Side Event

An introduction to DOPA, a Digital Observatory for Protected Areas

Organizer
Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Institute for the Environment and Sustainability

Date and Time
29 October 2010 13:15 - 14:45

Meeting
Tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 10)

The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) is a biodiversity information system currently developed as a set of interoperable web services at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in collaboration with other international organizations, including GBIF, UNEP-WCMC, Birdlife International and RSPB. DOPA is not only designed to assess the state and pressure of Protected Areas (PAs) and to prioritize them accordingly, in order to support decision making and fund allocation processes, but it is also conceived as a monitoring and ecological forecasting service, through e-Habitat, DOPA’s core web processing service. The use of open standards and of open source programming languages for the development of the core functionalities of the system are expected to encourage the participation of the scientific community beyond the current partnerships and to favour the sharing of such an observatory which could be installed anywhere. The event will include presentations and demonstrations of DOPA with a focus on African protected areas, followed by discussions and Q&A by lead contributors to the DOPA.