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

A new "LinkOut" feature introduced by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) NCBI’s allows the easy linking to content on PubMed and GenBank.  Dryad has already introduced the feature benefitting from easy and fast linking of associated content to the two resources.

PubMed and GenBank, from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), are hugely popular resources for searching and retrieving article abstracts and nucleotide sequence data, respectively.  PubMed indexes the vast majority of the biomedical literature, and deposition of nucleotide sequences in GenBank or one of the other INSDC databases is a near universal requirement for publication in a scientific journal. LinkOut allows the data from an article to be distributed among repositories without compromising its discoverability.

Dryad, intends to expand on this feature in a couple of ways. First, it is planned to make Dryad content searchable via the PubMed and GenBank identifiers, which because of their wide use will provide a convenient gateway for other biomedical databases to link out to Dryad.  Second, open web standards will be used to expose relationships between content in Dryad and other repositories, not just NCBI.

Original source: Dryad news and views

On March 18 2013 the BHL-Europe portal has gone officially live. The Biodiversity heritage library for Europe project began in 2009 and joins noteworthy European museum and botanical gardens, including some in the USA as well. The primary goal of the project was to create an indexed archival system for digitized scientific literature, and free access to this literature via a multifunctional portal (www.bhl-europe.eu).
The portal makes available 6,149 books containing one million pages from 92 content providers at the moment, but this is just the initial offering. New material is added every day, and the growth is projected to increase over time. The BHL-Europe portal (and other international sources) is linked to the Biodiversity Library Exhibition  platform, which publishes selected literature in the form of interesting themes, information and an attractive design. Thanks to the specific presentation of literature and interesting scientific items, the platform has significant educational potential.

You can access the BHL-Europe portal here: www.bhl-europe.eu
Read more about the portal on the official BHL blog:  http://bhleurope.blogspot.cz/2013/03/bhl-europe-is-finally-officially-live.html

Join the online community of EU BON and create buzz around the project. Take full advantage of our social network channels to interact with stakeholders and contribute to the EU BON discussion. Get an easy access and the latest updates on news and events around the project. You are a click away from making a difference to the project’s visibility.

Like, follow or join EU BON Social Media and get involved in the community now!

One year of experience and perspectives for the future from Pensoft Publishers and GBIF

In 2012 GBIF and Pensoft pioneered a workflow between the GBIF’s Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) and Pensoft’s journals ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, Nature Conservation, etc. to automatically export metadata into the form of a data paper manuscript, based on the Ecological Metadata Language (EML). One year on they share their experience and perspectives for the future of data publishing.

In its essence, a Data Paper is a scholarly journal publication whose primary purpose is to describe a dataset or a group of datasets, rather than to report a research investigation. As such, it contains facts about data, not hypotheses and arguments in support of the data, as found in a conventional research article. The future of data publishing according to Pensoft Publishers and GBIF, lies in the elaborating of formats for descriptions of various kinds of data (ecological, morphological, genomic, environmental, etc.), as well as in linking to various platforms (GBIF, Scratchpads, Dryad, EDIT, CBOL, etc.).

More about the collaboration and experience of Pensoft Publishers and GBIF learn from their joint poster available here.

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

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

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

The Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ is now offering a position for Quantitative Ecologist (Postdoc) in their Department of Conservation Biology. The position is open to both male and female applicants and it runs for 42 months, starting latest on 01.08.2013 in Leipzig, Germany. Salary will be according to the appropriate civil service level TVÖD, salary group 13.

The successful candidate will be focusing on optimizing monitoring designs at different scales under field constraints and assessinguncertainty in biodiversity trend analyses. He/She will have a PhD in an ecological discipline relevant for the research topic (e.g. population biology), excellent statistical and computing skills, a distinguished publication record, experience in international cooperation and strong interest both in theoretical and applied biodiversity conservation. Fluency in English in speech and writing is essential, some knowledge of German is of advantage.

The newest newsletter of the BioVel project is now available, offering a range of biodiversity related news, including brief coverage of the EU BON Kick-off and International Symposium Workshop in February, 2013. Among the other stories covered are:

•  Letter from Alex Hardisty, Project Coordinator
• Running Workflows Just Got a Whole Lot Simpler
• Friends of BioVeL: Friendships and collaborations are also blooming! (featuring news about: LifeWatch-BioVeL cooperation;; i4Life project; Micro B3 and GENSC are now friends of BioVeL.

The newsletter also contains information about the upcoming workflows and research within the project, as well about events planned for the future.

To read the article and find out more about the news stories covered click here.

A new article "A decadal view of biodiversity informatics: challenges and priorities"  published by BMC Ecology focuses on the challenges and perspectives for biodiversity informatics after a decade of development. The authors Alex Hardisty and Dave Roberts alongside 77 contributions from the biodiversity informatics community share experience and set future directions of biodiversity informatics as a tool for addressing conservation and ecological issues.

Biodiversity informatics plays a central enabling role in the research community's efforts to address scientific conservation and sustainability issues. This community consultation paper positions the role of biodiversity informatics, for the next decade, presenting the actions needed to link the various biodiversity infrastructures invisibly and to facilitate understanding that can support both business and policy-makers. The community considers the goal in biodiversity informatics to be full integration of the biodiversity research community, including citizens’ science, through a commonly-shared, sustainable e-infrastructure across all sub-disciplines that reliably serves science and society alike.

The full text of the article can be accessed here.

November 19-22, 2013 Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece

Continuing the successful mission of previous MTSR Conferences (MTSR'05, MTSR'07, MTSR'09, MTSR'10, MTSR'11 and MTSR’12), the seventh International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR'13) aims to bring together scholars and practitioners that share a common interest in the interdisciplinary field of metadata, linked data and ontologies. Participants will share novel knowledge and best practice in the implementation of these semantic technologies across diverse types of Information Environments and applications. These include Cultural Informatics; Open Access Repositories & Digital Libraries; E-learning applications; Search Engine Optimisation & Information Retrieval; Research Information Systems and Infrastructures; e-Science and e-Social Science applications; Agriculture, Food and Environment; Bio-Health & Medical Information Systems.

The "Environmental research: Experiences on best practices towards Horizon 2020" conference will be held the 30th of May 2013 in Brussels at the Museum of Natural Sciences.  Organizers of the event are the APRE (Agency for the Promotion of European Research), and the ENVIMPACT consortium.

The event will gather European Commission representatives,  researchers, FP7 project's participants, governmental, academic and industrial stakeholders of the Central East European countries with the aim of presenting the current and future tools and trends for dissemination and exploitation of R&D results with a special focus on the thematic areas of research in air pollution, chemical pollution and environmental technologies, especially in the Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries.

The agenda of the conference and the press release are downloadable at the link: http://download.apre.it/envimpact_presskit1.zip

The registration is free, please register at http://www.envimpact.eu/index.cfm?action=article&publication_id=922

ENVIMPACT project has been launched on 1st January 2011. This initiative is funded by the European Commission under FP7, DG Research and Innovation, with the objectives to improve the current communication  and dissemination of environmental research results deriving from Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries.

The European Commission adopted a new strategy for encouraging the use of green infrastructure, and for ensuring that the enhancement of natural processes becomes a systematic part of spatial planning. Green Infrastructure is a tried and tested tool that uses nature to provide ecological, economic and social benefits. Instead of building flood protection infrastructure, for example, a green infrastructure solution would be to allow a natural wetland to absorb the excess water from heavy rain.

Green infrastructure is often cheaper and more durable than alternatives provided through conventional civil engineering. Biodiversity-rich parks, green spaces and fresh air corridors can for example mitigate the negative effects of summer heat waves. In addition to the health and environmental benefits, green infrastructure also brings multiple social benefits: it creates jobs and makes cities more appealing places to live and work. And it allows for wildlife to thrive, even in an urban context.

Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik said: "Building green infrastructure is often a good investment for nature, for the economy and for jobs. We should provide society with solutions that work with nature instead of against it, where that makes economic and environmental sense."

More about the EC Green Infrastructure here: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/ecosystems/index_en.htm

Science for Environment Policy features a policy brief explaining the biases around biodiversity databases in their latest issue 331, from 6 June 2013. "Biodiversity databases: language and location help explain biases" features a new study arguing that low numbers of English speakers, large distances from the database host and low security acting as key barriers to data collection and among the main reasons for the underrepresentation of some countries in biodiversity databases.

Source: Amano T., Sutherland W.J. (2013) Four barriers to the global understanding of biodiversity conservation: wealth, language, geographical location and security. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 280: 20122649. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.2649

The EUBrazilOpenBio project  announces two new training tools as a part of its e-training Programme aiming at educating and enabling current and potential users of EUBrazilOpenBio to unlock new knowledge and shape effective policy on biodiversity challenges. The new tools cover the following use cases: Ecological Niche Modeling and Cross-mapping.

The EUBrazilOpenBio anytime, anywhere eTraining tools are designed for researchers in the spheres of Biodiversity, Life science, Climate Change, application Developers as well as regulatory authorities and policy decision-makers.

EUBrazilOpenBio is focused on tackling the complexity of biodiversity science such as the diversity of multidisciplinary datasets spanning from climatology to earth sciences by integrating advanced computing resources with data sources across Europe and Brazil.

For more informationand to try out the new tools click here.

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

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

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

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

The University of Cambridge invites for applications for a Research Associate to work on EU-BON, a major EU-funded research project seeking to improve the use of biodiversity data in public policy.

Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant social science or conservation science. Experience in both qualitative and quantitative analysis is desirable. Applicants should ideally have some first-hand experience of public policy processes and a willingness to travel within the European Union for research. Excellent organisational and communication skills will be essential in working as a successful part of this large, multi-partner and multinational team.

The researcher will carry out research on how biodiversity data is currently used in European policy making and will contribute to analysis of the opportunities to increase its effective provision and use. Research methods are likely to combine qualitative and quantitate analysis and to focus on the use of biodiversity data in public policy contexts. It is expected that some of the research will take place in Brussels. The researcher will have considerable freedom in defining the research project in discussion with Dr Doubleday and Prof Sutherland. In addition to carrying out research on the use of biodiversity data in European policy making, the researcher will support Cambridge's contribution to EU BON as a whole. This will involve contributing to other workpackages as and when required. More information about EU BON can be found here: http://www.eubon.eu

Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available for 36 months in the first instance.

Completed applications consisting of a CHRIS/6 (Parts I & III) (downloadable from http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/hr/forms/chris6/) a covering letter, and CV, should be sent to Danielle Feger, via email: geogrec@hermes.cam.ac.uk or sent to Research Administrator, Department of Geography, Downing Site, Cambridge, CB2 3EN

Please quote reference LC01355 on your application and in any correspondence about this vacancy.

Any enquiries concerning the position can be made to Dr Robert Doubleday, rob.doubleday@csap.cam.ac.uk

For more information about the position, please visit: http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/1611/

In this guest post Martin Sharman opens up a rich area of debate by arguing that as a policy concept, ecosystem services puts human wants first and foremost and undermines moral-aesthetic value arguments for conservation that are widely held in society. Martin was the policy offer responsible for biodiversity and ecosystems in the European Commission’s DG Research & Innovation up until his retirement last November. During his career he made an enormous contribution to biodiversity research and policy, including the initiation of the BioFresh project. The opinions expressed in this post are, of course, his own and are not intended to represent a position of either the Commission or BioFresh.

A "resource" is something that is useful to someone. A "natural resource" is something in the natural environment that a human can use to satisfy want or increase wellbeing.

To adopt this vocabulary is to adopt a forthright utilitarian view of the natural environment, and implicitly to accept that human benefit is the only good. Not only is human benefit the only good, but it is quantifiable – for if not, then we can never agree on what constitutes a resource, or who has the greater right to it. Thus someone who speaks of natural resources accepts, again implicitly, that happiness and wellbeing can be quantified. The vocabulary also requires that this quantified human benefit remains, if not constant, then comparable over cultures and generations.

More than this: the wellbeing of the "resource" is insignificant. It is only by setting concern for the wellbeing of the resource to zero that one can regard it as merely something to satisfy human want. Human benefit is the only good. This is the First Commandment; in the limpid words of the King James version of the bible, thou shalt have no other gods before me.

In this observation lies much of the moral argument against the concept of ecosystem services: just as oranges are not the only fruit, so humans are not the only species.

The concept of ecosystem services is one thing; the premise of its proponents is another. It is, in short, that conservation based on intrinsic value of biodiversity has failed to stop the loss of species, ecosystems, and the complex web of interactions between them. Since an ethical argument has failed, then we should try self-interest. By demonstrating that human wellbeing is increased by the services rendered by ecosystems, we can motivate people to protect the source of the service – biodiversity.

We know that conservation is not working because we continue to lose biodiversity. Oh yeah? This is the equivalent of me deciding that my accelerator is not working because my car is losing speed. Why is such a daft non-sequitur accepted by otherwise intelligent people? You immediately thought of many reasons my car might be losing speed – I have the brakes on, I’m going up a hill, I’ve run out of fuel, I’ve run into sand, I’ve hit an oncoming truck. The obvious reason that we are losing biodiversity is the memento mori that stares at us from our looking glass – biodiversity loss is the inevitable result of our debt-based economic system and our swelling population’s unsustainable demands on nature. We all know that. Why do we mutely accept the dangerously diversionary nonsense that "biodiversity is being lost because conservation is not working"?

Ecosystem services takes the utilitarian logic of natural resources one important step further. A "service" by definition benefits humans. If we are to protect services only if they benefit humans, then what happens to the useless ecosystems? Are they simply to be cemented over?

I recently heard a discussion in which one person said "most people are useless", meaning that they are surplus to requirement. The outrage that this provoked was spearheaded by someone saying that you can never prove that anyone is useless, because you can never know enough about their contribution to their social fabric. So does this mean that you can never show that an ecosystem is useless? If so that leaves the ecosystem services argument saying that because some ecosystems benefit humans, we have to protect every ecosystem.

Which may be the right answer, but why reach it by such objectionable means?

For those of us with a reverence of nature, the ecosystem services rhetoric and mindset are abhorrent, being fundamentally immoral and unethical. They take the most ecologically damaging invasive species in the history of life, and place it above all other species on Earth. They cast all other – voiceless – species in the role of consumables. This mindset might have worked for Homo habilis. It will not work for Homo sapiens.

Martin Sharman  for the BioFresh Blog: http://biofreshblog.com/2013/07/03/perspective-martin-sharman-on-ethics-and-the-ecosystem-services-paradigm/

The Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) is leading the development of a set of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), akin to the GCOS Essential Climate Variables (ECVs).

The recently published paper (Science 339, 18 January 2013) describing the EBV concept states that: "Reducing the rate of biodiversity loss and averting dangerous biodiversity change are international goals, reasserted by the Aichi Targets for 2020 by Parties to the United Nations (UN) Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).… However, there is no global, harmonized observation system for delivering regular, timely data on biodiversity change." Read Full Paper and supplementary materials on EBVs here.

GEO BON partners are thus developing (and seeking consensus around) EBVs that could form the basis of monitoring programs worldwide. For more information on EBVs please click here.

GEO BON invites anyone who would like to get involved in EBV development, to take the EBV survey which will run till 31 August 2013. The survey will help us gauge how respondents feel about current candidate EBVs and provides respondents with the opportunity to make suggestions for new/alternative EBVs. Complete survey now!

The Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) and the associated Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT), launched on 16th of September 2013, offer several innovations - some of them unique - at every stage of the publishing process. The workflow allows for authoring, peer-review and dissemination to take place within the same online, collaborative platform.

Open access to content and data is quickly becoming the prevailing model in academic publishing, resulting in part from changes to policies of governments and funding agencies and in part from scientist's desire to get their work more widely read and used. Open access benefits scientists with greater dissemination and citation of their work, and provides society as a whole access to the latest research.

To publish effectively in open access, it is not sufficient simply to provide PDF files online. It is crucial to put them under a reuse-friendly license and to implement technologies that allow machine-readable content and data to be harvested by computers that can collate small scattered data into a big pool. Analyses and modelling of community-owned big data are the only way to confront environmental challenges to society, such as climate change, ecosystems destruction, biodiversity loss and others.

Manuscripts are not submitted to BDJ in the usual way, as word processor files, but are written in the online, collaborative Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT), that provides a set of pre-defined, but flexible article templates. Authors may work on a manuscript and invite external contributors, such as mentors, potential reviewers, linguistic and copy editors, and colleagues, who may read and comment on the text before submission. When a manuscript is completed, it is submitted to the journal with a simple click of a button. The tool also allows automated import of manuscripts from data management platforms, such as Scratchpads.

"This is the first workflow ever to support the full life cycle of a manuscript, from initial drafting through submission, community peer-review, publication and dissemination within a single, online, collaborative platform. By publishing papers in all branches of biodiversity science, including novel article types, such as data papers and software descriptions, BDJ becomes a gateway for either large or small data into the emerging world of "big data", said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, managing director and founder of Pensoft Publishers.

BDJ shortens the distance between "narrative (text)" and "data" publishing. Many data types, such as species occurrences, checklists, measurements and others, are converted into text from spreadsheets into a human-readable format. Conversely text from an article can be downloaded as structured data or harvested by computers for further use.

A novel community-based peer-review provides the opportunity for a large number of specialists in the field to review a manuscript. Authors may also opt for an entirely public peer-review process. Reviewers may opt to be anonymous or to disclose their names. Editors no longer need to check different reviewers' and author's versions of a manuscript because all versions can be consolidated into a single online document, again at the click of a button.

"The Biodiversity Data Journal is not just a journal, not even a data journal in the conventional sense. It is a completely novel workflow and infrastructure to mobilise, review, publish, store, disseminate, make interoperable, collate and re-use data through the act of scholarly publishing!" concluded Dr Vincent Smith from the Natural History Museum in London, the journal's Editor-in-Chief.

The platform has been designed by Pensoft Publishers and was funded in part by the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7) project ViBRANT.

Smith V, Georgiev T, Stoev P, Biserkov J, Miller J, Livermore L, Baker E, Mietchen D, Couvreur T, Mueller G, Dikow T, Helgen K, Frank J, Agosti D, Roberts D, Penev L (2013) Beyond dead trees: integrating the scientific process in the Biodiversity Data Journal. Biodiversity Data Journal 1: e995. DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.1.e995

Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook sets out key steps to harness IT and open data to inform better decisions

Copenhagen, Denmark – A new initiative launched today (2 Oct) aims to coordinate global efforts and funding to deliver the best possible information about life on Earth, and our impacts upon it.

The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook sets out a framework to harness the immense power of information technology and an open data culture to gather unprecedented evidence about biodiversity and to inform better decisions.

The framework is outlined in a document and website entitled Delivering Biodiversity Knowledge in the Information Age, inviting policy makers, funders, researchers, informatics specialists, data holders and others to unite around four key focus areas where progress is needed.

The focus areas, each consisting of several specific components, are:

• Culture – promoting practices and infrastructure for sharing data, using common standards and persistent archives, backed up by strong policy incentives and a community of willing specialists;
• Data – addressing the need to transform all data about species, past and present, into usable and accessible digital formats; from historic collections and literature to citizen science observations, remote sensors and gene sequencing;
• Evidence – organizing and assessing data from all sources to provide clear, consistent views giving them context; including taxonomic organization, integrated occurrences in time and space, capturing information about species interactions, and improving data quality through collaborative curation; and
• Understanding – building models from recorded measurements and observations to support data-driven research and evidence-based planning, including predictive tools, better visualization and feedbacks to prioritize new data capture.

The document is being promoted through a number of upcoming events this month, including the Governing Board of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD SBSTTA) where it forms part of the discussion on meeting global targets to end biodiversity loss.

The framework arose from the Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference which gathered around 100 experts in Copenhagen in July, 2012, to identify critical questions relating to biodiversity and tools needed answer them. Workshop leaders at that conference went on to draw up and author the current document.

The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook includes examples of projects and initiatives contributing to its objectives, and the accompanying website www.biodiversityinformatics.org invites feedback from others wishing to align their own activities to the framework.

A deck of slides for presentations about GBIO is available at http://www.slideshare.net/GBIF/global-biodiversity-informatics-outlook

The 2014 SCIENCE POLICY SYMPOSIUM to support the implementation of the 2020 Biodiversity strategy and the EU Water Framework Directive will be held between 29-30 Jan 2014 in the Museum of Natural Sciences (RBINS), Brussels. The symposium is jointly organised by the EU FP7 funded projects BioFresh and REFRESH.

Numerous EU biodiversity and water related policies have been designed to protect freshwater ecosystems and ensure their sustainable use. However, major challenges still persist in the implementation of these policies. Freshwater ecosystems support 10% of all animal species on Earth and provide a diverse array of functions and services that contribute to human well-being. In recent decades global freshwater biodiversity has declined at a greater rate compared to terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

The Science Policy Symposium for Freshwater Life is organised with the aim of bringing together policy makers and stakeholders from the water, energy and conservation sector, NGOs, the scientific community and selected experts to discuss challenges to implementing the 2020 Biodiversity strategy and the EU Water Framework Directive.

Contact: waterlives.commitee@freshwaterbiodiversity.eu

A correspondence item, published today, 10 Oct 2013, in Nature focuses on the upcoming calls for Horizon 2020 research funding. The European Commission has said that it would prefer bids from open, collaborative consortia rather than the competitive bids seen in previous funding programmes. The authors call for an effort to forge interdisciplinary links in biodiversity research, and ask readers to contribute to discussions on project ideas.

For more information read the full correspondence item in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7470/full/502171d.html

The Biodiversity Data Journal goes beyond the basics of the Gold Open Access

There are two main modes of open access publishing – Green Open Access, where the author has the right to provide free access to the article outside the publisher's web site in a repository or on his/her own website, and Gold Open Access, where articles are available for free download directly from the publisher on the day of publication.

Opening of content and data, however does not necessarily mean "easy to discover and re-use". The Biodiversity Data Journal proposed the term "Advanced Open Access" to describe an integrated, narrative (text) and data publishing model where the main goal is to make content "re-usable" and "interoperable" for both humans and computers.

To publish effectively in open access, it is not sufficient simply to provide PDF or HTML files online. It is crucial to put these under a reuse-friendly license and to implement technologies that allow machine-readable content and data to be harvested and collated into a big data pool.

The Advanced Open Access means:

• Free to read
• Free to re-use, revise, remix, redistribute
• Easy to discover and harvest
• Content automatically summarised by aggregators
• Data and narrative integrated to the widest extent possible
• Human- and computer-readable formats
• Community-based, pre- and post-publication peer-review
• Community ownership of data
• Free to publish or at low cost affordable by all

BDJ shortens the distance between "narrative" (text) and "data" publishing. Many data types, such as species occurrences, checklists, measurements and others, are converted into text from spreadsheets for better readability by humans. Conversely, text from an article can be downloaded as structured data or harvested by computers for further analysis.

"Open access is definitely one of the greatest steps in scientific communication comparable to the invention of the printing technology or the peer-review system. Great but not sufficient!" said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder of Pensoft Publishers and the Biodiversity Data Journal. "We need to switch the focus already from making content 'available for free download' to being discoverable and extractable. Such re-usability multiplies society's investment in science".

Additional information:

The Biodiversity Data Journal is designed by Pensoft Publishers and was funded in part by the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7) project ViBRANT.

Source: Smith V, Georgiev T, Stoev P, Biserkov J, Miller J, Livermore L, Baker E, Mietchen D, Couvreur T, Mueller G, Dikow T, Helgen K, Frank J, Agosti D, Roberts D, Penev L (2013) Beyond dead trees: integrating the scientific process in the Biodiversity Data Journal. Biodiversity Data Journal 1: e995. DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.1.e995

By http://www.eea.europa.eu/

Grassland butterflies have declined dramatically between 1990 and 2011. This has been caused by intensifying agriculture and a failure to properly manage grassland ecosystems, according to a report from the European Environment Agency (EEA).

The Environmental Change Institute (ECI) in the University of Oxford is seeking to appoint a Research Assistant to join the existing research team on two EU funded research projects.

The role will require the development and application of methodologies for undertaking systematic literature reviews, quantitative analysis of model outputs, contribution to the writing of research papers, organisation of workshops and large meetings, and the performance of other duties necessary for the successful completion of both the IMPRESSIONS and OPENNESS projects

You will have a Masters or equivalent in an environmental discipline and strong quantitative skills. You must have the ability to undertake systematic literature reviews and synthesise findings and assist in the management of large research projects. Excellent organisational and writing skills are essential.

This is a part-time (50% FTE) post and is available for 24 months.

The closing date for applications is 12.00 noon on Wednesday 18 December 2013.

You can find more information and apply here.

The Environmental Change Institute (ECI) in the University of Oxford is seeking to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Assistant to join the existing research team on two EU funded research projects: IMPRESSIONS and OPENNESS.

The role will require the development of a range of methodological and modelling approaches, including quantitative, qualitative and mixed techniques, to address a number of environmental science challenges in the contexts of operationalising ecosystem services and investigating cross-sectoral climate change impacts and vulnerabilities. The post provides the opportunity for a researcher with skills in programming, GIS and statistics to develop innovative solutions in research areas critical to ensuring the resilience of our future environment and to expand the modelling capability of the ECI team.

You will have a PhD in a discipline relevant to modelling or environmental sciences and a background in programming and modelling. You will have experience of using Geographical Information Systems and a strong grounding in statistics and/or operational research. Excellent communication skills both written and oral are essential. You will be self-motivated, with the ability to work independently.

This post is available for 24 months in the first instance.

The closing date for applications is 12.00 noon on Wednesday 18 December 2013. It is intended that interviews will be held during the week beginning 13 January 2014.

For more information and to apply for this position, click here.

The final EUBrazilOpenBio newsletter for November 2013 is now available. The  newsletter presents the final press release showcasing the main results of 2 year collaborative work, namely: the innovative, web-based working environment designed to serve biodiversity scenarios; the new version of the Catalogue of Life cross-mapping tool developed in the i4Life project; the provision of the Ecological Niche Modelling tool as a service through the openModeller extended web service, and its application in collaboration with BioVeL; the EUBrazilOpenBio Joint Action Plan.

This newsletter highlights:

• EUBrazilOpenBio Joint Action Plan - drawing on policy strategies, analysing  current progress in contributing to international targets and defining actions for future collaborative research. It defines common actions with the aim of contributing to relevant Aichi Targets in the years ahead.
• EGI federatec use case on ecology - Over the last two years, BioVeL and EUBrazilOpenBio have joined forces to make openModeller ready for cloud deployment. Work within the EGI Federated Cloud Task Force has led to considerable success in enabling the openModeller service on the EGI Federated Cloud.
• EUBrazilOpenBio results - EUBrazilOpenBio Technical developments, training materials and sessions, publications and papers, media spotlights and policy results all collected in one page.
• A vision from the Experts - "The Crossmapper itself is a great tool, and an ideal way to identify errors and updates". Dr Christina Flann is one of the experts providing their vision on EUBrazilOpenBio story.

You can find an online version of the final EUBrazilOpenBio newsletter here.

The Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg offers in cooperation with GEO BON and iDiv the position of Executive Director for the duration of 30 months (initially limited till September 30th, 2016 with possibility of extension). The Executive Director will work in close collaboration with the incoming Chair of the GEO BON Steering Committee, Prof. Henrique M. Pereira (iDiv) and the incoming vice-chair, Dr. Mike Gill (Environment Canada), thematic workgroup coordinators, regional BON coordinators, the GEO BON Steering Committee and the GEO secretariat.

Requirements:
• Ph.D. in ecology or related field
• excellent diploma or master degree in a relevant field
• demonstrable experience in project management with executive leadership in organizations a plus
• excellent communication skills, fluency in English, knowledge of other languages being a plus
• willingness to travel abroad frequently, outgoing and at ease in multicultural backgrounds

Topic/job description:
• Providing visible leadership for GEO BON and representing GEO BON at scientific and policy meetings
• Creating funding opportunities through engagement with potential donors
• Coordinating activities of GEO BON Working Groups and Regional Observation Networks
• Liaising with national and regional organizations involved in biodiversity monitoring and reporting
• Organize the Steering Committee, All-hands and other meetings of GEO BON and manage the communication activities of GEO BON, including a regular newsletter and a website
• Manage, as and when required, activities and inputs requested by the GEO secretariat

Applications should be directed to emily.keller@idiv.de and addressed to Henrique M. Pereira, Professor of Biodiversity Conservation, iDiv. Applications should be in a single PDF file with reference file number (D 189/2013). Applications are accepted until January 6th, 2014.

For more information see attached the full text of the job offer.

The 2013 International Conference on Open Data in Biodiversity and Ecological Research took place between 20 - 22 Nov 2013, hosted by Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. With the aim to promote open data in science twelve foreign speakers introduced relevant projects and initiatives in the sphere of biodiversity informatics: AP-BON, DataONE, Ecological Research, EU-BON, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Japan Biodiversity Information Facility (JBIF), linked open data, National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), Pensoft, and Thomson Reuters.

Dirk Schmeller (UFZ) and Lyubomir Penev (Pensoft), who presented EU BON at the conference, share their experience in a recent interview:

What are the aims and main outcomes from this meeting?

LP: Taiwan has an impressive national policy with regard to data management in biodiversity sciences. The meeting summarised years of effort of Taiwanese scientists and especially of Academia Sinica to integrate data and make them publicly available. It is sufficient to mention that Taiwan has established four national nodes of the largest international biodiversity platforms, that is TaiBIF (of GBIF), TaiCOL (of Catalogue of Lige), TaiEOL (of EOL) and TaiBOL (of Barcode of Life).

Were there any biodiversity data integration models presented at the meeting that can be adopted and implemented in EUBON?

LP: Perhaps not directly, however the impressive amount and quality of work and the accumulated experience of the Taiwanese and Japanese colleagues would certainly be of value for EU BON. In addition, there are well established contacts already between the FP7 project SCALES and the National University of Taiwan which could serve as a stepping stone as well, because two of the SCALES partners participate in EU BON and at the meeting (UFZ and Pensoft).

The interest to the EU BON presentation by Dirk was great. An indicator for that was that more  than 120  EU BON leaflets have been picked up by the participants from the information desk.

Did you discuss any opportunities for partnership with organizations and initiatives from Asia and America, which deal with biodiversity data integration and accessibility?

LP: Yes, there were a lot of discussions how to mobilize and publish biodiversity data and most probably several data publishing projects will appear as a result of the discussions. These pilots could be used for the EU BON goals.

US National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) has activities similar to those planned by WP4 Link environment to biodiversity: analyses of patterns, processes and trends. Is there something that EU BON can learn from the experience of its American colleagues?

DS: It is important to keep a close link with Brian Wee and NEON, as they have a head start in comparison to EU BON. I am sure that a collaboration would benefit EU BON to work efficiently.

What is your prognosis for the successful establishment of the data publishing model in scholarly literature, and more specifically in spheres such as Ecology, Genetics, Physiology and Paleontology?

DS: Most research is financed by taxpayer money and should become publicly available once the analyses a researchers has intended are completed. I see a huge potential to publish this data in scholarly literature. I, however, see also quite some difficulties to recombine relevant datasets across different sources for further going analyses. I also see difficulties in the willingness of researchers to share data, as in many cases they see these as their own.

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a new and prominent technology to publish and share data on the web. Could you please explain what exactly hides behind this concept, and how could EU BON benefit from it?

LP: The meeting in Taiwan was impressive also in the wide representation of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) technologies in integration of biodiversity data, especially from a group from the National Museum of Japan and the University of Tokyo. RDF and the OWL Web Ontology Language are definitely the way to go if we want to make diverse data sets interoperable; the implementation of RDF in a pilot phase would be of primary importance for the success of EU BON.

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

The Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE, Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France), in its Research Group "Macroecology and Biogeography of Global Change (MacroBio)" has a 36-months PhD position open for applications. The position is funded by the European Commission through the FP7 Research Project OPERAs and affiliated to the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS).

The topic is the broad-scale spatial mapping and quantification of ecosystem service trade-offs following from management of agro-ecosystems in the Mediterranean basin. The context of the research includes the environment (climate, land use) as well as trends in societal demands for services. Based on scientific literature, spatial databases and the outputs from a process-based ecosystem model, the candidate will analyze, quantify and map ecosystem service trade-offs. Service valuation and indicator representation methods will be developed with the IMBE team. The approach is pan-Mediterranean: a significant part of the work will therefore consist of helping to reduce gaps in data and knowledge for the sum of countries around the Mediterranean basin. 

The research group works in close interaction with international programs such as Future Earth (through its project ecoSERVICES) and science-policy interfaces such as IPBES.

The successful candidate will have completed a Masters degree (or equivalent) in one of the environmental sciences, have experience in the handling of spatial data from databases, literature and models, have knowledge of existing concepts of ecosystem services, and be able to place results in the context of the Mediterranean basin (this includes the European, as well as North African and Eastern countries). The working language is English, appropriate skills in French or another of the Mediterranean languages will be an advantage.

The position will be filled when a suitable candidate has been identified. To apply for this position, please send a letter of application, demonstrating your ability to understand the task, and your CV as soon as possible, but before the 31st of January 2013, by e-mail to Ms. Gabriela Boéri (Gabriela.Boeri@imbe.fr). For any questions about the task, working conditions, or the OPERAs project, please contact Professor Wolfgang Cramer (Wolfgang.Cramer@imbe.fr).

The second plenary of the Platform met in December 2013 and agreed an ambitious work programme for 2014-2018: Details of the agreed work programme are available in the advanced meeting report of the Plenary.

The IPBES Secretariat have now issued a call for experts to help scope, advise on and deliver the work programme. Governments and relevant stakeholders can put forward nominations, from which the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel of IPBES will select a maximum of 20% of experts from the stakeholder nominations, and the rest from the government nominations.

The UK expects IPBES to make use of the best scientists/experts from all relevant disciplines - natural science, social science, economics, data and modelling and traditional knowledge, and to achieve a geographical and gender balance among those experts in the delivery of the IPBES work programme.

More information of the required topics to be covered by experts, alongside the nomination forms and how to nominate can be found in the attachments below.

EU BON site data management workshop and Memorandum of Understanding

A joint workshop of the Sierra Nevada LTER site and EU BON was held on 29-31 January 2014 in Granada, Spain and was hosted by the University of Granada. The aim of this meeting was to bring together the Spanish members of the Sierra Nevada LTER site and test site partners from EU BON (WP1, WP2 and WP5) to discuss and develop a closer relationship in exchanging datasets and experiences in site management, long-term monitoring activities and technical requirements for data management.

During the first day of the workshop, 19 participants from EU BON, the Sierra Nevada LTER site (e.g. Regino Zamora Rodriguez and Francisco Bonet) and guests from the remote sensing EU project BIO_SOS and GBIF Spain gave an overview of their activities to obtain information on their projects and to point out likely synergies and linkages. First, the Sierra Nevada LTER site was introduced, particularly the methodologies to monitor and evaluate biodiversity and the structure of the information system Linaria was shown. Thereafter EU BON testing sites (Doñana, Rhine-Main, Amvrakikos) outlined their current activities regarding data collection, data processing and data integration, in addition to that the results of a recently conducted gap analysis of the test sites were presented. In the afternoon session of the meeting, the planned information architecture of EU BON was explained and ways outlined of how biodiversity data could be integrated.

At the second day, the participants visited a highly monitored area located in the southern part of Sierra Nevada (Alpujarras) that is covered mainly by Quercus pyrenaica forests. The field trip included stops at a meteorological station, a traditional hydrological system was visited to show former human impact in the area and the functionality of a field NDVI camera was shown. This site-trip was also used to officially hand-over the Memorandum of Understanding, signed between the University of Granada and EU BON, to strengthen the cooperation between the Sierra Nevada LTER and the EU BON test sites. Anke Hoffmann on behalf of EU BON handed the MoU to Professor Regino Zamora Rodriguez, the scientific coordinator of the Sierra Nevada Global Change Observatory. The University of Granada is now a new associate partner of EU BON, a consortium with currently 30 partners from 18 countries.

At the last day local scientists gave an overview of the research conducted in Sierra Nevada. After that session, the workshop aimed to discuss the functionality of the envisaged MetaCat (dataprovider for Metadata) approach for the EU BON test sites and the advantages of self-developed information system Linaria of the Sierra Nevada LTER site.

EU BON will further intensify the dialogue with the University of Granada and the Sierra Nevada LTER site. It is scheduled to have a further meeting at the upcoming General Meeting of EU BON (Greece, 30 March-2 April 2014) to strengthen the partnership with the LTER test site.

For further questions please contact Anke Hoffmann or Florian Wetzel

Presentations from the meeting:

Day 1

1. Zamora - Ramos - Sierra Nevada global change obs
2. Bonet - The Linaria information system
3. Hoffmann - Häuser - Introduction to EU BON
4. Juan Negro  - CSIC-EBD
4. Juan Negro Donana 2
4. Juan Negro Donana 3
5. Stoll - test site Rhein - Main
6. Dailianis - test site Amvrakikos
7. Wetzel - Gap analysis
8. Palma Blonda - BIO_SOS and remote sensing
9. Pando - EU BON GBIF Granada 2014
10. Kunin- EU BON Work package 3

Day 3

1. Megia - Mendenez - Climate Change andd elevational range shifts
2. Gomez - Hybridization
3. Villar - Argaiz  Long time series in high mountain lakes
4. Moreno - Vegetation changes during Holocene

Workshop Agenda

Workshop Minutes

Workshop Photos (Google+ | Facebook)

Following the GEO-X Plenary in Geneva earlier this year (15-16 January 2014), GEO now issues Revision 3 of the GEO 2012-2015 Work Plan incorporating comments from the meeting. The new work plan is available through the GEO Work Plan Information Management system.

The GEO Work Plan provides the agreed framework for implementing the GEOSS 10-Year Implementation Plan (2005-2015). It is a living document that is updated annually. The 2012-2015 Work Plan has been designed to meet the 2015 GEOSS Strategic Targets. As a result, the tasks of the Work Plan correspond to outcomes identified as being necessary to meet the Strategic Targets.

The highlighted actions in the revised work plan are as follows:

• Call for Participation (CFP) in the 6th phase of the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP)
• GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) - Initial Operating Capability (IOC) phase
• Data Sharing Principles implementation
• AIP information page to GEOSS Implementation
• Call for Proposals: Earth Observations in Decision Support Projects

The GEO Work Plan provides a flexible action-oriented framework for developing new projects within and across areas, and coordinating strategies and investments. Benefits and opportunities include inter-alia: fostering networking and partnerships (new contacts and collaborations); launching regional and/or global initiatives (e.g. GEO BON, GEOGLAM); providing access to data (making more data available); enlarging user-bases (users grow in numbers and diversity); developing and maintaining capacity (participants build on complementarity); increasing visibility and high-level support (e.g. through the GEO Website, Newsletter, Plenary, Ministerial); and leveraging funding for activities (funding mechanisms value contributions to GEOSS implementation, like the European 7^th Framework Programme).

An international conference Adaptation Strategies to Global Environmental Change in the Mediterranean City and the Role of Global Earth Observations will take place between 10-11 June 2014 in Athens, Greece. The conference will explore the potential of earth observations and thrust climate information transfer from the science to the stakeholder application realm, in order to develop suitable adaptation measures at national and regional levels.

It will identify best adaptation programs and approaches to global environmental change in Mediterranean-climate cities. The aim is to enhance and strengthen European and international cooperation in the context of the activities within the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), and promote tools and options for adaptation strategies. The Conference will help local and regional authorities and stakeholders to gain insight on the role of EO-based services in adapting to climate chance impacts in urban hot-spot areas.

The eighth annual series of GEO European Projects Workshops will be consequently held on 12-13 June as a follow-up of the conference. The worksops are intended to bring all those interested in and actively contributing to the Global Earth Observations System of Systems (GEOSS) from all over Europe together, in order to present their work and discuss how Europe can contribute to this international effort, especially in the wake of the launch of the new EU Framework Programme for Research, Horizon 2020, and the renewal of the mandate of GEO for another 10 years through the endorsement of the 2014.

Registrations opens: 16 February 2014

Information and registration: www.mariolopoulosfoundation.gr/medcity2014

First Announcement (pdf flie)

Care about biodiversity protection and science-policy dialogue? The second BESAFE stakeholder workshop might be just the thing for you.

The BESAFE project invites all interested policy makers, NGO representatives, decision makers and people, who argue ('lobby') for biodiversity protection to take part in its second stakeholder workshop, focusing the results from the project case studies and the best ways to make them useful through a stakeholder focused web-based tool.

The workshop will be held on 13 and 14 May 2004 at the Park Inn Brussels Midi, Brussels, Belgium. To register and participate is easy just follow this link, which will take you to an easy to follow and use registration page.

On the afternoon of 13 May BESAFE will present the results of the project’s case studies and then their use and implications will be discussed with stakeholders. The morning of 14 May is reserved for a learning workshop on the best ways to unlock and present project results. As committed stakeholder involvement is crucial to BESAFE’s success, we hope that you will be able to join us in Brussels!

In a nutshell, BESAFE investigates the effectiveness of different types of arguments in convincing policy makers to take action for biodiversity protection in a variety of circumstances. The project has two specific focus areas: the interactions of environmental protection policies between governance scales, and the contribution that ecosystem services BESAFE is committed to produce practically usable results and to make them available and easily accessible through a web-based tool. This is a goal we can clearly only achieve through input and feedback from stakeholders. BESAFE is therefore set up as an interactive project in which we inform and consult those on a regular basis.

Deadline for registration is the 1st of April 2014, but registration will be closed earlier when our limit of 25 stakeholders is reached. Due to this limited capacity, registration is subject to approval.

Issue 72 of the CBD Technical Series is now out focusing on "EARTH OBSERVATION FOR BIODIVERSITY MONITORING : A review of current approaches and future opportunities for tracking progress towards the Aichi Biodiversity Targets". The issue shows how earth observation technologies can and should fit into systems for biodiversity monitoring, as well as demonstrates how these approaches could further improve relevant indicators for the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. It illustrates a clear track from observations done by remote sensing platforms through Essential Biodiversity Variables to biodiversity indicators and ultimately to the assessment of progress towards the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and ultimately in support of evidence-based decision making. EU BON is also featured in this report.

The goal of the CBD Technical Series is to contribute to the dissemination of up-to-date and accurate information on selected topics that are important for the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the equitable sharing of its benefits. A large and growing body of evidence has clearly established the need to disseminate synthesis publications relevant to CBD objectives and selected reports presented at CBD meetings.

The CBD Technical Series is intended to:

• Foster scientific and technical cooperation;
• Improve communication between the Convention and the scientific community;
• Increase awareness of current biodiversity-related problems and concerns; and
• Facilitate widespread and effective use of the growing body of scientific and technical information on conserving and using biological diversity.

The full report is available here.

Researchers and the public can now have immediate access to data underlying discovery of new species of life on Earth, under a new streamlined system linking taxonomic research with open data publication.

The partnership paves the way for unlocking and preserving a wealth of 'small data' backing up research conclusions, which often become lost within a few years of an article's publication in an academic journal.

In the first example of the new collaboration in action, the Biodiversity Data Journal carries a peer-reviewed description of a new species of spider discovered during a field course in Borneo just one month ago. At the same time, the data showing location of the spider's occurrence in nature are automatically harvested by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and richer data such as images and the species description are exported to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).

This contrasts with an average 'shelf life' of twenty-one years between field discovery of a new species and its formal description and naming, according to a recent study in Current Biology.

A group of scientists and students discovered the new species of spider during a field course in Borneo, supervised by Jeremy Miller and Menno Schilthuizen from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, based in Leiden, the Netherlands. The species was described and submitted online from the field to the Biodiversity Data Journal through a satellite internet connection, along with the underlying data . The manuscript was peer-reviewed and published within two weeks of submission. On the day of publication, GBIF and EOL have harvested and included the data in their respective platforms.

The new workflow established between GBIF, EOL and Pensoft Publishers' Biodiversity Data Journal, with the support of the Swiss NGO Plazi, automatically exports treatment and occurrence data into a Darwin Core Archive, a standard format used by GBIF and other networks to share data from many different sources. This means GBIF can extract these data on the day of the article's publication, making them immediately available to science and the public through its portal and web services, further enriching the biodiversity data already freely accessible through the GBIF network. Similarly, the information and multimedia resources become accessible via EOL's species pages.

One of the main purposes of the partnership is to ensure that such data remain accessible for future use in research. A recent study published in Current Biology found that 80 % of scientific data are lost in less than 10 years following their creation.

Donald Hobern, GBIF's Executive Secretary, commented: "A great volume of extremely important information about the world's species is effectively inaccessible, scattered across thousands of small datasets carefully curated by taxonomic researchers. I find it very exciting that this new workflow will help preserve these 'small data' and make them immediately available for re-use through our networks."

"Re-use of data published on paper or in PDF format is a huge challenge in all branches of science", said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, managing director of Pensoft and founder of the Biodiversity Data Journal. "This problem has been tackled firstly by our partners from Plazi who created a workflow to extract data from legacy literature and submit it to GBIF. The workflow currently launched by GBIF, EOL and the Biodiversity Data Journal radically shortens the way from publication of data to their sharing and re-use and makes the whole process cost efficient", added Prof. Penev.

The elaboration of the workflow from BDJ and Plazi to GBIF through Darwin Core Archive was supported by the EU-funded project EU BON (Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network, grant No 308454). The basic concept has been initially discussed and outlined in the course of the pro-iBiosphere project (Coordination and policy development in preparation for a European Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System, addressing Acquisition, Curation, Synthesis, Interoperability and Dissemination, grant No 312848).

Original source:

Miller J, Schilthuizen M, Burmester J, van der Graaf L, Merckx V, Jocqué M, Kessler P, Fayle T, Breeschoten T, Broeren R, Bouman R, Chua W, Feijen F, Fermont T, Groen K, Groen M, Kil N, de Laat H, Moerland M, Moncoquet C, Panjang E, Philip A, Roca-Eriksen R, Rooduijn B, van Santen M, Swakman V, Evans M, Evans L, Love K, Joscelyne S, Tober A, Wilson H, Ambu L, Goossens B (2014) Dispatch from the field: ecology of micro web-building spiders with description of a new species. Biodiversity Data Journal 2: e1076. DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e1076

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

The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.  ESA is an international organisation with 20 Member States.

How is EU BON connected to space research? As a speaker at the EU BON General Meeting, which took place on Crete between 30 March - 3 April 2014, Marc Paganini of the European Space Agency explains the collaboration between ESA and GEO BON, and how EU BON is involved.

In the following interview he continues the topic:

Marc Paganini (left) and Dirk Schmeller (right) at the EU BON General Meeting 2014

1) For most of the general public space and biodiversity research hardly have anything to do with each other, can you explain how the European Space Agency (ESA) and the idea of remote sensing communities make these two meet?

It is widely recognized that in-situ observations available on biological diversity are very scarce for most of the Earth’s ecosystems and are often insufficient for determining precisely the global status and trends of biodiversity worldwide. In most cases, satellite Earth Observations do not provide a direct measurement of biodiversity but, if properly used with ground collection of biodiversity data and species and habitat modeling, remote sensing can become an important and essential component of biodiversity monitoring systems. There are multiple cases where remote sensing is often the only instrument that can offer large scale monitoring, as for example in highly variable ecosystems such as wetlands or in remote areas that can hardly be monitored by field campaigns.

The recent and future evolution of the portfolio of EO satellites offers huge potential for increasing the use of EO products into biodiversity monitoring systems. The lack of data continuity has always been a barrier for the biodiversity community to invest in EO technology.  A commitment from Space Agencies to provide sustained observations on the long term is a strong incentive for the biodiversity community to invest in Space. The Sentinel series of the European Copernicus program, together with the freely available data from other space agencies such as the Landsat family of the US Geological Survey, will bring unprecedented long-term continuity of observations for the biodiversity community. In that context, free and open data policy to taxpayer-funded satellite remote sensing imagery is becoming a "de facto" standard amongst Space Agencies and a unique opportunity for the biodiversity community to use widely EO products to monitor biodiversity trends.

2) How is the ESA involved with the aims of EU BON, where do the two initiatives intersect?

ESA and many other Space Agencies are becoming more and more committed in helping the biodiversity community at large, in improving their capacity to use remote sensing data for monitoring biodiversity trends.

First there is a coordinated action from all Space Agencies through the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) and its involvement in the Group of Earth Observation (GEO). The GEO is a voluntary partnership of governments and international organizations who engaged jointly in developing a comprehensive, coordinated and sustained system of observations of the Earth with the ultimate objective to enhance scientifically-sound decision making. Biodiversity is one of the primary societal benefit areas of GEO and is addressed by the GEO Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON). CEOS is actively involved in GEO BON, principally through the participation to its steering committee of the European, US and German Space Agencies, namely ESA, NASA and DLR. Since EU BON is the principal European contribution to GEO BON, and has, amongst its objectives, the aim to integrate biodiversity data from ground observations to remote sensing information, ESA is directly concerned by the EU BON development in using remote sensing for terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms.

Second, ESA has its own EO application development programs, and funds a wide range of Research & Development projects for biodiversity and ecosystem services. In that context, ESA has established close relationships with the European Environment Agency (EEA) but also with the secretariats and scientific bodies of major Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEA) such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Ramsar Convention on wetlands. The findings of the ESA-funded EO projects on biodiversity and ecosystem services are highly relevant to EU BON. It is therefore expected that the ESA and EU BON activities in relation to the use of RS for biodiversity monitoring will offer some convergence of evidence showcases for the whole biodiversity community.

3) How do you see the future of collaboration with EU BON?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original Source:

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

The Heinz-Nixdorf-Chair for Distributed Information Systems at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena (Germany) invites applications for a fully funded PhD student position in Biodiversity Data Visualization for the data management project of the Biodiversity Exploratories (BE) Priority Program.

Deadline for application: 2nd, May 2014

Start date: June 2014 or later

What this is about

The data management project provides the platform for data storage and information exchange for the projects of the DFG Priority Program "Biodiversity Exploratories". Examples of the thematic focus of the projects include botany, forestry, soil, animal, fluxes, modeling, and remote sensing. This diversity is reflected in the format, structure, and semantics of their data which we manage.

Tasks in this project will be centered on the investigation and development of novel visualization methods and user-friendly tools for exploration, search and discovery, quality assurance and integration of the heterogeneous, large volume biodiversity data.  Overall, the study should contribute to the science of visualization for big-data-driven biodiversity research.

More information on the requirements, conditions and how to apply find in the official job offer attached below.

A new updated version of Euro+Med Plantbase was made available online in the middle of April 2014. For the first time, the economically important gymnosperms (coniferous trees), and the genus Thalictrum, as the first part of the large Ranunculaceae family, are treated in Euro+Med Plantbase.

Euro+Med Plantbase integrates and critically evaluates information from Flora Europaea, Med-Checklist, the Flora of Macaronesia, and from regional and national floras and checklists from the area as well as additional taxonomic and floristic literature. This is complemented by the European taxa of several families taken from the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families and of the Leguminosae from the International Legume Database and Information Service ILDIS. By April 2014 it provides access to 187 plant families, corresponding to ca. 92 % of the European flora of vascular plants.

The Euro+Med Plantbase web portal is accessible at http://ww2.bgbm.org/EuroPlusMed/.

Web services for Euro+Med merged with Fauna Europaea, ERMS, and Index Fungorum are provided by VLIZ at http://www.eu-nomen.eu/portal/webservices.php. The services will be also registered for use in EU BON in summer 2014.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2014) doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0190

Assessing and predicting ecosystem responses to global environmental change and its impacts on human well-being are high priority targets for the scientific community. The potential for synergies between remote sensing science and ecology, especially satellite remote sensing and conservation biology, has been highlighted by many in the past. Yet, the two research communities have only recently begun to coordinate their agendas. Such synchronization is the key to improving the potential for satellite data effectively to support future environmental management decision-making processes. With this themed issue, we aim to illustrate how integrating remote sensing into ecological research promotes a better understanding of the mechanisms shaping current changes in biodiversity patterns and improves conservation efforts. Added benefits include fostering innovation, generating new research directions in both disciplines and the development of new satellite remote sensing products.