29 October 2010: The European Commission, together with the UN Environment Programme-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Birdlife International and the Royal Society of the Protection of Birds, have launched the Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA).

The launch came on the sidelines of the 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 10) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), convening in Nagoya, Japan. According to the European Commission, the DOPA is a biodiversity information system developed as a set of interoperable web services. The DOPA is intended to be used to assess the state and pressure of Protected Areas (PAs) and to prioritize them accordingly, and also as a monitoring and ecological forecasting service.

At the side event to launch this resource, Stephen Peedell, JRC, elaborated on the concept of eHabitat, which is the future web processing service for habitat modeling. He said this will enable the user to use thematic maps when modeling environmental impacts on habitats. In this way, he elaborated that information can be used for visualizing issues such as climate impacts on species distribution.

Charles Besançon, UNEP-WCMC, noted that the organization manages a lot of data, largely for publications such as the Global Biodiversity Outlook-3. He presented the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), saying that it is the only global database on protected areas. Providing an overview of the contents of the WDPA, he highlighted the significant effort by the world to create protected areas over time. Besançon noted that a number of problems the WDPA faced, such as the website being too technical and the data not being updated frequently enough, has led to the launch of “protected planet.net.” This is online collaborative effort, he said, to draw people in, interact with the data, and update the data of the WDPA. He cited a number of collaborations in this project including, Flickr, Wikipedia, Panaramio. [The DOPA] [IISD RS coverage of the side event]