Diversity II

The Diversity II project will contribute to the programs of work of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) by assessing the status and trends of biological diversity in two important ecosystems of the Earth, namely inland waters and drylands

The Diversity II project is composed of two elements:

Diversity-Inland Waters: global assessment of the availability of freshwater water and of its quality with the provision of key observations over 300 large perennial inland waters (most natural lakes and water reservoirs which size are over 500 km2 and some natural lakes of biodiversity importance over 100 km2), on a multi-year basis, for the period 2002-2012:

• Water Availability: surface water extent and lake surface height;
• Water Quality: chlorophyll-a (Chla) concentrations, Total Suspended Material (TSM) concentrations, absorption coefficient of coloured dissolved organic matter (yellow substances), water transparency/turbidity metrics, and other quality-related surface water parameters that can be derived from the inherent optical properties of the water constituents;
• Lake Surface Temperatures(Lake ST).

Diversity-Drylands: assessment of the status and trends of the biological diversity in dry and sub-humid lands with the provision of global observations on land productivity and land conditions, over a large part of the drylands (22 drylands areas for a total surface over 10 million km2), on a multi-year basis, for the period 2002-2012:

• Net Primary Productivity(NPP) and related indices on the vegetative productivity of dryland ecosystems;
• Water Use Efficiency(such as RUE) and related indices on the land/vegetation conditions (status and degradation) in dryland ecosystems.

The project will support the development of global indicators on the status and trends of biological divesity in inland waters and in drylands.