The Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) is one of the internationally acting cross-cutting research networks of DIVERSITAS. GMBA acts as a platform of the international mountain biodiversity research (www.gmba.unibas.ch), currently listing more than 700 active partners worldwide. It aims to synthesise often fragmented knowledge, organize workshops/symposia and promote participation in international research projects. GMBA has also developed internationally accorded research guidelines for specific fields and encourages collaborative research programmes throughout the world and advocates the open access philosophy of GBIF and e-mining of mountain biodiversity data. The GMBA office is coordinating a network of field experiments worldwide, aiming to quantify the influences of land use and biodiversity on catchment value in steep mountian terrain, with successfully funded Joint Research Projects in Bolivia, Georgia, Austria, and upcomming projects in France, Switzerland and China. Main products of this funding period will include: - Global mountain biodiversity data portal and promotion of open access of geo-referenced mountain biodiversity data, in collaboration with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in Copenhagen, Denmark; - publication of a synthesis book on mountain biodiversity data mining and results of comparative data-mining of GMBA data expert; - synthesis of results of the world-wide network of field experiments on land use and biodiversity, and catchment value in mountains (in a special journal issue or synthesis volume); - GMBA will link the mountain biodiversity community with the International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity (IMoSEB), an international scientific biodiversity assessment panel. - organisation of the 2nd GMBA open science conference on mountain biodiversity in 2010. This will be the 10-year anniversary of GMBA under Swiss leadership.
GEOFON (GEOFOrschungsNetz) is the global seismological broad-band network operated by the German GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ). The GEOFON seismic network came into being in 1993 as one of the three pillars of the GEOFON program dedicated to Ernst von Rebeur-Paschwitz, proposer of a global earthquake monitoring system, who recorded the first teleseismic seismogram in Potsdam in 1889. The program and its seismic network were created to provide high quality broad-band data for scientific use and foster common standards in the seismological community. The network has evolved towards real-time data acquisition and distribution while keeping the high quality broad-band data in focus. Today the network plays a leading role in global real-time seismology providing valuable data for almost all fundamental and applied global/regional seismological research projects at GFZ and the wider seismological community.
The GEOFON network is operated jointly with more than 50 international partners and in 2014 consists of about 80 active stations on all continents, but concentrated in Europe and the Mediterranean region as well as in the Indian Ocean. Station operation is mostly performed by local partners with GFZ guidance and logistic support, allowing the global network to be well-advanced technically while still extremely cost-effective. All stations are equipped with broad-band sensors (generally STS-2) that allow resolution of the complete seismic spectrum from small high-frequency local earthquakes to the largest global earthquakes.
Data from all stations are freely redistributed in real-time for earthquake monitoring and tsunami warning centers immediately after acquisition at the GEOFON data centre via wired or satellite links. Archived data is also available. GEOFON is part of the Modular Earth Science Infrastructure (MESI) housed at GFZ.