Abstract
The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) has been developed to support the European Union’s efforts in strengthening our capacity to mobilize and use biodiversity data so that they are readily accessible to policymakers, managers, researchers and other users. Assessing protected areas for biodiversity conservation at national, regional and international scales implies that methods and tools are in place to evaluate characteristics such as the protected areas’ connectivity, their species assemblages (including the presence of threatened species), the uniqueness of their ecosystems, and the threats these areas are exposed to. Typical requirements for such analyses are data on protected areas, information on species distributions and threat status, and information on ecosystem distributions. By integrating all these global data consistently in metrics and indicators, the DOPA provides the means to allow end-users to evaluate protected areas individually but also to compare protected areas at the country and ecoregion level to, for example, identify potential priorities for further conservation research, action and funding. Since the metrics and indicators are available through web services, the DOPA further allows end-users to develop their own applications without requiring management of large databases and processing capacities. In addition to examples illustrating how the DOPA can be used as an aid to decision making, we discuss the lessons learnt in the development of this global biodiversity information system, and outline planned future developments for further supporting conservation strategies.
Highlights
Protected areas (PAs) are essential for preserving biodiversity
A science-based conservation strategy requires that decision makers have access to a wealth of comparable information across all scales which further need to be summarized into a smaller set of key indicators to support decision making. Such information is often difficult to find and access, in particular for developing countries. It is the objective of the Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) to support the European Union’s efforts “to substantially strengthen the effectiveness of international governance for biodiversity and ecosystem services” (EC/COM/2006/0216 final) and more generally for “strengthening the capacity to mobilize and use biodiversity data, information and forecasts so that they are readily accessible to policymakers, managers, experts and other users” (UNEP/Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)/COP/10/27) [7]
Where no purposefully designed indicators are known to us from the scientific literature, we have developed new indicators, as in the case of PA connectivity
Summary
Protected areas (PAs) are essential for preserving biodiversity. The fulfilment of their conservation objectives depends, among other factors, on the availability of reliable information that can be used to support management and funding decisions. The forthcoming release of the DOPA planned for early 2017 will include the ProtConn indicator, which (i) quantifies the percentage of a country or ecoregion covered by protected connected lands; (ii) can be partitioned in several components depicting different categories of land (unprotected, protected or transboundary) through which movement between protected locations may occur; (iii) is easy to communicate, to compare with PA coverage and to use in the assessment of global targets for PA systems (Figure 2). This connectivity indicator is presented and described in detail in Saura et al [19]. The indicators at the level of individual PAs that are described are, currently only available, due to computational constraints, for the nearly 16,000 PAs with a minimum size of 100 km
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