TEMS Developments

27 October 2004

Please feel free to send notices that you would like GTOS to disseminate to gtos@fao.org.

TEMS: qualitative change assessment of environmental variables

The GTOS secretariat has the pleasure to announce the release of a new service providing a qualitative change assessment of environmental variables measured.

This assessment would be made, on an appropriate basis, by each site’s manager. For example, the variable “water potability” could be marked with a positive trend if the measurement shows that it the water is becoming more potable, negative if it is becoming less potable and neutral if there is no change.

Less than half of the 120 variables in TEMS are concerned by that tool since most of them can’t be considered as an indicator. An improvement of the ecosystem’s condition should always be marked as a positive change. The latest assessment will be then displayed, as an arrow, beside the list of the variables measured by the site. Another small icon besides it will also provide a quick access to the entire time series as a graph.

Please see example

The dynamic map interface of TEMS will also represent for one variable all the assessments made by the sites measuring it. A positive change could be represented by a green dot, a negative one by a red dot and a stable trend by a blue dot.

Please see the example for “Forest cover change”.

Please note that this service has been recently released and will start being populated by the site managers.

We would most welcome any feedback concerning this new service at gtos@fao.org

© FAO   ::   Global Terrestrial Observing System - GTOS   ::   27 October 2004