This regional training, organized by International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), is designed to strengthen the capability of key institutions working for biodiversity management in its Regional Member Countries (RMCs) to manage, standardise and publish biodiversity data; in effect, building a community of data-publishing institutions that can leverage and amplify the use of open access data (for example, GBIF-mediated data) in biodiversity research and decision making.
The regional training is supported by GBIF’s Capacity Enhancement Support Programme and ICIMOD. The National Biodiversity Centre of Bhutan, Zoological Survey of India, Forest Action-Nepal and the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, are providing technical expertise. This collaboration is expected to build future partnerships for joint actions and proposal development. Following this workshop, there will be post-training national dissemination webinars on sensitising other agencies/institutions in the participating countries.
Post event update
The three-day training was held with 14 participations from five Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan.
Participants were first guided through data publishing process through the use case exercises of data mobilization course. Thereafter they were guided to publish their real datasets to GBIF – of which 12+ datasets were published (see all CESP2024-006 project-related datasets here). In addition, participants were provided a session on GRSciColl and during the exercise, participants suggested addition of entries and updates to the existing entries in GRSciColl from their countries (20 institutions and 6 collections were added/updated).
As a next phase, participants will organize in-country online webinars in their countries to share the knowledge and skills they have acquired during this regional training. It is envisaged that members of the CESP2024-006 project team will also participate in each webinar to answer questions and help with presentations.
