I was convinced that if my time is not up, this virus can never kill me

Nawaz Sharif has been kept in check with a scare, otherwise he would have fled long ago, says PTI founder

Privacy: The anonymous cash of our analog parents is fast disappearing, and in its wake comes trackable and permissioned debit cards to our children. While convenient, it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

In the last article, we looked at how our analog parents could anonymously buy a newspaper on the street corner with some coins, and read their news of choice without anybody knowing about it. This observation extends to far more than just newspapers, of course.

This ability of our parents – the ability to conduct decentralized, secure transactions anonymously – has been all but lost in a landscape that keeps pushing card payments for convenience. The convenience of not paying upfront, with credit cards; the convenience of always paying an exact amount, with debit cards; the convenience of not needing to carry and find exact amounts with every purchase. Some could even argue that having every transaction listed on a bank statement is a convenience of accounting.

But with accounting comes tracking. With tracking comes predictability and unwanted accountability.

It’s been said that a VISA executive can predict a divorce one year ahead of the parties involved, based on changes in purchase patterns. Infamously, a Target store was targeting a high school-aged woman with maternity advertising, which at first made her father furious: but as things turned out, the young woman was indeed pregnant. Target knew, and her own father didn’t.

This is because when we’re no longer using anonymous cash, every single purchase is tracked and recorded with the express intent on using it against us — whether for influencing us to make a choice to deplete our resources (“buy more”) or for punishing us for buying something we shouldn’t have, in a wide variety of conceivable ways.

China is taking the concept one step further, as has been written here before, and in what must have been the inspiration for a Black Mirror episode, is weighting its citizens’ Obedience Scores based on whether they buy useful or lavish items — useful in the views of the regime, of course.

It’s not just the fact that transactions of our digital children are logged for later use against them, in ways our analog parents could never conceive of.

It’s also that the transactions of our digital children are permissioned. When our digital children buy a bottle of water with a debit card, a transaction clears somewhere in the background. But that also means that somebody can decide to have the transaction not clear; somebody has the right to arbitrarily decide what people get to buy and not buy, if this trend continues for our digital children. That is a horrifying thought.

Our parents were using decentralized, censorship resistant, anonymous transactions in using plain cash. There is no reason our digital children should have anything less. It’s a matter of liberty and self-determination.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: In the last article, we focused on how people are tracked today when using credit cards instead of cash. But few pay attention to the fact that we’re tracked when using cash today, too.

Few people pay attention to the little sign on the revolving door on Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It says that wi-fi and bluetooth tracking of every single individual is taking place in the airport.

What sets Schiphol Airport apart isn’t that they track individual people’s movements to the sub-footstep level in a commercial area. (It’s for commercial purposes, not security purposes.) No, what sets Schiphol apart is that they bother to tell people about it. (The Netherlands tend to take privacy seriously, as does Germany, and for the same reason.)

Locator beacons are practically a standard in bigger commercial areas now. They ping your phone using wi-fi and bluetooth, and using signal strength triangulation, a grid of locator beacons is able to show how every single individual is moving in realtime at the sub-footstep level. This is used to “optimize marketing” — in other words, find ways to trick people’s brains to spend resources they otherwise wouldn’t have. Our own loss of privacy is being turned against us, as it always is.

Where do people stop for a while, what catches their attention, what doesn’t catch their attention, what’s a roadblock for more sales?

These are legitimate questions. However, taking away people’s privacy in order to answer those questions is not a legitimate method to answer them.

This kind of mass individual tracking has even been deployed at city levels, which happened in complete silence until the Privacy Oversight Board of a remote government sounded the alarms. The city of Västerås got the green light to continue tracking once some formal criteria were met.

Yes, this kind of people tracking is documented to have been already rolled out citywide in at least one small city in a remote part of the world (Västerås, Sweden). With the government’s Privacy Oversight Board having shrugged and said “fine, whatever”, don’t expect this to stay in the small town of Västerås. Correction, wrong tense: don’t expect it to have stayed in just Västerås, where it was greenlit three years ago.

Our analog parents had the ability to walk around untracked in the city and street of their choice, without it being used or held against them. It’s not unreasonable that our digital children should have the same ability.

There’s one other way to buy things with cash which avoids this kind of tracking, and that’s paying cash-on-delivery when ordering something online or over the phone to your door — in which case your purchase is also logged and recorded, just in another type of system.

This isn’t only used against the ordinary citizen for marketing purposes, of course. It’s used against the ordinary citizen for every conceivable purpose. But we’ll be returning to that in a later article in the series.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: We’ve seen how our digital children’s privacy is violated in everything they buy with cash or credit, in a way our analog parents would have balked at. But even worse: our digital children’s privacy is also violated by tracking what they don’t buy — either actively decline or just plain walk away from.

Amazon just opened its first “Amazon Go” store, where you just pick things into a bag and leave, without ever going through a checkout process. As part of the introduction of this concept, Amazon points out that you can pick something off the shelves, at which point it’ll register in your purchase — and change your mind and put it back, at which point you’ll be registered and logged as having not purchased the item.

Sure, you’re not paying for something you changed your mind about, which is the point of the video presentation. But it’s not just about the deduction from your total amount to pay: Amazon also knows you considered buying it and eventually didn’t, and will be using that data.

Our digital children are tracked this way on a daily basis, if not an hourly basis. Our analog parents never were.

When we’re shopping for anything online, there are even simple plugins for the most common merchant solutions with the business terms “funnel analysis” — where in the so-called “purchase funnel” our digital children choose to leave the process of purchasing something — or “cart abandonment analysis”.

We can’t even simply walk away from something anymore without it being recorded, logged, and cataloged for later use against us.

But so-called “cart abandonment” is only one part of the bigger issue of tracking what we’re interested in in the age of our digital children, but didn’t buy. There is no shortage of people today who would swear they were just discussing a very specific type of product with their phone present (say, “black leather skirts”) and all of a sudden, advertising for that very specific type of product would pop up all over Facebook and/or Amazon ads. Is this really due to some company listening for keywords through the phone? Maybe, maybe not. All we know since Snowden is that if it’s technically possible to invade privacy, it is already happening.

(We have to assume here these people still need to learn how to install a simple adblocker. But still.)

At the worst ad-dense places, like (but not limited to) airports, there are eyeball trackers to find out which ads you look at. They don’t yet change to match your interests, as per Minority Report, but that’s already present on your phone and on your desktop, and so wouldn’t be foreign to see in public soon, either.

In the world of our analog parents, we weren’t registered and tracked when we bought something.

In the world of our digital children, we’re registered and tracked even when we don’t buy something.

Privacy: Our analog parents’ dating preferences were considered a most private of matters. For our digital children, their dating preferences is a wholesale harvesting opportunity for marketing purposes. How did this terrifying shift come to be?

I believe the first big harvester of dating preferences was the innocent-looking site hotornot.com 18 years ago, a site that more seemed like the after-hours side work of a frustrated highschooler than a clever marketing ploy. It simply allowed people to rate their subjective perceived attractiveness of a photograph, and to upload photographs for such rating. (The two founders of this alleged highschool side project netted $10 million each for it when the site was sold.)

Then the scene exploded, with both user-funded and advertising-funded dating sites, all of which cataloged people’s dating preferences to the smallest detail.

Large-scale pornography sites, like PornHub, also started cataloging people’s porn preferences, and contiously make interesting infographics about geographical differences in preferences. (The link is safe for work, it’s data and maps in the form of a news story on Inverse, not on Pornhub directly.) It’s particularly interesting, as Pornhub is able to break down preferences quite specifically by age, location, gender, income brackets, and so on.

Do you know anyone who told Pornhub any of that data? No, I don’t either. And still, they are able to pinpoint who likes what with quite some precision, precision that comes from somewhere.

And then, of course, we have the social networks (which may or may not be responsible for that tracking, by the way).

It’s been reported that Facebook can tell if you’re gay or not with as little as three likes. Three. And they don’t have to be related to dating preferences or lifestyle preferences — they can be any random selections that just map up well with bigger patterns.

This is bad enough in itself, on the basis that it’s private data. At a very minimum, our digital childrens’ preferences should be their own, just like their favorite ice cream.

But a dating preferences are not just a preference like choosing your flavor of ice cream, is it? It should be, but it isn’t at this moment in time. It could also be something you’re born with. Something that people even get killed for if they’re born with the wrong preference.

It is still illegal to be born homosexual in 73 out of 192 countries, and out of these 73, eleven prescribe the death penalty for being born this way. A mere 23 out of 192 countries have full marriage equality.

Further, although the policy direction is quite one-way toward more tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion at this point in time, that doesn’t mean the policy trend can’t reverse for a number of reasons, most of them very bad. People who felt comfortable in expressing themselves can again become persecuted.

Genocide is almost always based on public data collected with benevolent intent.

This is why privacy is the last line of defense, not the first. And this last line of defense, which held fast for our analog parents, has been breached for our digital children. That matter isn’t taken nearly seriously enough.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: At worst, our analog parents could be prevented from meeting each other. Our digital children are prevented from talking about particular subjects, once the conversation is already happening. This is a horrifying development.

When our digital children are posting a link to The Pirate Bay somewhere on Facebook, a small window sometimes pops up saying “you have posted a link with potentially harmful content. Please refrain from posting such links.”

Yes, even in private conversations. Especially in private conversations.

This may seem like a small thing, but it is downright egregious. Our digital children are not prevented from having a conversation, per se, but are monitored for bad topics that the regime doesn’t like being discussed, and are prevented from discussing those topics. This is far worse than preventing certain people from just meeting.

The analog equivalent would be if our parents were holding an analog phone conversation, and a menacing third voice popped into the conversation with a slow voice speaking just softly enough to be perceived as threatening: “You have mentioned a prohibited subject. Please refrain from discussing prohibited subjects in the future.”

Our parents would have been horrified if this happened — and rightly so!

But in the digital world of our children, the same phenomenon is instead cheered on by the same people who would abhor it if it happened in their world, to themselves.

In this case, of course, it is any and all links to The Pirate Bay that are considered forbidden topics, under the assumption — assumption! — that they lead to manufacturing of copies that would be found in breach of the copyright monopoly in a court of law.

When I first saw the Facebook window above telling me to not discuss forbidden subjects, I was trying to distribute political material I had created myself, and used The Pirate Bay to distribute. It happens to be a very efficient way to distribute large files, which is exactly why it is being used by a lot of people for that purpose (gee, who would have thought?), including people like myself who wanted to distribute large collections of political material.

There are private communications channels, but far too few use them, and the politicians at large (yes, this includes our analog parents) are still cheering on this development, because “terrorism” and other bogeymen.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: Our parents, at least in the Western world, had a right to hold private conversations face-to-face, whether out in public or in the sanctity of their home. This is all but gone for our digital children.

Not long ago, it was the thing of horror books and movies that there would actually be widespread surveillance of what you said inside your own home. Our analog parents literally had this as scary stories worthy of Halloween, mixing the horror with the utter disbelief.

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being surveilled at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual device was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they listened to everybody all the time. But at any rate they could listen to you whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.” — from Nineteen Eighty-Four

In the West, we prided ourselves on not being the East — the Communist East, specifically — who regarded their own citizens as suspects: suspects who needed to be cleansed of bad thoughts and bad conversations, to the degree that ordinary homes were wiretapped for ordinary conversations.

There were microphones under every café table and in every residence. And even if there weren’t in the literal sense, just there and then, they could still be anywhere, so you had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.

“Please speak loudly and clearly into the flower pot.” — a common not-joke about the Communist societies during the Cold War

Disregard phonecalls and other remote conversations for now, since we already know them to be wiretapped across most common platforms. Let’s look at conversations in a private home.

We now have Google Echo and Amazon Alexa. And while they might have intended to keep your conversations to themselves, out of the reach of authorities, Amazon has already handed over living room recordings to authorities. In this case, permission became a moot point because the suspect gave permission. In the next case, permission might not be there, and it might happen anyway.

Mobile phones are already listening, all the time. We know because when we say “Ok Google” to an Android phone, it wakes up and listens more intensely. This, at a very minimum, means it’s always listening for the words “Ok Google”. IPhones have a similar mechanism listening for “Hey Siri”. While nominally possible to turn off, it’s one of those things you can never be sure of. And we carry these governmental surveillance microphones with us everywhere we go.

If the Snowden documents showed us anything in the general sense, it was that if a certain form of surveillance is technically possible, it is already happening.

And even if Google and Apple aren’t already listening, the German police got the green light to break into phones and plant Bundestrojaner, the flower-pot equivalent of hidden microphones, anyway. You would think that Germany of all countries has in recent memory what a bad idea this is. It could — maybe even should — be assumed that the police forces of other countries have and are already using similar tools.

For our analog parents, the concept of a private conversations was as self-evident as oxygen in the air. Our digital children may never know what one feels like.

And so we live today — from what started as a habit that has already become instinct — in the assumption that every sound we make is overheard by authorities.

Are We There Yet? – wethepeople in Australien

Our bro Felix Prangenberg was visiting Australia with his Wethepeople team mates Jordan Godwin and Ed Zunda. Unfortunately, the weather was not quite on their side, despite all the guys had a good time in Down Under! Enjoy the video, your kunstform BMX Shop.

Video: Callum Earnshaw

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Watch now the new Doomed Brand Mixtape, in which our bro Felix Prangenberg got also a video part, which he filmed during his england trip.

Enjoy the Videos, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!



Video: Doomed



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Yeah, Mankind Winter Apparel has arrived at kunstform BMX Shop. The new collection comes with fresh t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters and beanies.

Related links:

• all products of Mankind BMX

Yeah, eclat BMX Apparel has arrived at kunstform BMX Shop. The new collection comes with fresh t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters, beanies, socks and more.

Related links:

• all products of eclat BMX

The first warm sunstrays have reached us and the desire for riding increases immeasurably. Last year, almost all 18 inch bikes were sold out, so we are happy to be able to offer you the Sunday Primer 18" again which is one of the best BMX bikes for kids. We have also received deliveries from eclat and etnies!

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivers a statement during the United Nations climate change conference COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan November 12, 2024. — Reuters

BAKU: Climate change remains a point of concern and contention for countries around the world who are now fighting...

Rome teeters on the brink in Ridley Scott's "Gladiator II." Its fall is said to be imminent. The dream it once symbolized is dead. The once high-minded ideals of the Roman Empire have deteriorated across a venal land now ruled by a pale-faced emperor.

Tropical Storm Rafael chugged toward the Cayman Islands on Tuesday and was forecast to strengthen into a hurricane en route to Cuba.

"Presidential election polling this fall can best be characterized as stable uncertainty," said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. "Major events like an assassination attempt [on former President Donald Trump] and a high-profile debate barely caused the needle to stutter. Shifts of a single point can be consequential to the outcome but are beyond the ability of most polls to capture with any precision. The bottom line is this race is a toss-up and has been since August."

"Deep inside, all candidates think about winning and losing -- but the latter is suppressed. This unleashes a lot of energy. It's also the time where candidates stop sleeping and campaign day and night. It's another way of dealing with the fear of losing that you don't want to leave any stone unturned," campaign consultant Louis Perron said in a written statement shared with Inside the Beltway.

China's military forces are rapidly building up space warfare capabilities for use in a future conflict, two top American generals said on Wednesday.

American diplomatic efforts to conduct people-to-people contacts and exchanges in China are being blocked by Chinese intelligence and security services.

China's military carried out a rare flight test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that landed in the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday.

China's military is advancing the development of high-technology arms, including sound weapons to wage cognitive warfare -- the use of unconventional tools and capabilities to alter enemy thinking and decision-making, according to a new open-source intelligence report.

It's no surprise that students are pushing back on cellphone bans in classrooms. But school administrators in one South Florida county working to pull students' eyes away from their screens are facing some resistance from another group as well - parents.

More than 50% of U.S. Christians admit to consuming sexually explicit material and 22% say they do so weekly, according to an evangelical research firm.

Retired tennis star Andy Murray will talk about his pro career during a four-show theater tour in Scotland and England in June 2025, his management group announced Tuesday.

The Democratic Republic of Congo's troubled election this week has already scored at least one small victory for peace.

An older couple inherits two unexpected sons, an ex-offender regains custody of his daughter, an entrepreneurial mom teaches business smarts to her child, recovering addicts try to stay clean for their kids, and a son takes over for his father at the family restaurant.

McLaren driver Lando Norris won Saturday's Formula 1 sprint race at the Brazilian Grand Prix to cut his deficit to championship leader Max Verstappen.

Parents of high schoolers are now the most powerful force in higher education.

President-elect Donald Trump is looking to fill hundreds of top positions in his incoming administration during the next two months -- but one of the most coveted, flash point slots is that of attorney general.

World leaders are converging Tuesday at the United Nations annual climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan although the big names and powerful countries are noticeably absent, unlike past climate talks which had the star power of a soccer World Cup.

Effective Nov. 1, American taxpayers will begin paying routine medical bills for illegal aliens.

The Washington Commanders woke up in second place in the NFC East on Monday morning. Sunday's loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Commanders' third of the season, allowed the rival Philadelphia Eagles to slip into the top spot in the division.

Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is a finalist for his first National League MVP award after winning the AL honor twice, joined among the top three in NL voting by New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor and Arizona second baseman Ketel Marte.

South Carolina has lifted the suspension of forward Ashlyn Watkins after charges of assault and kidnapping were dismissed earlier this month.

Cleveland has won its first 12 games and is off to the best start in the league. There are 10 teams in the Western Conference with winning records. And somehow, only two teams in the Eastern Conference have winning records.

At least 11 employees were taken to hospitals and residents were urged to shelter in place after an apparent explosion at a Louisville, Kentucky, business on Tuesday.

The  8th GEO European Projects Workshop (GEPW-8) took place in Athens, Greece, on 12 and 13 June, hosted by the Greek GEO Office - National Observatory of Athens and co-organized by the Mariolopoulos-Kanaginis Foundation for the Environmental Sciences.

The event was 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 renewal of the mandate of GEO for another 10 years through the endorsement of the 2014 Geneva Declaration.

Oral presentations, a book of abstracts and the photos from the event are now uploaded and available for download on the events website.

Data sharing tools developed by an EU project are helping scientists worldwide understand more about the planet’s millions of species. A new article published on CORDIS and DAE looks into the benefits of the FP7 funded project VIBRANT.

The consultation will run from the 7th of October to the 30th of November 2014. Comments received before the 31st of October 2014 will be, as much as possible, presented with the first results of this project during the IUCN World Parks Congress taking place in Sydney, Australia, 12-19 November 2014.

Contributors are not required to comment on the entire Consultation Document – any input will welcomed. 

More information available here.

A new aticle published in Ecology Letters  looks into the indirect interactions among tropical tree species through shared rodent seed predators. The reasearch is part of the work of EU BON postdoc Carol X. Garzon-Lopez.

Abstract: The coexistence of numerous tree species in tropical forests is commonly explained by negative dependence of recruitment on the conspecific seed and tree density due to specialist natural enemies that attack seeds and seedlings (‘Janzen–Connell’ effects). Less known is whether guilds of shared seed predators can induce a negative dependence of recruitment on the density of different species of the same plant functional group. We studied 54 plots in tropical forest on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, with contrasting mature tree densities of three coexisting large seeded tree species with shared seed predators. Levels of seed predation were far better explained by incorporating seed densities of all three focal species than by conspecific seed density alone. Both positive and negative density dependencies were observed for different species combinations. Thus, indirect interactions via shared seed predators can either promote or reduce the coexistence of different plant functional groups in tropical forest.

Carol X. Garzon-Lopez et. al. (2015) Indirect interactions among tropical tree species through shared rodent seed predators: a novel mechanism of tree species coexistence. Ecology Letters. doi: 10.1111/ele.12452

It has been recognized that issues regarding the sustainability and interoperability of data collected by citizens hinder the re-usability and integration of these data across borders. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), is following up on these findings with a detailed study of interoperability arrangements, hosting and data management practices of Citizen Science projects. These activities include a survey designed to capture the state of play with regard to data management practices on the local, national and continental scales. The questions are especially inspired by the recently proposed data management principles of the Group on Earth Observations and those of the Belmont Forum.

Beyond the pure stocktaking and awareness raising, the results should establish a base line for prioritizing follow-up activities and measuring progress. The results will also inform the discussion on the potential roles of the European Commission – and especially the JRC – in Citizen Science.

After discussions with members of the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) and the international Citizen Science Association (CSA), it was decided to open the scope of the questionnaire to the international community, so that non-EU and globally acting organizations could also benefit from the outcomes.

The survey will be open until 31 August 2015, and the results of the subsequent analysis will be available by the end of September.  We invite all those involved in Citizen Science projects to take the survey in order to provide us with invaluable information and insight into Citizen Science projects and best practice.

Take the Survey! >> https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/CSDataManagement

October 2015 updates for both FishBase (www.fishbase.org) and SeaLifeBase (www.sealifebase.org) are now online!

The Museum für Naturkunde and the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum are honored to be hosting the 31st Annual Meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) as well as the 2nd International Conference on Biodiversity Biobanking of the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) in Berlin from June, 20 to June, 25, 2016. The conferences will be held in parallel at the andel’s Hotel Berlin, Landsberger Allee.

• SPNHC conference web site: http://www.spnhc2016.berlin/, conference theme: "Green Museum – How to practice what we preach?"
• GGBN conference web site: https://meetings.ggbn.org/conference/ggbn/2016/index, conference theme: "Meeting the Challenge: How to Preserve a Cross-Section of the Tree of Life"

The registration for both conferences is now open. Please check the conference web sites for information on the conference program, field trips, social events, accommodation, registration and abstract submission. All social events and field trips as well as the opening session on Tuesday are joint events for attendees of both conferences. During lunch and coffee breaks one will have the chance to visit the vendor booths and chat with attendees of both conferences. The sessions of both conferences cover complementary topics to avoid duplications.

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: 

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

A new EU BON acknowledged article looks at the recently introduced in scientific literature methods for constructing Spatially Explicit Rarefaction (SER) and their implication for ecologists and conservation biologist. The research was published in the journal Ecological Indicators.

Abstract: 

Recently, methods for constructing Spatially Explicit Rarefaction (SER) curves have been introduced in the scientific literature to describe the relation between the recorded species richness and sampling effort and taking into account for the spatial autocorrelation in the data. Despite these methodological advances, the use of SERs has not become routine and ecologists continue to use rarefaction methods that are not spatially explicit. Using two study cases from Italian vegetation surveys, we demonstrate that classic rarefaction methods that do not account for spatial structure can produce inaccurate results. Furthermore, our goal in this paper is to demonstrate how SERs can overcome the problem of spatial autocorrelation in the analysis of plant or animal communities. Our analyses demonstrate that using a spatially-explicit method for constructing rarefaction curves can substantially alter estimates of relative species richness. For both analyzed data sets, we found that the rank ordering of standardized species richness estimates was reversed between the two methods. We strongly advise the use of Spatially Explicit Rarefaction methods when analyzing biodiversity: the inclusion of spatial autocorrelation into rarefaction analyses can substantially alter conclusions and change the way we might prioritize or manage nature reserves.

Original Source: 

Bacaro, G., Altobelli, A., Camelletti, M., Ciccarelli, D., Martellos, S., Palmer, M.W., Ricotta, C., Rocchini, D., Scheiner, S.M., Tordoni, E., Chiarucci, A. (2016). Incorporating spatial autocorrelation in rarefaction methods: implications for ecologists and conservation biologists. Ecological Indicators, 69: 233-238. [5years-IF: 3.494] doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2016.04.026

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