Digital Observatory for Protected Areas: Helping Earth's Beleaguered Biodiversity

Human pressure on the natural world is nothing new. But the demands we make through agriculture and fishing, for housing, for energy and water, our ability to pollute vast areas and an insatiable need for resources means this pressure relentlessly increases – the result is a planet losing biological species at unprecedented rates. On purely philosophical grounds our right to prosper at the expense of other species occupying this planet is highly questionable. But even from a selfish viewpoint preserving the diversity of life on Earth should be a priority because of the “services” natural ecosystems provide: from regulating our climate to providing freshwater, food, fuel, fibre – and income.

Protected areas are a vital part of the response. They help maintain habitats in a pristine state; they allow species to exist and co-exist normally and processes to occur at natural rates over space and time. There are around 130,000 protected areas on the planet – over 12% of the land surface, and 6% of territorial marine areas. But are they in the right place? Are they the right size and shape? Does the governance structure help or hinder the surrounding economy and social wellbeing? And how will all of the above change as human population, infrastructure and climate changes? 

Effective protected area management deals with complex links between environmental and anthropogenic factors, calling for information gathered by many scientific disciplines. Hundreds of millions of records documenting the minutiae of habitats and their species’ distribution/condition are collected by thousands of scientists and held on hundreds of servers around the world; the Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) is one attempt to connect this vast array of information and its owners.

DOPA is a set of web services designed to encourage multi-scale cross-disciplinary approaches to biodiversity studies. It uses distributed computing technology to combine scientific findings from the field with environmental observations from space and geospatial models. This combination allows us to compare the intrinsic biological value of different protected areas, and to assess both short and long-term threats from actions as diverse as logging and land clearance to resilience to climate change.

DOPA helps bridge the borders between scientific disciplines to quantitatively determine the likelihood of losing/gaining habitats, to prioritise and balance threats/value and build scenarios – actions that strengthen the role of protected areas in assuring Earth’s continued biological diversity.