Biodiversity Session at the ESA Living Planet Symposium
Prague, 9-13 May 2016

The European Space Agency recently announced the organisation of their forthcoming Living Planet Symposium (LPS) 2016 that will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, from 9 to 13 May 2016.

The Living Planet Symposium is a major Earth Observation symposium that is organised every 3 years by the European Space Agency. The previous LPS symposia took place in Edinburgh (2013), Bergen (2010), Montreux (2007)
and Salzburg (2004). In 2013, it attracted over 1,800 participants from all continents. The LPS symposium provides a forum for EO experts to present and discuss their scientific and application research in Earth Observation. It covers the exploitation of satellite data in various thematic domains such as Atmosphere, Oceanography, Cryosphere, Land, Natural Hazards, Climate and Meteorology, Solid Earth. It has also sessions on EO missions, calibration and validation , methodologies and EO products and Science 2.0.

This year a session on “biodiversity and conservation” will be organised with a special focus on the development of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) from remote sensing,  and on the use of Earth Observation for conversation actions. You are all cordially invited to participate and submit an abstract.

When you submit an abstract you will be requested to select your main theme (i.e. your biodiversity realm such as land, oceanography, cryosphere, etc). When filling in your abstract, you are kindly requested to indicate “Biodiversity” as one of your keywords. Up to 5 keywords can be provided such as biodiversity but also biomass, coastal zones, wetlands, open science, water quality, LC/LU, GEO, citizen science, etc. Feel free to use any of these keywords but it is essential that biodiversity be included in your abstract.

More information about the event is available at: http://lps16.esa.int

The deadline to submit abstracts is fixed on the 16 October 2015.  Full papers for accepted contributions are required to be provided during the conference and will be published in an ESA Special Publication.

Looking forward to having most of you with us at the LPS 2016.

Martin Wegmann (University of Wurzburg), Nathalie Pettorelli (ZSL), Andrew Skidmore (ITC), Sander Mucher (University of Wageningen), Marc Paganini (ESA)