2016 GEO BON Open Science Conference
Biodiversity Science is facing enormous challenges as the pressures upon the earth’s biotic systems are rapidly intensifying and we are unlikely to reach the CBD 2020 Aichi Targets. But how far or close are we to reach the Aichi targets is virtually impossible to assess. In fact, the biodiversity community is still lacking a global observing system that evolves around the monitoring of a set of agreed biodiversity variables essential to the tracking of biological diversity on Earth. Such a gap is worrying, as operational systems of this kind and associated identification of priority variables to be monitored are key to (i) coordinating globally consistent data collection across all dimensions of biodiversity, and (ii) minimizing duplication of efforts, so that conservation funds are not wasted.
Move the scrollbar from left to right to see the dramatic development of the Aral Sea | Credits: ESA
The GEO BON Open Science Conference on “Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Monitoring for the 2020 Targets and beyond” will assess this target. The conference is open to the wide scientific public and is sponsored and co-organized by iDiv, UFZ, SASCAL, OBIS, GOOS.
The conference will foster scientifically sound biodiversity monitoring by in-situ and remote sensing methodologies, monitoring of ecosystem services, modeling of biodiversity at all scales and in all dimensions and especially encourage interdisciplinary research. It will show ways forward in biodiversity observation and the development of Essential Biodiversity Variables. The conference will accept submissions of abstracts versing any biodiversity monitoring topic, but will prioritize talks associated with the development of monitoring for Essential Biodiversity Variables.
The GEO BON Open Science Conference is a great opportunity to meet with the best scientists and organisations in the field of biodiversity observation in the world. The GEO BON Open Science Conference will be 2½ days of interesting and fascinating oral and poster presentations organised as rows of presentations in parallel sessions. Each day will also have one or two renowned keynote speakers to set the frame in particular fields. The GEO BON Open Science Conference is not only organised to present and discuss about scientific highlight findings and hypotheses, but also to set the frame to develop discrete products to better observe biodiversity change and serve the needs of the CBD and IPBES. The abstracts have to be submitted through the registration webpage.
