The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) has been developed in collaboration with various partners including the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and BirdLife International and with financial support from the European Union. DOPA is conceived as a set of distributed Critical Biodiversity Informatics Infrastructures (databases, web modelling services, broadcasting services, ...) combined with interoperable web services to provide a large variety of end-users including park managers, decision-makers and researchers with means to assess, monitor and possibly forecast the state and pressure of protected areas at local, regional and global scale. It will form part of the Regional Observatory for Protected Areas and Biodiversity, which is being set up through the BIOPAMA Programme in the Eastern and Southern African Region.