The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) gathered specialists from dozens of countries in Bonn, Germany, between November 11 and 14, to start the elaboration of its second Work Program for the period between 2019 and 2022. Partly inspired by the Intergovernamental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the platform was created in 2012 with the aim of supplying scientific knowledge to inform policy and decision-making on biodiversity, ecosystem services and sustainable development. One of their featured results is The IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, launched this year. At this new stage of IPBES, Brazil counts on five representatives in the specialist working groups and taskforces,including the Embrapa Agricultural Informatics analyst Debora Drucker. She was nominated by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Department of Environment to integrate the front on Data and Knowledge, alongside representatives from 19 countries. Her choice was also endorsed by the Brazilian Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (BPBES), a national initiative that in September published the 1st Brazilian Diagnostic of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, of which Drucker is one of the authors. The meeting in Germany kickstarted the work of elaborating and reviewing the data policy that will support the activities of the other taskforces and the teams involved with the generation of assessments and other platform products. The document will have to be concluded by the end of this year, so that it can be revised by IPBES' Secretariat and then submitted to the analysis of the multidisciplinary expert panel and subsequent approval in a plenary session that is due to happen in 2020. The other taskforces encompass the themes Professional Capacity-building, Indigenous and Local Knowledge, Scenarios and Models, and Policy Tools and Methodologies. Besides the data policy, Debora Drucker reports that the taskforce also discussed strategies to deal with observed gaps of knowledge on biodiversity and ecosystem services in given areas or regions the planet, where there is difficult access or lack of data and require research and generation of information. “We also considered the possibility of building a catalogue of geospatial data and the use of natural language processing techniques to inform different working groups and teams that compose the platform”, she stated. Embrapa launches reference framework Embrapa has a portfolio of research projects about environmental services and will launch, on November 29, the book Marco Referencial de Serviços Ecossistêmicos, a Reference Framework on Ecosystem Services (learn more here). “All these initiatives represent the opportunity to bring Embrapa's work closer to the Brazilian and the Intergovernmental Platforms”, underscores Debora Drucker, who contributed to the publication. The publication gathers knowledge about all Brazilian biomes and will help technicians, farmers, scientists and society in general to understand and apply the concepts and terms of the area, considering perspectives focused on sustainability in agriculture. It will also work as a reference document for action in congress and the executive power toward the elaboration of public policy. The book editors are the researchers Rachel Prado (Embrapa Soils), Rodrigo Ferraz (Embrapa Soils), Lucília Parron (Embrapa Forestry) and Mônica Campanha (Embrapa Maize and Sorghum). The publication is already available for download in Portuguese as PDF and Epub files. Translation: Mariana Medeiros