OBJECTIVES

The European environment is continually undergoing change caused by a combination of socio-economic and climatic processes at global to local level. To protect the environment and ensure sustainable use of natural resources a wide variety of national and international legal mechanisms (e.g. Amsterdam Treaty 1997, Habitats Directive, EU Common Agricultural Policy and Kyoto Protocol) have been established which in their turn have spurred on a wide range of environmental monitoring activities. Today Europe urgently needs to consolidate these monitoring efforts. The GMES initiative aims at achieving this ‘European capacity for Global Monitoring for the Environment and Security’ by 2008. This project will help realize this ambitious goal.

BIOPRESS will produce information on historical (1950 - 1990 - 2000) land cover change in and around a large sample of Natura2000 sites and convert this information into to pressures on biodiversity. The focus of the project is to develop a standardised product that will be extendable to Europe.

BIOPRESS is aimed at the EU-user community concerned with the impact of land cover/use changes on the environment and biodiversity. The proposed activities of the project are geared to the activities of the European Environment Agency (EEA) and European Topic Centres (ETC’s) (Figure 1) and support the further development of Community Information Systems for nature, biodiversity and forests.

Figure 1

Relationships between the proposed work (in red) and the activities and outputs of the EEA and its ETC’s (in green).