Biodiversity in danger: Which areas should be protected?
New Digital Observatory helps to set priorities
2011-02-20
(Press-News.org) Biodiversity loss is a growing concern. Protected areas are a instrument to counteract this trend. The UN's Convention on Biological Diversity conference of the parties in Nagoya (October 2010) set stringent new targets to be reached by 2020. At least 17% of terrestrial and inland water and 10% of coastal and marine areas have to be protected. But are protected areas really protected? Are they in the right place? Where should new protected areas be located? The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), in collaboration with other partners, is helping decision-makers to find their way through the vast amount of information needed to answer these and other questions by setting up a Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA).
DOPA is conceived as a set of distributed databases and open, interoperable web services to provide decision-makers and researchers with a means to assess, monitor and forecast the state of, and pressure on, protected areas on a global scale. It should help them prioritise and support them in decision-making and fund allocation processes. DOPA's modelling capabilities and global coverage will also enable to go beyond existing boundaries of protected areas to address anthropogenic pressures on ecosystems, as well as identifying ecological corridors and new areas to be protected.
DOPA is being developed in collaboration with other major organisations including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC), Birdlife International and the UK Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
The Observatory minimises exposure to the risks from mixing undocumented data with undocumented uncertainties and connecting scientific findings from the field with environmental observations from space.
By connecting data in a careful and controlled manner, DOPA is already helping to answer questions raised in Nagoya: Are the protected areas really protected? Are they in the right place? Are they optimally connected? Where should new protected areas be located? Where should funds be targeted? Can these new areas be protected without generating conflicts? Will these protected areas be able to cope with climate change?...
Effective protected area management deals with complex links between environmental and anthropogenic factors, calling for information gathered from many disciplines. The information needed ranges from molecular to global scales and over time periods of hours to centuries. This multidisciplinary aspect also means that large volumes of data have been collected and maintained independently, with related models having also been developed and operated in isolation.
In DOPA, data on protected areas, species distributions and socio-economic indicators are combined with the JRC's remote sensing information in order to generate global environmental indicators, maps and alerts. However, what looks in principle like a simple data exchange, becomes extremely complex in the absence of syntactic and semantic interoperability of the data and the systems serving them.
Hence, beyond the simple sharing and exchange of information, DOPA relies on open-ended systems of interoperable computer models and databases communicating via Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), a design that is becoming the cornerstone of all modern integrated assessments and is recommended by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) - a voluntary partnership of governments and international organisations, which coordinates efforts to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).
Background information: the nations call for a protected planet, the Nagoya targets
12% of our planet's land surface is protected, approximately 0.5% of the open oceans and 6% of territorial seas. According to the outcome of the Convention on Biological Diversity's 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Nagoya, the existing 130,000 terrestrial protected areas are far from enough to preserve the diversity of life on earth, at a time where the world's population will soon reach 7 billion people.
Our needs for agriculture, fishing, housing, energy and water, combined with the pollution of vast areas of land and ocean and an insatiable demand for resources, are putting relentlessly increasing pressure on the natural environment.
Protected areas are a vital part of mankind's attempts to preserve the diversity of life on earth. The Nagoya Strategic Plan sets stringent new targets for the 193 countries that have signed up: by 2020, at least 17% of terrestrial and inland water will have to be protected and the surface of protected coastal and marine areas will have to almost double.
The European Union has adopted a new 2020 biodiversity target in March 2010 which aims at halting the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystem services in the EU by 2020 and restoring them as much as possible. At the same time, the EU will step up its contribution to averting global biodiversity loss. The adoption of a new EU biodiversity strategy is envisaged in 2011 to translate the EU target into specific measures.
INFORMATION:
For more information on DOPA: http://dopa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2011-02-20
Nanotechnology offers a range of benefits over traditional materials and enables the development of innovative applications and products. However, there are often concerns about the safety aspects and to what extent these have been investigated. High-quality measurements are the basis for reliable safety assessments, process improvement, quality control and the development of new nanotechnology applications.
Until now, however, no certified benchmarks incorporating industrial nanoparticles were available. Some synthetic materials were available, but they were not fully ...
2011-02-20
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Last July, President Obama adopted the recommendations of a White House task force charged with devising a policy to better manage the nation's oceans, coastlines and the Great Lakes. The National Ocean Council is now charged with developing a plan to put the ideas into practice. Two scientists at Brown University will speak about the ecological and social facets of marine management this month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.
Heather Leslie
Sharpe Assistant Professor ...
2011-02-20
VIDEO:
In 2006 a teenager played Space Invaders with the help of an electrocorticography (ECoG) grid that used signals from the area of his motor cortex that normally controlled his right...
Click here for more information.
Daniel Moran has dedicated his career to developing the best brain-computer interface, or BCI, he possibly can. His motivation is simple but compelling. "My sophomore year in high school," Moran says, "a good friend and I were on the varsity baseball team. ...
2011-02-20
Once regarded as the stuff of science fiction, antimatter—the mirror image of the ordinary matter in our observable universe—is now the focus of laboratory studies around the world.
While physicists routinely produce antimatter with radioisotopes and particle colliders, cooling these antiparticles and containing them for any length of time is another story. Once antimatter comes into contact with ordinary matter it "annihilates"—or disappears in a flash of gamma radiation.
Clifford Surko, a professor of physics at UC San Diego who is constructing what he hopes will ...
2011-02-20
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Understanding and managing how humans and nature sustainably coexist is now so sweeping and lightning fast that it's spawned a concept to be unveiled at a major scientific conference today.
Meet "telecoupling."
Joining its popular cousins telecommuting and television, telecoupling is the way Jack Liu, director of the Human-Nature Lab/Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University, is describing how distance is shrinking and connections are strengthening between nature and humans.
The "Telecoupling of Human and Natural ...
2011-02-20
Once likened to a confusing tower of Babel, speaking more than one language can actually bolster brain function by serving as a mental gymnasium, according to researchers.
Recent research indicates that bilingual speakers can outperform monolinguals--people who speak only one language--in certain mental abilities, such as editing out irrelevant information and focusing on important information, said Judith Kroll, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Penn State. These skills make bilinguals better at prioritizing tasks and working on multiple projects at one time.
"We ...
2011-02-20
BOSTON—A team of research biologists headed by Thomas H. Kunz, professor of biology and director of the Center of Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University, will conduct a symposium on the emerging scientific discipline of aeroecology at this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting. Aeroecology is a new discipline whose unifying concept is a focus on the aerosphere and the myriad organisms that inhabit and depend on this aerial environment for their existence. The symposium is scheduled from 3:00-4:30 PM, Saturday, February ...
2011-02-20
A shift in the global research landscape will reposition the United States as a major partner, but not the dominant leader, in science and technology research in the coming decade, according to a Penn State researcher. However, the U.S. could benefit from this research shift if it adopts a policy of knowledge sharing with the growing global community of researchers.
"What is emerging is a global science system in which the U.S. will be one player among many," said Caroline Wagner, associate professor of international affairs, who presented her findings today (Feb. 18) ...
2011-02-20
Fierce debate over teaching evolution in public schools has raged across the United States since the epic courtroom battle between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial (State of Tennessee v. John Scopes). Science education researchers are now turning their attention to the Islamic world to determine whether teaching of evolution in schools spawns similar social controversy and what that means for the future of scientific thought across the globe.
Jason Wiles, assistant professor of biology in Syracuse University's College of ...
2011-02-20
A central challenge facing the planet is how to preserve forests while providing enough food to feed the world's population. It's really a "bad news/good news" story, says Eric Lambin, professor of environmental Earth system science and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford; and professor of geography at the University of Louvain.
The bad news: The world might run out of productive agricultural land by 2050, thanks to rising global demand for food, biofuels, and forest products, along with land degradation and urbanization. The good news: ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Biodiversity in danger: Which areas should be protected?
New Digital Observatory helps to set priorities
