International Center for Remote Sensing of Environment (ICRSE)
Abstract
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 modeling service. To capture the dynamics of spatio-temporal changes in habitats and anthropogenic pressure on PAs, the automatic collection and processing of remote sensing data are processes at the heart of the system. In particular, DOPA uses information from EumetCAST and SpotVGT to compute environmental trends and detect anomalies every 10 days. Anthropogenic threats are also currently assessed through the analysis of agricultural pressure, population growth and habitat fragmentation around the protected areas. Fire activity in sub-Saharan protected areas which is derived from the MODIS fire products (active fires and burned areas) provide further support to park managers as well as to experts working for conservation and natural resource management. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the variety of uses of remote sensing data by the DOPA, the integration with other data sources, the practical implementation according to an architecture grounded in international initiatives such as GEOSS, GSDI and INSPIRE, and applications in monitoring and in ecological forecasting through e-Habitat, DOPAs¿ habitat modeling service.JRC.H.3-Global environement monitorin
