DOPA Explorer 2.0: A web based tool assessing all large protected areas in support to conservation policies

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, information and forecasts so that they are readily accessible to policymakers, managers, experts and other users. Conceived as a set of web based services [1,2], DOPA provides a broad set of free and open source tools to assess, monitor and even forecast the state of and pressure on protected areas at local, regional and global scale.

Recognized by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as a reference information system, DOPA Explorer is a web based interface of the DOPA providing simple means to rank protected areas at the country and ecoregion levels. It further provides users with the information at the site level species, important ecosystems and the pressures they are exposed to because of human activities. First launched in 2015, and recently updated in 2018, the DOPA Explorer 2.0 currently documents all protected areas in the world at least as large as 50 km2, around 23 000 of them covering in total more than 95% of the global protected surface. Distinguishing between terrestrial, marine and mixed protected areas, DOPA Explorer can help end users, for example, to identify those exposed to highest pressure and at the same time hosting unique threatened biodiversity. The DOPA provides a broad range of consistent and comparable indicators, based on global reference datasets, on protected area coverage, connectivity, species, ecosystems, ecosystem services and pressures at multiple (country, ecoregion and protected area) scales. These indicators are derived from more than 400 metrics and include new indicators on the connectivity of protected area systems as well as new indicators derived from Copernicus services that highlight changes in the land cover, surface water and built-up areas in protected areas.

These indicators are particularly relevant for Aichi Biodiversity Target 11 (Protected Areas) of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals 14 (Life below Water) and 15 (Life on Land), and can be used to support spatial planning, conservation and international reporting.

It is the purpose of this presentation to introduce the audience with this new DOPA Explorer 2.0 tool as released in February 2018.

The above work has been made with the kind collaboration of the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and BirdLife International.

References

1. Dubois et al. 2016. Integrating multiple spatial datasets to assess protected areas: Lessons learnt from the DOPA. International Journal of Geo-Information ISPRS 5(12), 242; doi:10.3390/ijgi5120242

2. Bastin et al. 2017. Processing conservation indicators with Open Source tools: lessons learned from the DOPA. Proceedings of the FOSS4G Conference 2017", Boston, USA, 14 -19 August 2017.