Safe Software Joins Proteus Partnership

The United Nations Environment Programme‘s World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) have invited Safe Software into their Proteus Partnership, a collaboration of progressive corporate business leaders and the UNEP-WCMC. The goal of Proteus is to provide industry decision makers with access to the best possible data on location and distribution of biodiversity to support risk management and safeguard the Earth's biodiversity and ecosystems.  

The UNEP-WCMC helps decision-makers to protect conservation areas and therefore ensure that future generations can enjoy the benefits of biodiversity. To accomplish this, the Centre provides critical information to aid biodiversity assessments and policy support for decision making by compiling data from governments and other sectors around the world and making it globally available.

The challenge in achieving this objective is that data is created and stored in a wide variety of formats, models and coordinate systems by providers from all over the world. To overcome these barriers, the UNEP-WCMC turned to Safe Software's spatial ETL platform FME. When Safe Software learned of this situation in 2007, they donated FME to the Centre to help their critical global initiative. The Centre is now able to translate, transform and integrate source datasets as required, to make necessary information accessible and as current and accurate as possible.

Previously, bringing biodiversity information together from all over the world was challenging, requiring manual comparisons of existing maps with new data, which required assumptions that could risk data integrity. Today using FME, the UNEP-WCMC is able to provide this information directly to the decision makers in much less time and with greater accuracy. Additionally, FME has enabled the integration of data from areas of the globe which the Centre previously could not translate, ensuring that the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA), the only global dataset of protected areas, delivers the world-wide data needed to power conservation efforts.

Moving forward, Safe Software will continue to support the UNEP-WCMC by providing training and sharing their data conversion knowledge to enable further, more efficient data access for biodiversity conservation.

The UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre is the biodiversity assessment and biodiversity policy support arm of the United Nations Environment Programme, the world's foremost intergovernmental environmental organisation. The Centre has been in operation for over 25 years, providing objective, scientifically rigorous products and services to help decision makers recognise the value of biodiversity and apply this knowledge to all that they do. The Centre's core business is locating data about biodiversity and its conservation, interpreting and analysing that data to provide assessments and policy analysis, and making the results available to both national and international decision makers and businesses.