.

Keeping video surveillance systems up and running can be challenging — in large part because not everything needed to keep the camera functioning properly is under the control of the security integrator.

Interface Systems announced WaBa Grill Franchise has chosen Interface Systems’ Restaurant Network-Technology-in-a-Box solution to transform its network and voice infrastructure in over 190 franchise locations.

Businesses and organizations leveraging LVT Units can access satellite connectivity for both primary connectivity and secondary connectivity.

Eagle Eye Networks, the global leader in cloud video surveillance, is previewing Eagle Eye Camera Direct Complete, as well as showcasing the newly enhanced Enterprise Edition and new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools for enterprise businesses at ISC West 2023.

The tools you need, and how to properly handle fiber optic and network cables.

New OberCloud ABI product simplifies IP camera hookup and provides integrators with a great RMR tool.

Vigitron, a provider of networking solutions for security applications, has established a library for security-based network applications.

Ascent Capital Group announced that its primary operating subsidiary, Monitronics International Inc., established a deal to acquire Security Networks for a total transaction price of $507.5 million.

Vienna, VA – The Network of Employers for Traffic Safety has developed a free online toolkit to help organizations strengthen their road safety programs.

This technology automates, streamlines  and manages on-site devices, delivering unparalleled security and ease-of-use for the security industry. The patent was issued on January 2, 2024.

As part of the arrangement, SS&Si will print Peak Alarm’s logo on hardware from manufacturers including Qolsys, Alarm.com and ProDataKey.

Network convergence has democratized the Pro A/V industry, allowing for increased accessibility and participation from non-traditional players with diverse skill sets.

The “Editor’s Choice” and more new products and solutions as described by manufacturers.

Using generative AI, video snapshot images are transformed into a searchable database, allowing users to find key operational issues by simply speaking commands.

Parks Associates data estimates that between 2022 and 2024, more than 250 million networked cameras, video doorbells, and smart speakers/smart displays will be sold in the U.S. 

This new offering provides commercial customers with affordable access to professional body camera services, which improve staff safety and accountability, trigger immediate response and provide valuable evidence, all while protecting assets and keeping communities safe.

The Eagle Eye Cloud VMS true cloud video surveillance platform is designed to safeguard businesses, while delivering cybersecurity assurance, business intelligence, flexibility and scalability. 

Ideal candidates are organizations already serving the security marketplace, including security consultants, investigators, and product vendors.

The integration brings the distinct advantages of cloud, including greatly simplified installation, robust end-to-end cybersecurity, centralized management of multiple locations, and AI-filtering to dramatically reduce false-positive activity to the monitoring center or command center professional.

This collaboration expands Comcast Smart Solutions’ existing video analytics expertise while giving clients more flexibility to choose the right smart video solution, according to the announcement.

In collaboration with Indiana based partner CK2 Technologies, Xtract One was able to integrate SmartGateway into decades-old buildings without compromising the visitor experience.

Through a combination of high-speed, high-bandwidth wireless and hardwired connectivity, the Core Network enables seamless communication between the many buildings within the sanctuary.

CP Kelco, a leader of nature-based ingredient solutions, launched a new global innovation center, adding to the company’s growing network of innovation and technical support facilities around the world. The Atlanta-based innovation center is designed as an open, collaborative space for scientists and customers alike to engage in ingredient research, problem-solving, development and pilot plant scale-up of food, beverage, home care, personal care and other consumer and industrial products.