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.

Butterfly monitoring at local, national, regional, and global levels is the topic of the first of the GEO BON Technical Series reports produced to provide stakeholders with practical guidance for biodiversity conservation.

The report is jointly produced by GEO BON, EU BON, UNEP-WCMC, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Dutch Butterfly Conservation, as a follow up of a joint workshop, which took place in December 2014, to catalyse the process for the development of global butterfly monitoring guidelines and the creation of a new specialist butterfly monitoring group.

The report titled "Guidelines for Standardised Global Butterfly Monitoring" provides a suite of standard field protocols that can measure butterfly population change over various spatial and temporal scales, and that can be applied in any part of the world.

The importance of butterfly monitoring programmes lies in the fact that they provide information about population trends and changes that can be then used as indicators of biodiversity and environmental change outside of the butterfly context.

The guidelines are intended for scheme coordinators, i.e. people wishing to establish butterfly monitoring in any part of the world. The guidelines explain how to set up butterfly monitoring that can provide consistent and comparable results between sites and between years, consistent with international standards.

The ambition behind this new publication is that butterfly populations around the world are well monitored, thereby providing vital information on how these insect populations and other parts of biodiversity are changing. This information is important for feeding into local, national, regional, and global decision-making to help reduce biodiversity loss as well as raising awareness of butterflies and biodiversity in general.

Original Source:

Van Swaay, C., Regan, E., Ling, M., Bozhinovska, E., Fernandez, M., Marini-Filho, O.J., Huertas, B., Phon, C.-K., Kőrösi, A., Meerman, J., Pe’er, G., Uehara-Prado, M., Sáfián, S., Sam, L., Shuey, J., Taron, D., Terblanche, R., and Underhill, L. (2015). Guidelines for Standardised Global Butterfly Monitoring. Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network, Leipzig, Germany. GEO BON Technical Series 1, 32pp.

A new special issue titled "Connecting the Dots: Integrating Biodiversity Observations to Better Track the CBD 2020 Targets" looks at Biodiversity Observatios and the ways that can be integrated into the CBD 2020 targers, for better results in biodiversity conservation.

The issue, where a number of GEO BON partners are authors, explores a wide variety of aspects of Biodiveristy Observations, including data management, integration of in-stiu data, the roles and contricutions of BONs, contextualization with the UN's Sustainable Developmen Goals, and many more.

For more information and to see what is included in the Special Issue, click here.

A new article published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering looks at how Aphia, the core platform that underpins the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS),  can Serve the taxonomic community and the field of biodiversity informatics.

Abstract

The Aphia platform is an infrastructure designed to capture taxonomic and related data and information, and includes an online editing environment. The latter allows easy access to experts so they can update the content of the database in a timely fashion. Aphia is the core platform that underpins the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and its more than 80 related global, regional and thematic species databases, but it also allows the storage of non-marine data. The content of Aphia can be consulted online, either by individual users or via machine-to-machine interactions. Aphia uses unique and stable identifiers for each available name in the database through the use of Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs). The system not only allows the storage of accepted and unaccepted names, but it also documents the relationships between names. This makes it a very powerful tool for taxonomic quality control, and also allows the linking of different pieces of information through scientific names, both within the Aphia platform and in relation to externally hosted databases. Through these LSIDs, Aphia has become an important player in the field of (marine) biodiversity informatics, allowing interactions between its own taxonomic data and e.g., biogeographic databases. Some applications in the field of biodiversity informatics encompass the coupling of species traits and taxonomy, as well as the creation of diverse, expert validated data products that can be used by policy makers, for example. Aphia also supplies (part of) its content to other data integrators and the infrastructure can be used to host orphan databases in danger of being lost.

Original Source: http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/3/4/1448/htm

A recently completed benchmark survey of common plants provides a comprehensive dataset of vascular plant diversity and abundance in South Northumberland and Durham, contributing an additional 35,000 observations to the 200,000 observations collected by local recorders since the turn of the millennium.

Apart from contributing an updated inventory of vascular plant diversity, the survey is intended to be used as a reference point with which to identify change in the countryside and study the drivers of biodiversity change in the North-east of England.

Changes in the abundance of rare species have little impact on other species, but change in the abundance of common species can have cascading effects on whole ecosystems. The new survey provides a solid foundation that can be used to qualify the abundance of common species and compare against previous and future studies.

The distribution of heather predicted from the common plant survey data. This is one of the region's most characteristic species and one that many other organisms rely upon for food and cover.

The survey was part of the North-East Common Plants Survey Project, conducted over four years and required volunteers to go to various places. Some surveyed post-industrial brown-field sites, while others walked for miles across bleak moorland to reach sites high in the hills. Although these moors are arguably wilder and natural, the industrial wastelands turn out to be far more biodiverse.

Botanical surveying continues in the region despite the end of the project. Volunteers continue to monitor rare plants in the region and are currently working towards the next atlas of Britain and Ireland, coordinated by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland.

This survey is also among the first one to make use of the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) functionality, jointly developed by EU BON and GBIF, that allows the easy export and exposure of datasets to maximize their discoverability and reuse. The survey was published in the Biodiversity Data Journal, providing easy and streamlined publication of GBIF data via a variety of newly introduced plugins.

Original Source:

Groom Q, Durkin J, O'Reilly J, Mclay A, Richards A, Angel J, Horsley A, Rogers M, Young G (2015) A benchmark survey of the common plants of South Northumberland and Durham, United Kingdom. Biodiversity Data Journal 3: e7318. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.3.e7318

A new paper "Combining internal and external motivations in multi-actor governance arrangements for biodiversity and ecosystem services" published in the journal Environmental Science & Policy looks at ways to motivate actions for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision. The paper is a result of the EU FP7 funded project BIOMOT.

Abstract: 

This paper analyses the possibility of building a mutually supportive dynamics between internally and externally motivated behaviour for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision. To this purpose a face to face survey amongst 169 key actors of 34 highly successful and prominent biodiversity arrangements in seven EU countries was conducted. The main finding of the paper is the feasibility of combining inherently intrinsically motivated behaviours (providing enjoyment, pleasure from experimentation and learning, aesthetic satisfaction) and internalized extrinsic motivations (related to the identification with the collective goals of conservation policy) through a common set of governance features. Successful initiatives that combine internal and external motivations share the following features: inclusive decision making processes, a broad monitoring by "peers" beyond the core staff of the initiatives, and a context that is supportive for the building of autonomous actor competences. These findings are in line with the psycho-sociological theory of motivation, which shows the importance of a psycho-social context leading to a subjective perception of autonomy and a sense of competence of the actors.

Original Source: 

Tom Dedeurwaerdere, Jeroen Admiraal, Almut Beringer, Flavia Bonaiuto, Lavinia Cicero, Paula Fernandez-Wulff, Janneke Hagens, Juha Hiedanpää, Paul Knights, Erica Molinario, Paolo Melindi-Ghidi, Florin Popa, Urban Šilc, Nathalie Soethe, Tiina Soininen, Jose Luis Vivero, Combining internal and external motivations in multi-actor governance arrangements for biodiversity and ecosystem services, Environmental Science & Policy, Volume 58, April 2016, Pages 1-10, ISSN 1462-9011, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2015.12.003

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: 

EU BON has signed memoranda of understanding with almost thirty institutions and projects from across Europe and outside to state its desire for collaboration and exchange of expertise. Among the early partners in this list is the LTER-Europe group, focussed on the integration of scientific research  and ecosystem research approaches, including the human dimension.

Dr. Mark Frenzel who took part in the EU BON Third Stakeholder roundtable in December 2015, gives an overview of his impressions from the meeting as well as his ideas on the co-work between LTER-Europe and EU BON.

Credit: Florian Wetzel

Q: The LTER-Europe network looks at conceptualizing Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) as an essential component of world-wide efforts to better understand ecosystems. How is the network planning to achieve this?

A: This is / will be achieved mainly by funded project work. Actually the H2020 eLTER project is the most important backbone, an ESFRI eLTER initiative is running too. In terms of content there are several challenges which need to be addressed: (1) Harmonisation in terms of what and how is being measured at LTER sites, (2) collection and representation of metadata about sites, actors and data sets within the web tool DEIMS, (3) open access of data and DOI registration of data sets, (4) considering the human component as a major driver for changes in ecosystems by including socio-economy and socio-ecology in the LTER approach.      
 

Q: How would EU BON and its planned European biodiversity portal be beneficial to LTER-Europe and its aims in the next years?

A: Biodiversity is not the only, but an important focus within LTER. It depends on the services and benefits connected with this portal and its long-term perspective. The most important added value I would see in an elaborated framework-based agreement on the set of  "essential biodiversity variables" which will be a compromise between importance and feasibility. This selection process should be well tuned with the relevant players in this field.
 

Q: The LTER-Europe network includes several hundreds of sites that are collecting large amounts of data  – how can this data be used for improving our knowledge of biodiversity, particularly for policy-relevant questions?

A: The big advantage (and potential) of LTER-Europe sites is the coverage in terms of geography and bioms, the general shortcoming is in the heterogeneous reasons why these sites have been set up (e.g. for monitoring air pollution) and that there is no targeted funding (in terms of a specific research question) for all sites.

Not all sites are dealing with biodiversity data. First, suitable sites need to be selected according to metadata in DEIMS (https://data.lter-europe.net/deims/). Second, data sets according to fitting topics have to be compiled (perhaps no easy task, as datasets up to now are not exhaustively documented). Site managers of representative sites (depending on the question to be addressed) could be motivated to create a common standardised data sets (needs external funding depending on the resources necessary for the task or at least a very attractive research question) responding to e.g. policy needs. Moreover, the long-term knowledge of site coordinators about the development and the important drivers of change at their sites (e.g. by assessing ecosystem services) comprises valuable meta information about the context of data sets.

Data obtained from the sites could potentially help with policy-relevant questions like status of endangered species or status of ecosystem service relevant system parameters which could be extracted from LTER sites.
 

Q: According to you what are the next three most urgent step in order to achieve better understanding of ecosystem services and their benefits for policy, economics and society?

A: (1) reliable data and suitable scale of data, (2) understanding the effect of scale on ecosystem services, (3) make use of large networks to approach this issue, bring the results down to a scale understandable for the layman.
 

About LTER-Europe:

Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) is an essential component of world-wide efforts to better understand ecosystems. 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.

• Assistant Programme Officer – Marine Digital Products (AD 916) Deadline: 5^th February 2016
• Assistant Programme Officer (AD 922) Deadline: 5^th February 2016

Are you in Eastern Europe and actively involved in monitoring and managing biodiversity data? Then the EU BON "Biodiversity data sharing and data publishing workshop" might just be the thing for you.

The event will take place on 22-23 March 2016 in Sofia, Bulgaria with focus on publishing of biodiversity data, in particular species occurrences, sample-based and citizen science data. The training will include a practical session during which participants will be assisted by experienced trainers from the EU BON project. To register and for more information, click here.

The sessions on data sharing will cover introductory overview of key concepts, demonstration and practical exercise using the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT). The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is the world's largest initiative for enabling free access to biodiversity data via internet.

Special attention will be paid to data paper publishing led by specialists from Pensoft Publishers - a company well known among biodiversity scientists worldwide for technologically cutting-edge open access journals, such as: Research Ideas and Outcomes, ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, Nature Conservation, and a strong advocate of data publishing. Registration of data in GEO registry system will be also addressed during the workshop.

The following topics will be covered (detailed program will follow):

• The data publishing landscape, gaps and mobilization efforts
• Demonstration and practical session on data publishing using the GBIF IPT: step-by-step demo will show in detail (and in practice) how to publish a dataset using IPT.
• The Data Publishing Toolkit at EU BON: Automated creation of data papers, data and text integrated publishing via the ARPHA Publishing Platform
• Citizen Science gateway and demo of PlutoF Citizen Science module
• GoldenGate Imagine tool and copyright issues
• Registration of data in the GEO Registry System

Context and background: 

Addressing global problems, such as biodiversity loss and impacts of climate change requires open access to data. This was concluded by world leaders at Johannesburg Summit in 2002 when they established the Group for Earth Observations (GEO). EU BON (Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network) seeks to enhance biodiversity data availability and integration, and is the European contribution to the GEO Biodiversity Observation Network.

All biodiversity databases need to be integrated in GEO. Therefore, EU BON undertakes capacity building of biodiversity communities (e.g. researchers, citizen scientists, non-governmental organisations) that are involved in collecting and disseminating biodiversity information, including monitoring initiatives.

To register and for more information, click here.

The Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at the University of Twente has recently launched an investment programme to strengthen its international academic fields. For 11 pioneering-multidisciplinairy projects a PhD-position is made available, three of them already are filled in. The Department of Natural Resources (NRS) specialises in advanced spatial and temporal analysis and technique development for the environment as well as sustainable agriculture.

Job Description: 

For more information visit the official job offer.

One of the main outputs of EU BON will be the establishment of an European Biodiversity Portal based on data collected and compiled from a variety of sources including earth observations but also observations and monitoring data from (local) sites. One of the main points of this portal is to serve as a substantial building block of a global biodiversity portal planned by the Group of Earth Observations project GEO BON.

But how will this portal be useful to stakeholders on a more local level - for example for people involved in questions connected to biodiversity across European regions? What will be the real benefits of it for biodiversity monitoring and conservation? Just a couple of weeks after the Third EU BON Stakeholder Round Table in Granada, Spain, Mr Clint Alibrandi from REDIAM (Environment and Water Agency in Andalusia) gives us his views on these questions.

Picture:  Excursion to Sierra Nevada.; Credit: Katrin Vohland

Q: REDIAM shares a mission with EU BON in its attempt to collect, standardize and distribute available biodiversity data. What will be the expected benefits and challenges in the process of making this type of datasets available for society and environmental policy?

A: Among the responsibilities of the Regional Environmental Government of Andalusia are promoting Social Environmental Awareness, Managing a vast, diverse and very complex territory, Control and Mitigate any threats posed to the fragile ecosystems present in our region as well as all the responsibilities derived from the management and planning of the existing natural resources.

Considering these facts, it is necessary to be able to account for the best environmental information available. Since the early 80’s the Regional Environmental Government of Andalusia has been working on its Environmental Information System with the purpose of generating, compiling, standardizing and analyzing Environmental Information covering topics such as Climate, Water, Air Quality and Biodiversity by means of ICTs. This the REDIAM. The name comes from the Spanish Acronym "REd De Información AMbiental de Andalucía" which means the Environmental Information Network of Andalusia. It serves as a Unified Regional Environmental Information Registry.

From this effort, the information obtained by the REDIAM is made publicly available to be then employed in Decision Making processes and Management Planning on behalf of the Administrations, for Dissemination and Awareness as well as for Research purposes.

As such, it is of vital importance for the REDIAM to be able to account for updated and verifiable Information and Data Sources and this is what we consider to be the most important benefit on behalf of EU BON, as it will offer the possibility to have a higher level reference covering a larger perspective, allowing stakeholders, be it either from a local, regional or national level, to consult or work with data, tools and have reference to relevant policies concerning Biodiversity on the European scale in order to be able to better transpose them to a more local context.

Yet the greatest challenge we believe that EU BON might come to face is the fact that the different contexts that exist over the whole European territory make it very difficult to tailor tools and information formats which can cover the different priorities or needs that exist in the diverse makeup of stakeholders that exist from a local, regional and national perspective. The same can most probably apply to the feedback, queries or requests made to EU BON on behalf of the stakeholder and user community. It is never easy to reach a common base level and from the regional perspective, REDIAM has faced the same type of situations.

Q: What type of stakeholders do you hope to engage through your network - who is using your data and for what purposes?

A: The stakeholders which are currently engaged with the REDIAM consist in Universities, Research Centres, Public Bodies, Local Administrations, Private Companies just to name a few examples. There are over 150 organizations which are partners of the REDIAM, they provide relevant Environmental Information to the REDIAM and are responsible for updating the information.

And as can be expected,the information provided is as diverse as the makeup of stakeholders that are part of the REDIAM, with the following formats being made available: Cartography, Satellites Images, Databases, Reports, Statistics, Applications, Management Plans and Programmes, Orthophotos, Indicators, Studies.

Additionally the REDIAM offers the user community different alternatives in order to access the previously indicated information. The REDIAM Channel is a web portal with a Catalogue and Information Search System, OGC Services, Query and Viewer tools, Downloader. The user community is able to access its information and services. This community consists in Citizens, Universities, Public Administrations and Companies from the Public and Private Sector.

Q: Where do you see the cross section between REDIAM’s work and EU BON - what are the products from EU BON and other European projects that would be helpful for the work that you are doing?

A: The REDIAM has great interest in the following issues and we believe that EU BON would be up to the task of providing solutions and/or guidelines on how to be able to proceed to solve them:

• The elaboration of a common tool for the description and localization of species throughout the European Territory. This can prove a very useful service for Environmental Impact Assessments by providing a more complete view on different species distribution on determined area.
• Defining a standardized list of species which contains the taxonomically correct name for each one of them. EU BON could serve as a base reference to set guidelines for standardizing the taxonomical classification of species.
• Support and guidance in defining specific biodiversity indicators as proposed by EUROSTAT, a methodological and assessment guide of some sort.

Q: In your opinion what are the three greatest benefits of a European level biodiversity portal?

A: 1) Offering an opportunity of Standardizing and Harmonizing Biodiversity related information. We all speak the same "language" when referring to Biodiversity, but it is necessary that we all be able to follow the same "rules" as well. This is the first and most important pillar we believe that a European level Biodiversity portal can bring into play.

2) It would allow for and facilitate a widespread exchange of information amongst stakeholders throughout the whole European Territory.

3) And finally, it would allow a common analysis on a European level which would provide a general assessment on how different efforts and policies are effective, value which is the real status of Biodiversity and/or specific species independently from the limit of administrative or country borders.

About REDIAM:

The Environmental Information Network REDIAM has onboard experts from the Regional Ministry of Environment in Andalusia and its Water and Environmental Agency. With a team expertise ranging from local to regional and European level and from technical know-how to regional and thematic assessment, the main aim of the network is to integrate all spatially-referenced biodiversity data produced in Andalusia. Raw data are used to generate knowledge and improve its distribution, making it accessible and comprehensible for the general public.

Recommendations from the FP7-funded EU project BESAFE

Biodiversity decline is a fact, but how can society be convinced of the benefits of biodiversity for human well being and of the necessity of further protective action? The FP7 funded EU project Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Arguments for our Future Environment (BESAFE) addressed this challenge to produce guidance that can help improve the way we use arguments for conservation and convincingly demonstrate the value of biodiversity to decision-makers.

Credit: Rob Bugter

Two key outputs of the project are the final brochure "How to Argue for Biodiversity Conservation More Effectively: Recommendations from the BESAFE project", including key conclusions from project publications and case studies, and an interactive online tool, which can lead stakeholders to the relevant information in a few mouse clicks.

Key recommendations of BESAFE featured in these resources are:

• The success of a more integrated approach depends on stakeholder engagement. A top-down policy framework that sets goals for the protection of particular sites and species is important, but it is not enough to prevent biodiversity loss. - -- An integrated approach, seeking to 'mainstream' biodiversity concerns across all policy sectors (e.g. agriculture, forestry, water, energy, transport and urban planning) is needed.
• Promote bottom-up initiatives at the local level. All stakeholders need to be actively involved in the decision-making process, which should facilitate building trust and working towards generally agreed and accepted solutions.
• Tailor arguments to the audience. Arguments need to be framed to fit the values and goals of the audience, embracing the plurality of values attached to nature, and using appropriate language. For example, over-emphasising economic arguments could alienate people who are motivated mainly by ethical and moral concerns.
• Use positive arguments. Positive framing of arguments to emphasise benefits is often more powerful than negative framing that focuses on threats and losses. The concept of ecosystem services is useful for emphasising positive benefits, provided that it is properly explained to stakeholders.
• Use a wider range of arguments. Arguments based on the economic value of nature for humans dominate European and national policy-making, and are often seen as central to gaining high-level policy-maker support, but our results show that many decision-makers and other stakeholders also use and respond positively to ethical and moral arguments.

"We aimed to provide the essence of 4 years worth of research in an easy to read and reuse form, to maximise the potential of using the right arguments for conservation at the right time in order to successfully demonstrate the value of biodiversity to decision-makers," comments Rob Bugter, co-ordinator of the BESAFE project.

Try out the resources below:

Bugter R., Smith A.C. and the BESAFE consortium. 2015. How to argue for biodiversity conservation more effectively. Recommendations from the BESAFE project. Pensoft Publishers, Sofia, 26 pp. Available at: http://www.besafe-project.net/img/uplf/BESAFE_brochure_online_18.pdf

BESAFE web tool available at: http://tool.besafe-project.net/

From 26 to 28 January 2016, EU BON hosted its first Biodiversity Portal Hackathon in Seville, Spain. The event marked an important milestone for the project, paving the way towards one of the most important EU BON products - the European Biodiversity Portal.

It is a well known fact that current biodiversity observation systems and environmental datasets are unbalanced in coverage and not well integrated. This brings the need of a new system which will facilitate access to such knowledge and will effectively improve the work in the field of biodiversity observation in general.

Participants at the Biodiversity Portal Hackathon in Seville, Spain; Credit: Pensoft

The ultimate goal of EU BON is to create an European Biodiversity Portal which will collect and present biodiversity data from across Europe in a consistent and re-usable way. The portal will then feed into a global equivalent developed by the Group on Earth Observation’s Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON).

But what are the benefits from and what are the challenges in front of such an ambitious project?

Following the Biodiversity Data Portal hackathon, Dr. Hannu Saarenmaa, leader of WP 2 Data integration and interoperability, and Juan José Negro answered these questions in a video interview: 

Engagement with relevant political authorities and other stakeholders is of crucial importance for a research project, making sure its objectives are in tune with the real-world problems and its results provide adapted solutions. Now EU BON shares the outcomes, lessons learned and conclusions from a series of three roundtable meetings designed to identify stakeholder needs and promote collaboration between science and policy.

The collection of EU BON stakeholder roundtable reports provides a summarized overview of shared experiences gained in the three different workshops that were organized from 2013-2016. With more than 100 participants from over 20 countries altogether, the roundtable reports provide insights and exchange of ideas on highly relevant issues concerning policy, citizen science and local/regional stakeholders and its networks.

Simplified workflow from data mobilization via processing to stakeholders from the practice; Credit: Vohland et al.

The roundtables seek to build up a stakeholder dialogue with exemplary sector-specific user communities to incorporate feedback loops for the products of EU BON, as well as to develop improvements of existing biodiversity data workflows. Being published via the innovative Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO) journal conclusions, derived knowledge and results are now made available for other projects and the wider community to ensure their re-use.

The three roundtable papers report on conclusion on highly relevant issues related to biodiversity information and its open-access and availability, data workflows and integration of citizen science as well as science-policy interfaces.

"In each of the three detailed reports of the roundtables we outline its aims, intentions, as well as results and recommendations, that were drafted based on the roundtable discussions, world café sessions and working groups. Such project results are now published for the first time in the new series of EU BON results, featured in RIO, providing a unique new medium to share experiences, outcomes and conclusions," comments Dr. Katrin Vohland, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.

"The three reports were published as workshop report provided by the Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO) journal. This allows readers to publish, distribute and computationally analyse myriads of workshop reports that otherwise often get forgotten or just lost," comments Prof. Lyubomir Penev, co-founder and publisher of RIO.

Original Sources:

Rationale of the roundtables

Wetzel F, Hoffmann A, Häuser C, Vohland K (2016) 1st EU BON Stakeholder Roundtable (Brussels, Belgium): Biodiversity and Requirements for Policy. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8600. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8600

Vohland K, Häuser C, Regan E, Hoffmann A, Wetzel F (2016) 2nd EU BON Stakeholder Roundtable (Berlin, Germany): How can a European biodiversity network support citizen science? Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8616. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8616

Vohland K, Hoffmann A, Underwood E, Weatherdon L, Bonet F, Häuser C, Wetzel F (2016) 3rd EU BON Stakeholder Roundtable (Granada, Spain): Biodiversity data workflow from data mobilization to practice. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8622. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8622

General synthesis and lessons learnt from the three EU BON stakeholder roundtables

Open access to biodiversity is key for addressing pertinent ecological issues such as biodiversity loss and impacts of climate change. On 22 & 23 March 2016, experts from EU BON met with scientists, policy makers and practitioners from across Europe to discuss issues of biodiversity data sharing, curation and publishing.

The workshop, which took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, introduced participants to key concepts, demonstration and practical exercise in biodiversity data sharing using the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT). Practical training sessions led by Larissa Smirnova from the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium) and Kyle Braak from GBIF demonstrated the integration and management of datasets in GBIF. A step-by-step demo and practical session on how to publish a data was also featured in the workshop.

Participants at the EU BON data sharing & data publishing workshop in Sofia; Credit: Pensoft

Special attention was paid to innovative data publishing practices in a session led by the local hosts Pensoft Publishers who introduced their ARPHA publishing platform, as well as its new journal Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO), which publishes unconventional output types across the research cycle, including data and software descriptions, workflows, methods and many more.

PlutoF demonstrated its citizen science gateway and  demonstrated how the citizen science data can be managed using the CS module. Plazi also presented their GoldenGate Imagine tool, optimized for marking up, enhancing, and extracting text and data from PDF files.

    
Sessions at the at the EU BON data sharing & data publishing workshop in Sofia; Credit: Pensoft

The importance of measuring species diversity as an indicator of ecosystem health has been long recognized and it seems that satellite remote sensing (SRS) has proven to be one of the most cost-effective approaches to identify biodiversity hotspots and predict changes in species composition. What is the real potential of SRS and what are the pitfalls that need to be avoided to achieve the full potential of this method is the topic of a new research, published in the journal Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation.

The new study, supported by the FP7 funded EU project EU BON takes the assessment of diversity in plant communities as a case study. Showing the difficulties to achieve high results by relying only on field data, the paper discusses the advantages of SRS methods.

"In contrast to field-based methods, SRS allows for complete spatial coverages of the Earth's surface under study over a short period of time. Furthermore, it provides repeated measures, thus making it possible to study temporal changes in biodiversity," explains Dr. D. Rocchini from Fondazione Edmund Mach, lead author and WP deputy leader / task leader in EU BON. "In our research we provide a concise review of the potential of satellites to help track changes in plant species diversity, and provide, for the first time, an overview of the potential pitfalls associated with the misuse of satellite imagery to predict species diversity. "

Traditionally, assessment of biodiversity at local and regional scales relies on the one hand on local diversity, or the so called alpha-diversity, and on the other, on species turnover, or beta-diversity. Only in combination of these two measures can lead to an estimate of the whole diversity of an area.

While the assessment of alpha-diversity is relatively straightforward, calculation of beta-diversity could prove to be quite challenging. This is where increased collaboration between the remote sensing and biodiversity communities is needed in order to properly address future challenges and developments.

The new research shown the high potential of remote sensing in biodiversity studies while also identifying the challenges underpinning the development of this interdisciplinary field of research.

"Further sensitivity studies on environmental parameters derived from remote sensing for biodiversity mapping need to be undertaken to understand the pitfalls and impacts of different data collection processes and models. Such information, however, is crucial for a continuous global biodiversity analysis and an improved understanding of our current global challenges."concludes Dr. Rocchini.

Original Source:

Rocchini, D., Boyd, D. S., Féret, J.-B., Foody, G. M., He, K. S., Lausch, A., Nagendra, H., Wegmann, M., Pettorelli, N. (2016), Satellite remote sensing to monitor species diversity: potential and pitfalls. Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, 2: 25-36. doi: 10.1002/rse2.9

Applications for a Project Manager position for the Horizon 2020 project called COOP+ are now open at the University of Granada (Spain). This project aims to foster the cooperation among EU environmental research infrastructures (EISCAT, ICOS, EMSO, LifeWatch) and their international counterparts (NEON, TERN, AMERIFLUX, LBA, ILTER, OOI, AMISR, IMOS, etc.).

The Project Manager will be in contact with the project consortium on a daily basis to foster the cooperation among RIs. He/she will be responsible for communication with project partners (organizing meetings, workshops and videoconferences during the project duration, maintenance of web page). He/she will also participate in writing reports, timely production of deliverables as well as scientific outputs. He/she will join the "Laboratory of ecology" located in theAndalusian Institute for Earth System Research, at the University of Granada (Spain).

More infornation on the position, requirements and how to apply can be found in the offcial job offer.

April proved to be an eventful month for EU BON, hosting the presentation of two major project results, not only within the same month, but in the course of one week. While CSIC and partners were launching the beta-version of the long-waited Biodiversity Portal in Seville, another EU BON team was busy to search for Integrated approaches for focused biodiversity data mobilization in Stockholm.

About the Portal:

In a dedicated session at the WP2 meeting in Seville, Spain, EU BON partners had the chance to view their work for the last couple of years materialising into one of the main expected project results - the European Biodiversity Portal. That said, what was then presented on 29 April is a beta version, with the final release of the portal planned to become available in early 2017.

Participants at the Seville Workshop, April 2016. Credit: A. Hoffmann

Nonetheless, this beta version already addresses the main aim to offer a unique service for analysing and understanding biodiversity change in Europe. For instance, users can explore how relative abundance of species (within a larger group) changes over time by using big data mediated by GBIF. There is also a spatial browser for locating datasets in any part of the world, which may be usable for computing the EBVs for species populations.

Additionally, an online analytical data processing (OLAP) toolbox has been included in this release. Based on GEOSS technology, the new portal lets users harvest and simultaneously access data from several directories, including GBIF, LTER, EuMon (coming), PESI, and GEOSS sources.

This release also highlights the products of the EU BON project, including new methods and analyses packed in factsheets and infographics for the convenience of scientists and policy users alike. Explore the portal’s beta version here.

Suggestions of how to develop the beta portal further towards the full release are appreciated. Use the feedback form at the welcome page.

Integrated biodiversity data mobilization:

It is a challenge for Bioinformatics group in Europe and around the world to find better ways to integrate different systems and technology. In EU BON’s Task 1.4 the approach to solving this issue was to integrate different systems managing natural history collections and molecular data systems using the best techniques available.

In a dedicated workshop, which took place in Stockholm, Sweden, developers in the sphere of bioinformatics were presented with the project’s Data Mobilization Toolkit. This particular workshop was mainly focused on Docker as a tool to move towards a more integrated environment. Docker has revolutionized system integration and in the workshop the Swedish team shared their experience with dockerizing the DINA-system.

Discussions during the Stockholm workshop; Credit: Karin Karlsson

The workshop ended with a hackathon where they together explored the possibilities for using Docker in selected parts of integrating Pluto-F, JACQ and DINA.

A new position for "Researcher and Scientific Project Manager" is opened by the Doing it Together science (DITOs) project, running under the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) within the H2020 framework, and led by the UCL London.

The DITOs project aims to elevate public engagement with science across Europe from passive engagement with the process of developing science to an active one.

Deadline: 23.05.2016

For more information on how to apply and requirements for this position, please download the Official Job Offer.

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

EU BON partner DataONE welcomes the Program for Research on Biodiversity (PPBio) Western Amazon as its first Member Node in South America. PPBio’s Western Amazon Node data repository contains data from surveys conducted in the framework of the Research Program in Biodiversity, the Center for Integrated Studies of Biodiversity in the Amazon and partner projects.

About PPBio:

The Research Program in Biodiversity (PPBio) is structured into three components:

• Biological Collections - support and development of biological collections such as herbaria, museums and living collections;
• Biological Inventories - biodiversity surveys, collecting sites, metadata and data for long-term studies;
• Thematic Projects - developing methods for sustainable management of biodiversity and bioprospecting.

PPBio’s research is based on spatial standardization that is crucial for answering the questions raised by decision makers, the integration of biodiversity and physical sciences and on the incorporation of local people and traditional knowledge in biodiversity research and bio-prospecting. PPBio uses a flexible, standardized, modular and economical sampling method, RAPELD, which is compatible with other existing methods and a data policy which enable their datasets to be quickly made available to other researchers. PPBio has produced several free online guides to the flora and fauna of the region and the book "Biodiversity and Integrated Environmental Monitoring" which is essential reading for anyone with questions about biodiversity whether or they also intend to collect data.

Due to the exponential growth of biodiversity information in recent years, the questions of how to mobilize such vast amounts of data has become more tangible than ever. Best practices for data sharing, data publishing, and involvement of scientific and citizen communities in data generation are the main topic of a recent report by the EU FP7 project Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON), published in the innovative Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO) journal.

The report "Data sharing tools for Biodiversity Observation Networks" provides conceptual and practical advice for implementation of the available data sharing and data publishing tools. A detailed description of tools, their pros and cons, is followed by recommendations on their deployment and enhancement to guide biodiversity data managers in their choices.

"We believe publishing this report in RIO makes a lot of sense given the journal's innovative concept of publishing unconventional research outcomes such as project reports. This feature provides projects like EU BON with the chance to showcase their results effectively and timely. The report provides a useful practical guide for biodiversity data managers and RIO gives the project an opportunity to share findings with anyone who will make use of such information", explains Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Managing Director of Pensoft and partner in EU BON.

The new report is the second EU BON contribution featured in a dedicated project outcomes collection in RIO. Together with the data policy recommendations it provides a comprehensive set of resources for the use of biodiversity data managers and users.

"We did our biodiversity data sharing tools comparison from the perspective of the needs of the biodiversity observation community with an eye on the development of a unified user interface to this data - the European Biodiversity Portal (EBP)", add the authors.

The scientists have identified two main challenges standing in front of the biodiversity data community. On the one hand, there is a variety of tools but none can as stand alone, satisfy all the requirements of the wide variety of data providers. On the other hand, gaps in data coverage and quality demand more effort in data mobilization.

"For the time being a combination of tools combined in a new work-flow, makes the most sense for EU BON to mobilize biodiversity data," comment the report authors on their findings. "There is more research to be done and tools to be developed, but for the future there is one firm conclusion and it is that the choice of tools should be defined by the needs of those observing biodiversity - the end user community in the broadest sense - from volunteer scientists to decision makers."

Original Source:

Smirnova L, Mergen P, Groom Q, De Wever A, Penev L, Stoev P, Pe'er I, Runnel V, Camacho A, Vincent T, Agosti D, Arvanitidis C, Bonet F, Saarenmaa H (2016) Data sharing tools adopted by the European Biodiversity Observation Network Project. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e9390. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e9390

Established under the auspices of the UNEP Convention on Migratory Species (UNEP/CMS), the Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans of the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and contiguous Atlantic area (ACCOBAMS) is an Intergovernmental Agreement aimed at achieving and maintaining a favorable conservation status for cetaceans though the implementation of coordinated measures.

The Secretariat of ACCOBAMS, based in Monaco, ensures the coordination of the Agreement implementation and provides assistance to the Contracting Parties. In this context, the Secretariat is working on the development of an initiative aimed at responding to the ACCOBAMS strategic objective on improving the understanding of the conservation status of cetaceans at the Mediterranean/Black Sea macroregional level (the "ACCOBAMS Survey Initiative" – ASI).

Set to compile the largest biodiversity data collection for Europe to date, the EU-funded FP7 project Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON) has now launched the beta-version of its European Biodiversity Portal.

Despite being a beta version, this release already addresses the main aim to offer a unique service for analysing and understanding biodiversity change in Europe. For instance, users can explore how relative abundance of species (within a larger group) changes over time by using big data mediated by GBIF. There is also a spatial browser for locating datasets in any part of the world, which may be usable for computing the EBVs for species populations.

Additionally, an online analytical data processing (OLAP) toolbox has been included in this release. Based on GEOSS technology, the new portal lets users harvest and simultaneously access data from several directories, including GBIF, LTER, EuMon (coming), PESI, and GEOSS sources.

Started in 2012, the five-year project EU BON has been working towards building this new European Biodiversity Portal where scattered and various information and tools are collected, highlighted and widely shared for future research.

The service will provide all interested parties with a professional database platform with a large amount of implications. For example, coordinators can receive information about related monitoring programs in different countries. Initiatives could integrate their data and compare the trends and status across different countries and regions.

"The ultimate goal of EU BON is to build a comprehensive European Biodiversity Portal that will then feed into a Global Portal currently developed by GEO BON. This initiative will provide a completely new holistic way for analyzing global trends and processes.", concludes Dr. Hannu Saarenmaa, University of Eastern Finland and Work Package leader in EU BON.

We invite everyone to test the new portal and send us their feedback and suggestions for improvements via our Feedback Form.

The Biodiversity Indicators Partnership (BIP) Secretariat is looking for indicators to fill gaps in the global suite of biodiversity indicators and allow a full understanding of progress towards globally agreed targets.

They are inviting experts and organisations to participate in an open online consultation to fill the gaps in the global indicator framework for the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020. Through this short online survey they want to hear about any existing indicators (both global and sub-global in scale), indicators under development, potentially useful datasets or key experts or organisations in the fields. The main focus is on indicators that respond to the gaps in the global framework, which are listed on the attached flyer, but they are also keen to hear about any other indicators that could potentially enhance the existing indicator suite.

The consultation is open until 30 June 2016. Further information on the consultation is available in the attached flyer, the BIP website http://www.bipindicators.net/gaps, and the CBD notification SCBD/OES/RH/KNM/85710.

A new opinion piece published in the journal Global Change Biology looks at the development of biodiversity scenarios and their inclusion of  future land-use changes.

Abstract: 

A new research paper Linking Earth Observation and taxonomic, structural and functional biodiversity: Local to ecosystem perspectives published in the journal Ecological Indicators looks at the ways in which earth observation (EO) techniques may provide a solution to overcome shortcomings in biodiversity monitoring by measuring entities of interest at different spatial and temporal scales. 

Abstract: 

Impacts of human civilization on ecosystems threaten global biodiversity. In a changing environment, traditional in situ approaches to biodiversity monitoring have made significant steps forward to quantify and evaluate BD at many scales but still, these methods are limited to comparatively small areas. Earth observation (EO) techniques may provide a solution to overcome this shortcoming by measuring entities of interest at different spatial and temporal scales.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the role of EO to detect, describe, explain, predict and assess biodiversity. Here, we focus on three main aspects related to biodiversity taxonomic diversity, functional diversity and structural diversity, which integrate different levels of organization molecular, genetic, individual, species, populations, communities, biomes, ecosystems and landscapes. In particular, we discuss the recording of taxonomic elements of biodiversity through the identification of animal and plant species. We highlight the importance of the spectral traits (ST) and spectral trait variations (STV) concept for EO-based biodiversity research.

Furthermore we provide examples of spectral traits/spectral trait variations used in EO applications for quantifying taxonomic diversity, functional diversity andstructural diversity. We discuss the use of EO to monitor biodiversity and habitat quality using differ-ent remote-sensing techniques. Finally, we suggest specifically important steps for a better integrationof EO in biodiversity research.EO methods represent an affordable, repeatable and comparable method for measuring, describing,explaining and modelling taxonomic, functional and structural diversity. Upcoming sensor developmentswill provide opportunities to quantify spectral traits, currently not detectable with EO, and will surelyhelp to describe biodiversity in more detail. Therefore, new concepts are needed to tightly integrate EOsensor networks with the identification of biodiversity. This will mean taking completely new directionsin the future to link complex, large data, different approaches and models.

Original reseach:

A. Lausch, L. Bannehr, M. Beckmann, C. Boehm, H. Feilhauer, J.M. Hacker, M. Heurich, A. Jung, R. Klenke, C. Neumann, M. Pause, D. Rocchini, M.E. Schaepman, S. Schmidtlein, K. Schulz, P. Selsam, J. Settele, A.K. Skidmore, A.F. Cord, Linking Earth Observation and taxonomic, structural and functional biodiversity: Local to ecosystem perspectives, Ecological Indicators, Volume 70, November 2016, Pages 317-339, ISSN 1470-160X, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2016.06.022

The EU BON workshop "Biodiversity research for and by citizens in Eastern Europe: tools, information services and public engagement" was organized to present the EU BON citizen science gateway, share accomplishments of the project, promote products, raise and discuss challenges of citizen science and facilitate networking between countries, especially eastern and central European countries.

There were 33 participants from Baltic countries and Finland and EU BON partners from Norway, Spain, Israel and Brussels. First day was showcasing the citizen science initiatives in Estonia, following best practice examples from EU BON consortium. During the second day the participants got a chance to learn the tools and methods for citizen science data management by ECSA and EU BON. This was followed by world cafe style discussion about the needs of citizen science initiatives and Pan-European citizen science gateway. One of the important conclusions for Baltic countries is that there is a need for stronger collaboration and supportive infrastructure to make citizen science more effective and also deliver accessible data to research community.

Some workshop participants also took part of Tartu Mini-BioBlitz on 29th June, first BioBlitz in Estonia. BioBlitz participants observed 239 species of animals, plants and fungi .

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Workshop agenda

Read a first hand report form the workshop in the two great blog posts by Egle Marija Ramanauskaite (a workshop participant from Lithuania):

http://seplute.tumblr.com/post/146841955105/citsci-overtakes-the-baltics-citizen-science

http://seplute.tumblr.com/post/146844410470/citizen-science-workshop-in-tartu-recap-of-day-2

EU projects EuMon and EU BON call out to monitoring programs to share data and expertise for building the European Biodiversity Portal.

Combining forces, two large scale EU projects, EuMon and EU BON, are set to compile the largest data collection on biodiversity monitoring activities in Europe to date. Using existing biodiversity data and metadata collected by the two projects, the initiative is a stepping stone in completing a comprehensive European Biodiversity Portal. The projects now call out to monitoring programs across the Old Continent and beyond, to join in, provide information about their schemes and share their expertise for the cause.

For its life span between 2004 and 2008 the project EU-wide monitoring methods and systems of surveillance for species and habitats of Community interest (EuMon) created Europe's most comprehensive metadata catalogue of biodiversity monitoring activities.

Started in 2012, the five-year project Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network(EU BON) has been working towards building a new European Biodiversity Portal where this information is collected, highlighted and widely shared for future research and applied biodiversity conservation. The beta version is now all set up and available to test here.

To answer knowledge gaps since the project has ended in 2008, the original EuMon monitoring meta database is being further expanded with new information on data availability and access, as well as with new remote sensing data. Previously underrepresented, the marine realm is now also included in the EuMon collection.

"Monitoring data has received a central stage in recent years, a process largely facilitated by the instalment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). However, while knowledge about monitoring efforts is important, we still miss a large variety of available programs and biodiversity data", explains EuMon's Project Leader Prof. Dr. Klaus Henle, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ.

"We, therefore, currently aim to increase and update the number of monitoring programs in the EuMon catalogue, as the catalogue still covers less than half of all existing programs in Europe", adds EuMon Project Coordinator, Dirk Schmeller, UFZ.

In a joint initiative EuMon and EU BON are now looking to create the opportunity for monitoring program coordinators to publish their data by using the data publishing service of the EU BON portal (data embargos also possible).

The service will provide all interested parties with a professional database platform with a large amount of implications. For example, coordinators can receive information about related monitoring programs in different countries. Initiatives could integrate their data and compare the trends and status across different countries and regions. Volunteers can find contacts about schemes in their regions they may consider to join.

Using the data publishing service of EU BON will also facilitate data sharing with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

"The ultimate goal of EU BON is to build a comprehensive European Biodiversity Portal that will then feed into a Global Portal currently developed by GEO BON. This initiative will provide a completely new holistic way for analyzing global trends and processes. We invite projects from across Europe to publish their datasets via the European Biodiversity Portal and become a part of this one-of-a-kind initiative", concludes Dr. Hannu Saarenmaa, University of Eastern Finland and Work Package leader in EU BON.

How to take part:

To access the EuMon database, please visit http://eumon.ckff.si/biomat. For sharing information about your monitoring program, please register here. You will then be able to provide metadata about your scheme via a simple online questionnaire. Answering the full set of questions is desirable, but not compulsory.

A recent article in the academic journal Science published by Prof. Urmas Kõljalg and colleagues aims to explain the possibilities for identifying species determined based on DNA samples only.

The article was published as a response to David Hibbetts paper "The invisible dimension of fungal diversity". The American mycologist Hibbett argues that huge amount of fungal species cannot be identified and described scientifically as the international code does not permit describing new species based on DNA samples derived from molecular surveys of the environment. However, the Estonian and Swedish scientists show – analysing the same data – how DNA based fungal species have been identified and communicated for several years now using database UNITE (https://unite.ut.ee).

In the forests of Laos the mushroom season has already begun.  Among the mushrooms presented on these dishes one can most likely also find species scientifically yet undescribed. The digital object identifiers (DOIs) system created by the scientists in Tartu permits comunication of these species already before they have been granted scientific names. Writing about poisonous mushrooms for example helps to keep people informed, so that cases of intoxication can be avoided more often. (Photo: Urmas Kõljalg)

"Traditionally species are determined based on their morphology and anatomy, in printed books – traditional keys to nature – species are displayed on pictures and in written descriptions. But DNA of fungi can also be found in samples of soil, of leaves, of air, in these circumstances we do not actually have the fungus itself and we cannot identify it visually," Urmas Kõljalg explains the core of the matter. "In this case, species can be determined evaluating their DNA sequences."

The UNITE Species Hypotheses approach demonstrates how the DNA based fungal species can be referred to in a proper scientific manner already before they have been described formally according to the code. This can be done using unique digital object identifiers (DOIs) given to all fungal species in the UNITE database. This keeps all the references automatically connected and machine-readable by other databases as well.

"Even if the species will have its name ten years from now, the DOI code will help us go back and see, where the species was first described and who found it," Urmas Kõljalg says.

For several years now by leading species classification platforms based on DNA sequences more than half a million DOI codes have been used as identifiers of fungal species. UNITE fungal codes are used by the most influential gene bank NCBI also. The UNITE system uses a new paradigm in identifying species, this paradigm was first described by Urmas Kõljalg and colleagues in 2013.

UNITE – the global unified system for the DNA based fungal species – contains information of all the fungal species known from sequence data, hundreds of researchers from all over the world are collaborating. UNITE is hosted by PlutoF cloud, which permits creating very complex databases for various biodiversity data, including DOIs. The development of PlutoF system is supported by the Estonian research infrastructures roadmap project NATARC (http://natarc.ut.ee), EU BON (http://eubon.eu), etc. All scientists can use PlutoF for free.

The planetary boundaries framework attempts to set limits for biodiversity loss within which ecological function is relatively unaffected. In a recent article in Science Newbold et al. present a quantitative global analysis of the extent to which the proposed planetary boundary has been crossed. 

Abstract: 

Land use and related pressures have reduced local terrestrial biodiversity, but it is unclear how the magnitude of change relates to the recently proposed planetary boundary ("safe limit"). We estimate that land use and related pressures have already reduced local biodiversity intactness—the average proportion of natural biodiversity remaining in local ecosystems—beyond its recently proposed planetary boundary across 58.1% of the world’s land surface, where 71.4% of the human population live. Biodiversity intactness within most biomes (especially grassland biomes), most biodiversity hotspots, and even some wilderness areas is inferred to be beyond the boundary. Such widespread transgression of safe limits suggests that biodiversity loss, if unchecked, will undermine efforts toward long-term sustainable development.

The study is available at http://dx.doi/10.1126/science.aaf2201

The ASEAN BIODIVERSITY UPDATES are published by the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) to keep stakeholders informed of news about biodiversity concerns and efforts that are relevant to the ASEAN region. In its latest issue the newsletter provides an overview of the 2016  World Environment Day, as well as gives information about  the new ACB headquarters at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and the organization's training programs.

A special feature gives insights on the Nusa Penida Marine Protected Area in Indonesia, followed by country-specific biodiversity news from accross Southeast Asia.

The full issue is available here.

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

Key in ensuring the effectiveness of conservation efforts and maintaining ecosystem health, measuring biodiversity can benefit greatly when remote sensing data comes into the equation. A new EU BON related paper, published in the journal Ecological Indicators, proposes open source solutions for measuring the important Rao's Q index, when it comes to remote sensing data.

Abstract: 

Measuring biodiversity is a key issue in ecology to guarantee effective indicators of ecosystem health at different spatial and time scales. However, estimating biodiversity from field observations might present difficulties related to costs and time needed. Moreover, a continuous data update for biodiversity monitoring purposes might be prohibitive. From this point of view, remote sensing represents a powerful tool since it allows to cover wide areas in a relatively low amount of time. One of the most common indicators of biodiversity is Shannon's entropy H′, which is strictly related to environmental heterogeneity, and thus to species diversity. However, Shannon's entropy might show drawbacks once applied to remote sensing data, since it considers relative abundances but it does not explicitly account for distances among pixels’ numerical values. In this paper we propose the use of Rao's Q applied to remotely sensed data, providing a straightforward R-package function to calculate it in 2D systems. We will introduce the theoretical rationale behind Rao's index and then provide applied examples based on the proposed R function.

Original Source: 

Rocchini, D., Marcantonio, M., Ricotta, C. (2017). Measuring Rao's Q diversity index rom remote sensing: an open source solution. Ecological Indicators, 72: 234-238. [5years-IF: 3.649] DOI:10.1016/j.ecolind.2016.07.039

Being voluntary, citizen science work is often automatically assumed to also be openly available. Contrary to the expectations, however, a recent study of the datasets available from volunteers on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) prove to be among the most restrictive in how they can be used.

There is a high demand for biodiversity observation data to inform conservation and environmental policy, and citizen scientists generate the vast majority of terrestrial biodiversity observations. The analysis on GBIF showed that citizen science datasets comprise 10% of datasets on GBIF, but actually account for the impressive 60% of all observations.

Invaluable as a resource for conservationists and biodiversity scientists, however, these resources unfortunately often come with restrictions for re-use. Although the vast majority of citizen science datasets did not include a license statement, as a whole, they ranked low on the openness of their data.

The assumption that voluntary data collection leads to data sharing is not only not reflecting the real situation, but also does not recognize the wishes and motivations of those who collect data, nor does it respects the crucial contributions of these data to long-term monitoring of biodiversity trends.

In a recent commentary paper, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, EU BON partners suggest ways to improve data openness. According to the researchers citizen scientists should be recognised in ways that correspond with their motivations, in addition its is advisable that organisations that manage these data should make their data sharing policies open and explicit.

Original Research:

Groom, Q., Weatherdon, L. & Geijzendorffer, I. (2016) Is citizen science an open science in the case of biodiversity observations? Journal of Applied Ecology. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2664.12767

A new editorial, published in the Journal of Apllied Ecology looks at modelling and monitoring as methods for adaptive biodiversity management in the 21st century.

Abstract: 

With increasing threats on biodiversity, informed conservation decisions need to be based on currently observed and future predicted trends of biodiversity (Pereira, Navarro & Martins 2012; Guisan et al. 2013). In this regard, two essential components supporting informed biodiversity conservation decisions are good monitoring data to assess recent and ongoing trends (Collen et al. 2013; Pereira et al. 2013) and robust models to anticipate possible future trends (Pereira et al. 2010a; Akc
akaya et al. 2016). Models benefit from robust monitoring data sets, that is repeated observations of biodiversity, as they need data to be fitted or validated, but models can also help assess data representativeness (e.g. by highlighting any bias), support proper data collection (e.g. covering the relevant gradients) or be used to make more effective use of biodiversity observations (Guisan et al. 2006, 2013; Ferrier 2011).

Read more in the open access paper.

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

A new report has been added to the dedicated EU BON Outputs Collection in the innovative RIO journal. The paper reviews biodiversity related citizen science in Europe, specifically the data mobilization aspect and gives an overview of citizen science related activities in the project EU BON.

In addition, recommendations for a Pan-European citizen science gateway and data mobilization efforts will be given, with the aim of filling in existing biodiversity data gaps. Also the EU BON citizen science gateway is described, which is a part of the European Biodiversity Portal (http://biodiversity.eubon.eu) with citizen science related products. 

Citizen science is a vital element for EU BON with regards to biodiversity information sources that provide data for research and policy-making. CS data are used by many research institutes, public organisations and local data portals. CS data offer volumes of field data, which would otherwise not be possible to collect with the limited resources of research institutes and agencies. Thus one of the main targets for EU BON is to make CS data available through various efforts, for example through networking and by using new technologies for data mobilisation. Overall, one of the main goals of a common EU citizen science Gateway is to integrate CS data for European biodiversity research. EU BON also seeks to develop a strategy for achieving this goal and encourages educational aspects of citizen science through networking and the development of tools.

Original Source:

Runnel V, Wetzel F, Groom Q, Koch W, Pe’er I, Valland N, Panteri E, Kõljalg U (2016) Summary report and strategy recommendations for EU citizen science gateway for biodiversity data. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e11563. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.2.e11563

Published just recently, a new open access EU BON article discusses the need for additional research efforts beyond standard biodiversity monitoring to reconstruct the impacts of major anthropogenic pressures and to identify meaningful temporal baselines for biodiversity.

The article, published in Scientific Reports, reports on the temporal baselines that could be drawn from biodiversity monitoring schemes in Europe and compares those with the rise of important anthropogenic pressures.

With most biodiversity monitoring schemes initiated late in the 20th century, well after anthropogenic pressures had already reached half of their current magnitude, the team of scientists found that setting temporal baselines from biodiversity monitoring data would underestimate the full range of impacts of major anthropogenic pressures.

The authors stress that these limitations need to be explicitly acknowledged when designing management strategies and policies as they seriously constrain our ability to identify relevant conservation targets aimed at restoring or reversing biodiversity losses.

Find out more in the original research paper:

Mihoub J B, Henle K, Titeux N, Brotons L, Brummitt N A, Schmeller D S (2017) Setting temporal baselines for biodiversity: the limits of available monitoring data for capturing the full impact of anthropogenic pressures. Scientific Reports. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep41591

While development and implementation of data publishing and sharing practices and tools have long been among the core activities of the academic publisher Pensoft, it is well-understood that as part of scholarly publishing, open data practices are also currently in transition, and hence, require a lot of collaborative and consistent efforts to establish.

Based on Pensoft's experience, and elaborated and updated during the Framework Program 7 EU BON project, a new paper published in the EU BON dedicated collection in the open science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), outlines policies and guidelines for scholarly publishing of biodiversity and biodiversity-related data. Newly accumulated knowledge from large-scale international efforts, such as FORCE11 (Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship), CODATA (The Committee on Data for Science and Technology), RDA (Research Data Alliance) and others, is also included in the Guidelines.

The present paper discusses some general concepts, including a definition of datasets, incentives to publish data and licences for data publishing. Furthermore, it defines and compares several routes for data publishing, namely: providing supplementary files to research articles; uploading them on specialised open data repositories, where they are linked to the research article; publishing standalone data papers; or making use of integrated narrative and data publishing through online import/download of data into/from manuscripts, such as the workflow provided by the Biodiversity Data Journal. Among the guidelines, there are also comprehensive instructions on preparation and peer review of data intended for publication.

Although currently available for journals using the developed by Pensoft journal publishing platform ARPHA, these strategies and guidelines could be of use for anyone interested in biodiversity data publishing.

Apart from paving the way for a whole new approach in data publishing, the present paper is also a fine example of science done in the open, having been published along with its two pre-submission public peer reviews. The reviews by Drs. Robert Mesibov and Florian Wetzel are both citable via their own Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs).

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Original source:

Penev L, Mietchen D, Chavan V, Hagedorn G, Smith V, Shotton D, Ó Tuama É, Senderov V, Georgiev T, Stoev P, Groom Q, Remsen D, Edmunds S (2017) Strategies and guidelines for scholarly publishing of biodiversity data. Research Ideas and Outcomes 3: e12431. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.3.e12431

Europe’s regions are facing rising sea levels and more extreme weather, such as more frequent and more intense heatwaves, flooding, droughts and storms due to climate change, according to the latest European Environment Agency report published on 25 Jan 2017. The report assesses the latest trends and projections on climate change and its impacts across Europe and finds that better and more flexible adaptation strategies, policies and measures will be crucial to lessen these impacts.

Find a summary of the report's Key Findings, or download the full report.

The discipline of taxonomy is highly reliant on previously published photographs, drawings and other images as biodiversity data. Inspired by the uncertainty among taxonomists, a team, representing both taxonomists and experts in rights and copyright law, has traced the role and relevance of copyright when it comes to images with scientific value. Their discussion and conclusions are published in the latest paper added in the EU BON Collection in the open science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).

Taxonomic papers, by definition, cite a large number of previous publications, for instance, when comparing a new species to closely related ones that have already been described. Often it is necessary to use images to demonstrate characteristic traits and morphological differences or similarities. In this role, the images are best seen as biodiversity data rather than artwork. According to the authors, this puts them outside the scope, purposes and principles of Copyright. Moreover, such images are most useful when they are presented in a standardized fashion, and lack the artistic creativity that would otherwise make them 'copyrightable works'.

"It follows that most images found in taxonomic literature can be re-used for research or many other purposes without seeking permission, regardless of any copyright declaration," says Prof. David J. Patterson, affiliated with both Plazi and the University of Sydney.

Nonetheless, the authors point out that, "in observance of ethical and scholarly standards, re-users are expected to cite the author and original source of any image that they use." Such practice is "demanded by the conventions of scholarship, not by legal obligation," they add.

However, the authors underline that there are actual copyrightable visuals, which might also make their way to a scientific paper. These include wildlife photographs, drawings and artwork produced in a distinctive individual form and intended for other than comparative purposes, as well as collections of images, qualifiable as databases in the sense of the European Protection of Databases directive.

In their paper, the scientists also provide an updated version of the Blue List, originally compiled in 2014 and comprising the copyright exemptions applicable to taxonomic works. In their Extended Blue List, the authors expand the list to include five extra items relating specifically to images.

"Egloff, Agosti, et al. make the compelling argument that taxonomic images, as highly standardized 'references for identification of known biodiversity,' by necessity, lack sufficient creativity to qualify for copyright. Their contention that 'parameters of lighting, optical and specimen orientation' in biological imaging must be consistent for comparative purposes underscores the relevance of the merger doctrine for photographic works created specifically as scientific data," comments on the publication Ms. Gail Clement, Head of Research Services at the Caltech Library.

"In these cases, the idea and expression are the same and the creator exercises no discretion in complying with an established convention. This paper is an important contribution to the literature on property interests in scientific research data - an essential framing question for legal interoperability of research data," she adds.

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Original source:

Egloff W, Agosti D, Kishor P, Patterson D, Miller J (2017) Copyright and the Use of Images as Biodiversity Data. Research Ideas and Outcomes 3: e12502. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.3.e12502

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.

A recent story, featured on CORDIS News, focuses on EU BON and its achievements. Based on a recent project's publication in ‘Nature – Scientific Reports’ and information from the project, the new item discusses important project outcomes, including the European Biodiversity Portal, and their contribution to drawing a more accurate picture of current biodiversity to aid efforts for sustainable governance of natural resources.

Here is a snippet from the news feature on CORDIS: 

A recent article published in the journal ‘Scientific Reports’ states, ‘Monitoring schemes provide an important source of information on biodiversity change, guiding further research, conservation assessment and planning.’ The article cites The European Biodiversity Portal, designed and implemented by the EU-funded EU BON project that offers researchers, policy-makers, and others interested in biodiversity, easy access to insights on trends and modelling techniques.

The project worked on the establishment and adoption of new data standards, the development of tools to enable collaborative research and the encouragement of citizen-scientists. As a result, EU BON, by building the European Biodiversity Observation Network, has created advanced techniques for data analysis along with new approaches for modelling and strategies for future biodiversity monitoring.

Read the full publication here.

Coming to an end, after 4.5 years of hard work and dedicated research, the FP7-funded project EU BON leaves behind a basket of results to support the Group of Earth Observations (GEO) and assist researchers in their future studies.

The EU BON website will continue to exist and host relevant information for at least the next 5 years to ensure project results are easy to access and reuse, not only by EU BON researchers, but for anyone interested in the project or working in the field.

Among the major outcomes of the project, the biodiversity portal is now complete and will be hosted for the next years by CSIC. All EU BON’s tools, products, services and the Citizen Science gateway can be found there.

Additionally, about 15 of our tools will soon be included in the GEO BON’s BON-in-a-Box to ensure sustainability and exploitation of results.

All EU BON related publications are available via the project’s website. Moreover,  important documents are also in a dedicated piloting RIO Open Science collection, demonstrating how next-generation publishing can ensure sustainability of results coming from along the research cycle, including data, guidelines, infographics and more.

EU BON’s success could not be possible without the professional and friendly team of consortium partners and 33 associated partners, who’ve worked hard together and have contributed in various ways and with different efforts.

Credit: Dirk Schmeller

The 11th European Projects GEO Workshop took place between 19-21 June 2017, in Helsinki, Finland, bringing together European stakeholders interested in and actively contributing to the Global Earth Observations System of Systems (GEOSS).

Alongside the plenary (see presentations here), the conference featured 20 sessions looking at various aspects GEOSS, its objectives and their implementation.

Among those EU BON took part in a dedicated session titled ‘How Ecosystem and Biodiversity data and knowledge can support the GEO objectives’, alongside fellow projects and initiatives, and associated partners ECOPOTENTIAL, LTER-Europe, GLOBIS-B, EKLIPSE and ENEON.

Credit: F. Wetzel

The session aimed to inform about recent developments of relevant projects that focus on Ecosystems and Biodiversity and also outline how the generated data and knowledge can support the GEO objectives and inform relevant policies on a European and global scale.  

.@ft_wetzel explaining the @EUBON1 approach to mobilising linked and standardised data #EGW2017 #citizenscience #harmonisation #biodiversity pic.twitter.com/jJJ5jADAzG

— Scent (@SCENT_EU) June 20, 2017

EU BON, as a now completed project, opened the session by presenting its major products in particular the European Biodiversity Portal and how current and future projects can build on the outcomes achieved.

Overall, the session gave the opportunity to learn about the different approaches of selected EU-projects that address the mobilization, integration and analysis of biodiversity and ecosystem data, their current achievements and existing barriers. Here are some of the Key Messages that emerged from the session: 

• For biodiversity and ecosystem approaches, European level efforts are needed to achieve comprehensive data coverage and full open access, especially for in situ data integration.
• Existing European-level data portals and information platforms need to be sustained and considered as integration points for national and local data hubs. 
• Systematic approaches for biodiversity are needed, which means linking biotic and abiotic data and improving harmonization efforts for the whole data cycle/ workflows from data collection, analysis and dissemination for different disciplines (SBAs). 
• Essential (Biodiversity) Variables (EBVs) are a key concept / framework especially for monitoring / long-term observations that should be applied for all available biodiversity/ecosystem data fields.
• Use examples from existing projects and networks as successful blueprints for bottom-up/user-driven approaches in GEOSS that relate to knowledge and user needs at the local scale.