Between the 4th and 9th of July 2016, the SWOS project was actively involved in the developments of the Open Science Conference and All Hands Meeting of GEO BON that took place in Leipzig, Germany.
Several SWOS partners were present including Jena Optronik, the University of Malaga, the University of Bonn, RSS, and Wetlands International who gave presentations in different sessions of the conference. The University of Bonn co-chaired a workshop centred around the development of a Global Wetlands Observing System (GWOS) while the project partners presented the relevant products including data, indicators, tools, and methodologies developed by SWOS that can be used to support the GWOS initiative, as well as a session on “Freshwater and wetland biodiversity monitoring and data mobilisation”.
ETC-UMA, in addition, presented SWOS indicator on flood regulation service during the dedicated session on “Measure, Map & Model Ecosystem Services” of GEO BON. The methodology developed for SWOS for the development of indicators on the assessment of ecosystem services demand, supply, and balances was presented and discussed with experts on the matter that attended the session.
The conference served as an opportunity to strengthen the collaboration with relevant projects and initiatives. Namely, a working approach was defined with the Ecopotential Horizon 2020 project, and several activities are in preparation to make the best use of the project results of developed by the two initiatives in terms of their support and complementarity to users including the European Commission as well as natural resource managers.