The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas
"Providing the right information to the right people with the right tools"
The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) has been created as a component of the GEO-BON observation network by the Joint Research Centre in collaboration with other international organizations including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC), Birdlife International and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). DOPA is conceived as a set of distributed databases combined with open, interoperable web services (Figure 1) to provide a large variety of end-users including park managers, decision-makers and researchers with means to assess, monitor and forecast the state and pressure of protected areas at the global scale.
DOPA is also a contribution to the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), the biodiversity arm of the Global Earth Observation System of System of Systems (GEOSS).
Fig. 1. Illustration of the web services, currently in development at JRC, that will be made available by the DOPA.
