Blogs

National Academies Press has published Ecosystem Services: Charting a Path to Sustainability.  The report is a summary of a conference in which various working groups looked at a range of services and policy issues, including valuation, from a primarily USA perspective. Part of the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative - multidisciplinary forward perspectives in various areas.

The Second Plenary meeting of IPBES has finished - detailed coverage available so far from IISD. Two areas of emphasis were first the workplan, based on the submitted paper, from which priorities were identified as an "assessment of assessments" and development of a conceptual framework - together with capacity building and other measures.  Second was the location and operation of the secretariat- Bonn was agreed.

ICSU has been developing a strategic framework for earth system research over the past 3 years - summarised on the Earth System Visioning site.  To meet the ICSU Grand Challenges for research and the Belmont Challenge, Future Earth has been initiated - a new 10-year initiative on earth system research involving various ICSU programmes and partners and the funding agencies represented in the Belmont Forum. Initial launch at the recent Planet Under Pressure meeting, with a fuller exposure at Rio +20

A barcode for fungi has been published in PNAS - part of the activity of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBoL). Schoch, C.L. et al. (2012)  Nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region as a universal DNA barcode marker for Fungi PNAS 2012 109 (16) 6241-6246; published ahead of print March 27, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1117018109

The second plenary of IPBES (the intergovernmental science-policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services) is being held 16-21 April 2012 in Panama.  The available papers sketch out options on work plans and the nature of the secretariat, among other things.  Also a fair number of background papers from the various exploratory meetings that have taken place between the plenaries on issues such as assessments and capacity building.