A Digital Observatory for Protected Areas - DOPA, a GEO-BON Contribution to the Monitoring of African Biodiversity

Biodiversity data are particularly difficult to manage at the global scale as the volume of information is huge and at the same time very fragmented. Biodiversity is one of the 9 key themes by which the activities of the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) are organised. GEO-BON, GEO¿s Biodiversity Observation Network, is therefore aiming to integrate biodiversity data by bringing together the large variety of sensors, databases and systems. The purpose of this paper is to present DOPA, a possible contribution to GEO-BON. DOPA is a Digital Observatory for Protected Areas currently developed at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission in collaboration with other international organizations, including GBIF, UNEP-WCMC and BirdLife International. DOPA is conceived as a set of distributed databases and open, interoperable web services for the assessment of the state and pressure of protected areas. Already benefiting from existing data for environmental assessments, DOPA is being extended to become an operational monitoring and modelling service capable of capturing the dynamics of spatio-temporal changes in habitats in and around protected areas. To achieve these goals, there is a need for collecting and processing remote sensing data automatically. Such a collecting and processing system has been developed by the JRC in the frame of its support to the AMESD (African Monitoring of Environment for Sustainable Development) project. Called, eStation, this component of AMESD is the software dealing with the reception, processing, analysis and dissemination of key environmental parameters. Remotely sensed data, derived from the Earth Observation measurement platforms such as SPOT/VGT, SEVIRI/MSG and TERRA-AQUA/MODIS, are processed to compute environmental trends and detect anomalies. In contrast to the other information processed by DOPA, the eStation receives the data mainly through the EumetCAST broadcasting system, providing DOPA with some means to be partly independent from an internet based infrastructure. Ultimately, DOPA could become a significant contribution to the local implementation of operational environmental information services that can help to improve environmental surveillance, management and policy making. Further developments of DOPA will focus on providing means to submit ground based information back into the system for validations.JRC.DDG.H.3-Global environement monitorin