About

The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) has been developed to support the European Union’s efforts “//to substantially strengthen the effectiveness of international governance for biodiversity and ecosystem services//” and more generally for “//strengthening the capacity to mobilize and use biodiversity data, information and forecasts so that they are readily accessible to policymakers, managers, experts and other users// ”. DOPA is conceived as a set of web based services to provide a large variety of end users with means to assess, monitor and possibly forecast the state of, and pressures on protected areas at local, regional and global scale.

In particular, DOPA aims to

1) **provide the best available material** (data, indicators, models) made available by a few key institutions which can serve for establishing baselines for research and reporting;

2) **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;

3) **provide an interoperable and, as far as possible, open source framework** to provide institutions with their own means to assess, monitor and forecast the state of, and pressures on protected areas, and to help these institutions to further engage with the organizations hosting critical biodiversity informatics infrastructures.

=The DOPA wiki=

The main purpose of the DOPA Wiki is to allow end-users of our services and indicators to generate their own information. In particular, we provide here

1) the **technical details** depicting the methods used to generate the indicators presented in the DOPA using global datasets that are open access;

2) pointers to the **datasets** used to generate the indicators;

3) brief discussions on the use of the proposed **indicators**;

4) **latest news** regarding changes made to our web services and applications;

5) a platform for **end-users to comment** our methods and make suggestions for further improvements.

Follow us on Twitter [|@EU_DOPA]