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The European Commission’s Science and Knowledge Service, the Joint Research Centre (JRC), decided to try working hand-in-hand with leading European science centres and museums. Behind this decision was the idea that the JRC could better support EU Institutions in engaging with the European public. The fact that European Union policies are firmly based on scientific evidence is a strong message which the JRC is uniquely able to illustrate. Such a collaboration would not only provide a platform to explain the benefits of EU policies to our daily lives but also provide an opportunity for European citizens to engage by taking a more active part in the EU policy making process for the future. A PILOT PROGRAMME To test the idea, the JRC launched an experimental programme to work with science museums: a perfect partner for three compelling reasons. Firstly, they attract a large and growing number of visitors. Leading science museums in Europe have typically 500 000 visitors per year. Furthermore, they are based in large European cities and attract local visitors as well as tourists from across Europe and beyond. The second reason for working with museums is that they have mastered the art of how to communicate key elements of sophisticated arguments across to the public and making complex topics of public interest readily accessible. That is a high-value added skill and a crucial part of the valorisation of public-funded research, never to be underestimated. Finally museums are, at present, undergoing something of a renaissance. Museums today are vibrant environments offering new techniques and technologies to both inform and entertain, and attract visitors of all demographics., JRC.H.2-Knowledge Management Methodologies, Communities and Dissemination

People, planet, prosperity and peace are four priorities shared by Africa and Europe, and areas where opportunities for beneficial cooperation abound. Over the past three decades, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has worked with many organisations and institutions across Africa. This report and its accompanying interactive online service ‘Africa StoryMaps’ present the key findings from this collaboration, and set out options the decision-making, research and education communities may consider. The report focuses on the African dimension of the partnership. It explores the opportunities and challenges arising from the fact that Africa has over twice the population of the European Union (EU), is the world’s most youthful continent, has an economy that is growing faster than that of the EU, is almost seven times larger geographically, yet is vulnerable to diverse internal and external stresses. Tell us what you think about this report. Please fill out and return our feedback form (PDF) at https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/file/document/africa-report-feedback-form., JRC.D.6-Knowledge for Sustainable Development and Food Security

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The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) is conceived as a set of distributed Critical Biodiversity Informatics Infrastructures (databases, web modelling services, broadcasting services, ...) combined with interoperable web services to provide a large variety of end-users including park managers, decision-makers and researchers with means to assess, monitor and possibly forecast the state and pressure of protected areas at local, regional and global scale. In particular, the DOPA aims to • provide the best available material (data, indicators, models) agreed on by contributing institutions which can serve for establishing baselines for research and reporting (i.e. Protected Planet Report, National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans, …); • provide free analytical tools to support the discovery, access, exchange and execution of web services (databases and modelling) designed to generate the best available material but also for research purposes, decision making and capacity building activities for conservation; • provide an interoperable and, as much as possible, open source framework to allow institutions to get their own means to assess, monitor and forecast the state and pressure of protected areas and help these to further engage with the organizations hosting critical biodiversity informatics infrastructures. It is the purpose of this document to introduce the readers to eSpecies, the component of the DOPA providing the services focusing on the delivery of species information and products on a 1 km grid at the global scale. In particular, the readers will find here the necessary instruction to access and use our services as well as some information about the possible uses and limitations of the proposed products and services, JRC.H.5-Land Resources Management

The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) is conceived around a set of interacting Critical Biodiversity Informatics Infrastructures (databases, web modelling services, broadcasting services, ...) hosted at different institutions, including the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and BirdLife International. The current services of DOPA provide to a large variety of end-users, ranging from park managers, funding agencies to researchers, with means to assess, monitor and possibly forecast the state and pressure of protected areas at the local, national and global scales. With an introduction to the DOPA, the readers will find here a user manual of the beta version of DOPA Explorer, a first web based assessment tool where information on 9 000 protected areas covering almost 90% of the global protected surface has been processed automatically to generate a set of indicators on ecosystems, climate, phenology, species, ecosystem services and pressures. DOPA Explorer can so help identify the protected areas with most unique ecosystems and species and assess the pressures they are exposed to because of human development. Ecological data derived from and near real-time earth observations are also made available for the African continent. Inversely, DOPA Explorer indirectly highlights the protected areas for which the information is incomplete., JRC.H.5-Land Resources Management

The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook helps to focus effort and investment towards better understanding of life on Earth and our impacts upon it. It proposes a framework that will help harness the immense power of information technology and an open data culture, to gather unprecedented evidence about biodiversity and to inform better decisions. This document is accompanied by a website, www.biodiversityinformatics.org, that will report progress towards each part of the framework and provide a forum for ideas, projects and funding sources supporting the goals of the Outlook, JRC.H.5-Land Resources Management

The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook helps to focus effort and investment towards better understanding of life on Earth and our impacts upon it. It proposes a framework that will help harness the immense power of information technology and an open data culture, to gather unprecedented evidence about biodiversity and to inform better decisions. Much progress has been made in the past ten years to fulfil the potential of biodiversity informatics. However, it is dwarfed by the scale of what is still required. The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook (GBIO) offers a framework for reaching a much deeper understanding of the world’s biodiversity, and through that understanding the means to conserve it better and to use it more sustainably. The GBIO identifies four major focal areas, each with a number of core components, to help coordinate efforts and funding. The co-authors, from a wide range of disciplines, agree these are the essential elements of a global strategy to harness biodiversity data for the common good.

This edition of the Scanning the Horizon bulletin is the first product of the Science Advice to Policy, Innovation and Horizon Scanning unit. The regular issue of this publication is intended to draw the attention of policy makers in the European Union to scientific and technology issues and developments that may have a bearing on the future policies of the Union. It is prepared by the JRC services based on a review of literature and specialised news sources using a series of categories most relevant to the spectrum of EU policies. If you wish to subscribe or to comment, please do so by sending an email to: JRC-HORIZON@ec.europa.eu, JRC.A.1-Science Advice to Policy

eHabitat is a Web Processing Service (WPS) designed to compute the likelihood of finding ecosystems with similar conditions. Starting from a reference area, typically a protected area, one can compute for each pixel of a region of interest the probability to find a combination of a set of predefined environmental indicators that is similar to the one observed in the reference area using the Mahalanobis distances to the mean and covariance of these indicators. Inputs to the WPS are thus the reference polygon and a set of environmental indicators, typically thematic geospatial “layers”, which can be discovered using standardised catalogues. The outputs can be tailored to specific end user needs in terms of data format and data resolution. Because these input layers can range from geophysical data captured through remote sensing to socio-economical indicators, eHabitat is exposed to a broad range of different types and levels of uncertainties which are inevitably propagated through the service (see e.g. Heuvelink, 1998). Potentially chained to other services to perform ecological forecasting, for example, eHabitat would be an additional component further propagating uncertainties from a potentially long chain of model services. Such a configuration of distributed data and model services as envisaged by initiatives such as the “Model Web” from the Group on Earth Observations, to be of any use to policy or decision makers, requires from users clear information on data uncertainties. The development of such an Uncertainty-Enabled Model Web is the scope of the UncertWEB project which is promoting interoperability between data and models with quantified uncertainty and building a framework on existing open, international standards. It is the objective of this paper to illustrate a few key ideas behind UncertWeb using eHabitat to discuss the main types of uncertainties the WPS has to deal with and to present the benefits of the use of the UncertWeb framework., JRC.H.3-Global environement monitoring

An interoperable web processing service (WPS) for the automatic interpolation of environmental data has been developed in the frame of the INTAMAP project. In order to assess the performance of the interpolation method implemented, a validation WPS has also been developed. This validation WPS can be used to perform leave one out and K-fold cross validation: a full dataset is submitted and a range of validation statistics and diagnostic plots (e.g. histograms, variogram of residuals, mean errors) is received in return. This paper presents the architecture of the validation WPS and a case study is used to briefly illustrate its use in practice. We conclude with a discussion on the current limitations of the system and make proposals for further developments.

The INTAMAP FP6 project has developed an interoperable framework for real-time automatic mapping of critical environmental variables by extending spatial statistical methods and employing open, web-based, data exchange protocols and visualisation tools. This paper will give an overview of the underlying problem, of the project, and discuss which problems it has solved and which open problems seem to be most relevant to deal with next. The interpolation problem that INTAMAP solves is the generic problem of spatial interpolation of environmental variables without user interaction, based on measurements of e.g. PM10, rainfall or gamma dose rate, at arbitrary locations or over a regular grid covering the area of interest. It deals with problems of varying spatial resolution of measurements, the interpolation of averages over larger areas, and with providing information on the interpolation error to the end-user. In addition, monitoring network optimisation is addressed in a non-automatic context., JRC.H.3-Global environement monitoring

First results of a geostatistical analysis of the maximum annual NDVI (MANDVI) measured by SPOT/VEGETATION over Kenya between 1999 and 2007 are presented here. The purpose of this work is to investigate the use of the spatial correlation of land cover classes using indicator variograms to characterize and summarize spatio-temporal changes in the land cover on an annual basis. More precisely, we used the slopes of the log-log plots of the variograms to characterize spatio-temporal changes in MANDVI. The value of the slope is also known to correspond to the fractal dimension of the spatial correlation of the analysed variable and, since it provides us with a single value rather than with a complex plot, this fractal dimension could be used as environmental indicator to summarize complex changes in the patterns of MANDVI. The use and limitations of this approach are discussed., JRC.H.3-Global environement monitoring

In many Environmental Information Systems the actual observations arise from a discrete monitoring network which might be rather heterogeneous in both location and types of measurements made. In this paper we describe the architecture and infrastructure for a system, developed as part of the EU FP6 funded INTAMAP project, to provide a service oriented solution that allows the construction of an interoperable, automatic, interpolation system. This system will be based on the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Web Feature Service (WFS) standard. The essence of our approach is to extend the GML3.1 observation feature to include information about the sensor using SensorML, and to further extend this to incorporate observation error characteristics. Our extended WFS will accept observations, and will store them in a database. The observations will be passed to our R-based interpolation server, which will use a range of methods, including a novel sparse, sequential kriging method (only briefly described here) to produce an internal representation of the interpolated field resulting from the observations currently uploaded to the system. The extended WFS will then accept queries, such as ‘What is the probability distribution of the desired variable at a given point’, ‘What is the mean value over a given region’, or ‘What is the probability of exceeding a certain threshold at a given location’. To support information-rich transfer of complex and uncertain predictions we are developing schema to represent probabilistic results in a GML3.1 (object-property) style. The system will also offer more easily accessible Web Map Service and Web Coverage Service interfaces to allow users to access the system at the level of complexity they require for their specific application. Such a system will offer a very valuable contribution to the next generation of Environmental Information Systems in the context of real time mapping for monitoring and security, particularly for systems that employ a service oriented architecture.

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The Plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), in section II of its decision IPBES-2/5, established a task force on knowledge and data for the period of its first work programme 2014‒2018. In decision IPBES-3/1, section II, the Plenary approved the data and information management plan set out in annex II to the same decision. At its seventh session, in decision IPBES-7/1, section II, the Plenary adopted the rolling work programme of the Platform up to 2030, which included among its six objectives objective 3 (a), advanced work on knowledge and data. In section IV of its decision IPBES-7/1, the Plenary recalled the establishment of the task force and extended its mandate for the implementation of objective 3 (a) of the rolling work programme of the Platform up to 2030, in accordance with the revised terms of reference set out in annex II to the same decision, and requested the Bureau and Multidisciplinary Expert Panel, through the IPBES secretariat to constitute the task force in accordance with the terms of reference. According to its terms of reference, the task force on knowledge and data oversees and takes part in the implementation of objective 3 (a) of the rolling work programme up to 2030 and acts in accordance with relevant decisions by the Plenary and its subsidiary bodies. Its mandate includes, among other things, to guide the secretariat, including the dedicated technical support unit, in the management of the data, information and knowledge used in IPBES products, including the development of the web-based infrastructure, to ensure their long-term availability and data interoperability. In line with this mandate, the task force on knowledge and data drafted and, upon approval by the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel and Bureau at their 14th meetings in January 2020, published the first version of the IPBES data management policy (version 1.0). The task force revised the policy in September 2020 and published the revision (version 1.1) after approval by the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel and Bureau at their 15th meetings in November 2020. The data management policy was presented to the Plenary in document IPBES-8/INF/12. The Plenary, in decision IPBES-8/1 section IV, took note of the data management policy, as presented. The data management policy was further revised in 2021 and the task force on knowledge and data published the IPBES data and knowledge management policy (version 2.0) after approval by the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel and Bureau at their 18th meetings in February 2022. The purpose of the policy is to provide overarching guidance on the management of data and knowledge to current assessments and the work of task forces regarding IPBES products. The policy is grounded in the principles of open science, accessibility, and building knowledge through partnerships. To get the latest version of the policy visit http:/doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3551078 Inquiries should be directed to tsu.data@ipbes.net