This Francophone project provides mentoring support for the network of data holders and users in Guinea while completing the digitization and publication of collections from l'Herbier National de Guinée (the National Herbarium of Guinea) and l'Herbier National de Guinée Sérédou-Macenta of l'Institut de Recherche Agronomique de Guinée.
Through a series of outreach and training sessions, GBIF Guinea and GBIF France will bring collections staff up to date on current trends and tools in data cleaning and publishing. The understanding that data holders gain regarding licensing rights and reuse will help reinforce the value of collections digitization and establish a reinvigorated national data sharing network for Guinea. The training course will be made available on GBIF France’s elearning platform enabling it to be reused to reach a broader audience.
Project Progress
An outreach session and training workshop was held in Conakry with the support of GBIF France. The workshop aimed to reduce obstacles to data publication whilst raising awareness among data users about the benefits of open source data to fill in gaps identified in biodiversity publishing in Guinea. All of the presentations and demonstrations made by the GBIF France trainers were recorded and have been arranged as an online course on the GBIF France e-learning website. As a result of this project so far, 15 Guinean environment department managers have gained knowledge of data use in decision making for the protection of the environment and the role of GBIF in the management and valorization of biodiversity data. Similarly, 20 executives from administration and herbaria teams have been trained in specific use of GIS and biodiversity modelling software, processes to publish, archive and share biological data as well as knowledge of tools to manage databases and enhance data quality.
Previously digitized biodiversity documents from various national projects have been selected and the project team are now focusing on measures to extract and publish data from these sources with remote support from GBIF France.
GBIF France and GBIF Guinea held a four-day workshop in November 2016 in partnership with the National Herbarium of Guinea. The workshop was held at the Gamal Abdel Nasser University of Conakry in Guinea. The aim of the workshop was to give participants an overview of the different ways to prepare, publish, access and use biodiversity data via the network, standards and tools of GBIF. The workshop information can also be found in French on GBIF France's website.
Following the workshop, three new Guinean institutions were registered, and have since published datasets through the GBIF Guinea IPT. Centre d'Etude et de Recherche en Environnement (CERE) published a dataset with a list of medicinal plants used in the prefecture and observed in the field of Labé, Guinea. Institut de Recherche Agronomique de Guinée (IRAG) was registered and has since published a dataset on the collection of C.C.H. Jongkind on the Nimba Range through the BID programme. The last institution that also published a dataset following the training in Conakry and in the context of the BID programme was National Guinea Herbarium (HNG). Their dataset is a collection of data on plant biodiversity in Guinea to better understand the flora of the country.
A total of seven new data publishers were endorsed following the workshop in November 2016. In 2017, Centre de Gestion Environnemental de Nimba Simendou (CEGENS) was endorsed as a new data publisher.
Since 2017, the project has also published an additional dataset, Inventory of the Vasseredou area, containing plant species on the banks of the Milo River, Republic of Guinea.
