GEO BON will held its first Open Science Conference & All Hands Meeting in July of 2016 in the beautiful city of Leipzig, Germany. The GEO BON network’s conference will convene hundreds of the world’s leading biodiversity monitoring experts for a full week of plenaries, workshops, and presentations. GEO BON’s member organizations, partners from national biodiversity observation networks, working groups and other conservation focused institutions will come together to discuss global biodiversity challenges, share innovations, collaborate on new initiatives, and shape the future in terms of biodiversity monitoring.

The first two days of the conference will kick off with plenaries and sessions tackling broad global biodiversity monitoring, providing the context and setting the stage for the next three days. Beginning on the third day, participants will have the opportunity to discuss and plan how to support the strategic plan of GEO BON for the coming years in focused breakout sessions. This first GEO BON conference will be a great opportunity to connect with people that share your passion and curiosity for biodiversity, learn how you can get involved in efforts to track biodiverse change, and meet the scientist that have their fingers on the pulse of biodiversity.

Read more and register now on
conf2016.geobon.org

Open access to biodiversity is key for addressing pertinent ecological issues such as biodiversity loss and impacts of climate change. On 22 & 23 March 2016, experts from EU BON met with GEO BON and scientists, policy makers and practitioners from across Europe to discuss issues of biodiversity... Read more

GEO BON compiles information for biodiversity related geospatial datasets that:

• represent well a particular Essential Biodiversity Variable
• have reach implementation stage
• are available globally  
• can bee accessed and used for free

These information and their corresponding metadata will be organized and stored in a dynamically-updated database that will be served on the GEO BON website.
Anyone that is looking for relevant information on a particular EBV or group of EBVs will be able to access our portal and find information about available datasets that can be potentially used. We have started to compile these information into a database and we would love to have your feedback on additional datasets that we should include in this searchable metadata dynamic table.

On April 24th, the CBD Secretariat, in collaboration with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), UNESCO IOC’s Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and GEO BON’s Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON), convened a one day workshop in Montréal, Canada... Read more

BON in a Box is a state of the art, customizable and continually updated online toolkit that connects scientists and tool developers around the world and lowers the threshold for the start-up or enhancement of a national, regional or local biodiversity observation system. It serves as a technology transfer and capacity building mechanism that ensures researchers around the world have access to the latest technologies and can build and implement biodiversity observation systems that are interoperable using international standards. It is currently available in three languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and English).

More information on

The 2nd national workshop on biodiversity monitoring in China will be held in October in Beijing. This series of workshop was firstly organized last year during January 20-21. It will comprehensively summarize the progress of biodiversity monitoring in China and provide detailed and reliable information for biodiversity conservation and sustainable utilization.
Read more from the 1st workshop