#unep-wcmc

[migratorybirdday]

Bringing Nature Back.

Actions to revive ecosystems – from degraded forests and grasslands, to peatlands and farmlands – broadly termed “ecosystem restoration”, have the power to reverse biodiversity loss, boost climate change mitigation and adaptation and increase human livelihoods and well-being.  

World Conservation Monitoring Centre

[environmentday]

Know more about reviving ecosystems.

Reviving degraded forests can help reverse biodiversity loss, boost climate change mitigation and adaptation and enhance human well-being

Explore the unep-wcmc's Generation Restoration report!

United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre.

[worldseagrassday]

Seagrass meadows should be considered one of the most important shallow marine ecosystems to humans.

Some 15 per cent of the entire world's seagrass has been lost in the past 10 years, putting at greater risks already threatened manatees and sea turtles, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) said today.

Some 15 per cent of the entire world's seagrass has been lost in the past 10 years, putting at greater risks already threatened manatees and

In a press release issued in London and Nairobi, UNEP said the seagrass meadows were being diminished by "runoff of nutrients and sediments from human activities on land, boating, land reclamation and other construction in the coastal zone, dredge-and-fill activities and destructive fisheries practices."

The findings were published Monday in the World Atlas of Seagrasses, prepared by UNEP's World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC). The agency estimates that the total area of seagrass meadows is now about 177,000 square kilometres, an area just two-thirds the size of the United Kingdom.

"We now have a global, scientific view of where seagrasses occur and what is happening to them," said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP Executive Director. "Unfortunately, the scientists have presented us with a worrying story. In many cases, these vitally important undersea meadows are being needlessly destroyed for short-term gain without a true understanding of their significance."

Seagrasses are a mixed group of true flowering plants - not seaweed - that grow submerged in large meadows in both tropical and temperate seas. According to UNEP, besides manatees and sea turtles, thousands more associated marine plant and animal species utilize seagrass habitat.

According to the new Atlas, seagrass meadows should be considered one of the most important shallow marine ecosystems to humans, playing a vital role in fisheries, protecting coral reefs by binding sediments, cleaning coastal waters and providing coastal defence from erosion.

"Seagrass beds have been needlessly destroyed for short-term gain without real analysis of the values that the intact ecosystems bring to coastal society," said Mark Collins, Director of UNEP-WCMC. "Physically they protect coastlines from the erosive impact of waves and tides, chemically they play a key role in nutrient cycles for fisheries and biologically they provide habitat for fish, shellfish and priority ecotourism icons like the dugong, manatee and green turtle. And yet, despite these important attributes, they have been overlooked by conservationists and coastal development planners throughout their range."

[wcmc-informatics]

FOSS4G 2015 Seoul - Big Bang in Asia

by Miguel Torres

In September 2015 I attended the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference (FOSS4G) in Seoul. This annual conference is where geospatial geeks that use and write open source software all gather.

From developers to desktop users, it was a great chance to share knowledge on maps and GIS tools.

I had the chance to present our work on calculating Protected Planet coverage statistics during a Special Session named Open Source GIS for UN and Developing Countries.

My presentation was titled Protecting the Planet with Postgis: How we are calculating complex protected area coverage statistics for all countries in the world.

During my presentation, I explained the methodology that we use to calculate the percentage of area of each country that it is covered by protected areas.

For example, using Protected Planet you can find out that 12% of South Korea is protected (Land Area Protected and 4% Marine Area Protected).

All of this was recorded on video which you can watch below.

Protecting the Planet with Postgis — Miguel Torres from FOSS4G on Vimeo.

I held a brief question & answers session afterwards, and my presentation led to a great deal of interest from the audience towards Protected Planet and a number of questions on how they might be able to use it in future.

As well as presenting I had the opportunity to watch a number of really interesting talks, the majority of which were about web tools (e.g. Leaflet, GeoExt3, GeoServer) and Spatial Data Infrastructures (e.g. geOrchestra or MapMint).

Some of this newly acquired knowledge has already been utilised in a project I’m currently working on with the Brazilian Government.

Also related to spatial data management, I attended a GeoNetwork workshop where I learned how to create custom versions of metadata catalogues.

Meeting and talking to the people behind these tools, and staying in touch with them since, has been extremely useful in informing the systems we decide to use in the data management project I’m currently leading for UNEP-WCMC.

I also had the honour to chair one of the sessions on Project Development. 

But FOSS4G wasn’t exclusively just about technical stuff. I watched some really inspiring Keynote speeches.

All were very interesting but my favourite was Paul Ramsey’s talk on the next 10 years on Open Source Geospatial, the video for which you can see below.

Keynote Lecture 5: Where do we go from here? The next 10 years of open source geospatial — Paul Ramsey from FOSS4G on Vimeo.

Finally, we also had a great fun in the social events, which included this amazing box for lunch.

And a gala dinner with great Korean drums... and great Korean food!

The event was a huge success thanks to Sanghee Shin and his team.

For me personally it was a great opportunity to talk about the work we do at UNEP-WCMC and raise awareness of the tools we build, such as Protected Planet. And it was also a good chance to learn from the huge number of experts all gathered in one place, and this new knowledge has already proved invaluable.

With 562 attendees, from 48 countries covering every continent, FOSS4G really was a Big Bang in Asia.

Miguel Torres Data Manager, Biodiversity Informatics UNEP-WCMC

@migtorres

[wcmc-informatics]

The power of sharing species data – an overview of the Species+ API

by Ferdinando Primerano

Species+ Introduction

Species+, developed by UNEP-WCMC and the CITES Secretariat, is a website designed to assist Parties with implementing CITES, CMS and other multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Species+ provides a centralised portal for accessing key information on species of global concern.

In particular, Species+ contains information on all species that are listed in the Appendices of CITES and CMS, as well as other CMS Family listings and species included in the Annexes to the EU Wildlife Trade Regulations.

Since the launch of the CITES Checklist and Species+, the Secretariat has worked with UNEP-WCMC, Belgium, France and Switzerland on the development of web services to allow Parties to extract, inter alia, species’ scientific and common names and the relevant Appendix number directly into national CITES checklists or CITES electronic permits and certificates.

Canada geese / Paul Sullivan / CC BY-ND 2.0

Species+/CITES Checklist API

The Species+/CITES Checklist API enables a user to request data from Species+ and CITES Checklist to be used in websites and databases regardless of the technology used. How an API works is very simple and a basic diagram is given below:

As described by the diagram, the entire process can be splitted into 4 steps:

1. Authentication

This step is required to prevent unauthorized access to the protected resources. The user needs to sign up and to have a token generated for them. At this point the user can then send authorized requests to the Species+ server using that valid token.

2. Request

The client submits a request using its token to one of the following available endpoints:

Taxon Concepts

CITES Legislation

EU Legislation

Distribution

References

Each endpoint provides a different set of data, with the possibility to be filtered using optional parameters. Taking for example the Taxon Concepts endpoint, the user can use the following URL to get several information regarding all the species in the Species+ database:

api.speciesplus.net/api/v1/taxon_concepts

As you may have noticed, no optional parameters have been used and no response format has been specified. In this case, the request is paginated since more than 500 species are returned and the output of the response is delivered in JSON format by default.

The following is an example with optional parameters where we want to fetch 100 species per page and also select the second page:

api.speciesplus.net/api/v1/taxon_concepts?page=2&per_page=100

The main goal of the Taxon Concepts endpoint is to keep the list of all taxa up-to-date using it regularly as to find out about any possible changes, including deletion, that have occurred since the last synchronization. Note that in case of removal from CITES appendices, a taxon is not deleted from the Species+ database but it will be just marked as such. A taxon concept is deleted from the database only if it has been entered by mistake.

A full explanation of all endpoints is provided in the documentation page.

3. Request processing - Data retrieval

Once the request is taken successfully and verified, the requested data is retrieved from the Species+ Database.

4. Response

The API sends the data to the client who made the request using the previously specified format (JSON or XML).

These are the essential steps for building a pipeline capable of automatically updating the client system with fetched data. If, for example, the user of the API is maintaining a species database by his/her own, he or she can automatically synchronize that database with the Species+ one. Another use case could be simply fetching the data using the API and processing the response to be used on another website.

An Application Programming Interface is a powerful instrument for sharing centralized content between applications and communities in an automatic and dynamic way. It’s a lot different than just having a website where you manually search for information.

With the Species+/CITES Checklist API we are allowing parties building pipelines to automatically update their own databases, helping them with their analysis procedures and with the achievement of several goals.

The possibilities are endless; everyone can use the API, everyone can fetch the data, everyone can benefit from the power of sharing information.

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too), those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed” - Charles Darwin