The UNCCD Conference of the Parties (COP) during its ninth session in Buenos Aires in September 2009 decided (Decision 17/COP9) to provisionally accept a set of eleven impact indicators to measure progress on strategic objective 1, 2 and 3 of The Strategy.

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The website of the GLOBIO model has been fully renewed. The model is a tool to assess past, present and future human impact on biodiversity. As a policy tool, it is regularly applied in global, regional and national assessments. The GLOBIO model is the result of a collaboration between the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) and UNEP/GRID-Arendal. The website provides information on the workings of the model and its applications.

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Science Commons recently held an event called Science Commons Symposium at the Microsoft campus in Redmond Washington. It was a day full of presentations from leaders in the fields of Open Science, Open Access and Open Data. The conversations that took place during the breaks and the post-event reception were just as stimulating as the presentations. I was thoroughly exhilarated by the exciting ideas and bright, passionate people discussing them.

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The 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) will be held in Hyderabad, India from January 10th to 14th, 2011. The Conference is being held in South Asia for the first time; and in a departure from the past, will be hosted by a practitioner organization – Foundation for Ecological Security (FES).

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  In the first days of opening the final version for signature (December 2009), Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC)have signed the Charter and according to the article 9.h of the Charter, by joining three qualified Organizational Members to make the document applicable,  the Charter of the Friends of the Conservation Commons became a binding document.

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The sixth Trondheim Conference on Biodiversity will be held February 1-5, 2010, and will consider status and lessons learned from the 2010 target and provide CBD with a sound basis for developing post 2010 biodiversity targets. New targets will be set under CBD and the United Nations in the second half of 2010.
The conference is hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of the Environment in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD).

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Ten years ago the Centre for Biological Information Technology (CBIT) was established and the first in the series of Lucid identification tools was released. To celebrate this event, they are making the Lucid 3.3 version freely available. Lucid v3.3, which was released in 2006, operates on Windows98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista, OSX, Linux, and Solaris and is capable of producing keys for deployment on CD or the Internet.

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NatureServe Vista is a powerful, flexible, and free decision-support system that helps users integrate conservation with land use and resource planning of all types.

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Following several reviews of the Charter of the Friends of the Conservation Commons by ad-hoc Steering Committee, it is now approved and open for signature.

Please note that, according to the article 9.h of the Charter, by joining three qualified Organizational Members,  the Charter will be a binding document but it shall be open for signature by individuals and institutions, who are the Signatories of the Commons.

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The Google Book Settlement is probably the copyright story of the year — it’s complex, contentious, involves big players and big subjects — the future of books, perhaps good and evil — resulting in a vast amount of advocacy, punditry and academic analysis.

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