BITC / BBII - 02 Intro to BITC

So let's talk about this course Over dinner last night we had a conversation about what good could this course do it was a very useful conversation because here we have around the table a very excellent example of a biodiversity informatics institution XXXXXXXXXX in a developing country, in an African country that has done very very nice work in making a lot of biodiversity data available we have a representative from Brazil who has similarly taken a country from essentially nothing to a major amount of biodiversity information online Krishtalka is coming from a university in the US and also I remember in his job interview he said "you hire me, I place KU as one of the world leaders in biodiversity informatics" you remember that? and you'll hear from Jorge Soberon who was in Mexico in Mexico the government decided to step into this world of biodiversity informatics and did rather successfully so those are kind of fore-case studies but if anyone of you in your home country were to be leading a parallel effort let's say Madagascar, Ghana or Congo where ever the very interesting fact is that your set of constellation is going to be completely different so Kris has to deal with the academic work and how do you sell biodiversity informatics to people who care about academic performance and Tania and Jorge has to deal with this ona governmental basis how do you sell this to the minister or whoever it is is one or two or three steps up in the governmental hierarchy and XXXXXXXXX has done this from an independent institution so there are all sorts of different situations there are all sorts of different contexts and certainly the sets of players are going to be different for in every single country so the question is what can we do usefully in a week with a bunch of smart people around the table right? some who have done this before and some well placed potentially to do this in the future so what do we need. Well, you know the basic message we are talking about biodiversity laws, laws of the ecosystem services and governments and NGOs and entities worldwide I am very conscious that these are important losses. certainly data exist. we don't after know how much data exist whether it is enough and very very frequently nobody put the data together so I make the difference between data which were just can raw materials this is information so the data exist in some unknown quantity and information is awfully scarce I pointed out throughout to you is that if you have particular interest in xxxxx nobody is going to take care of the best interest of xxxxx with respect to Biodiversity except xxxxx and so if there are regional, national, sub national, local concerns xxxxxxxx people who are concerned with those issues. and so the kind of logical consequence of that sort of reasoning is the abilities,facilities, the experties, to get this work done needs to be assembled on these levels each at it's own level of need and hopefully feeding between levels Hopefully the Zambi?? is supporting the next level down the district, state, province level and the district state province level hopefully is hopefully helping individual natural areas, OK so that's the rationale behind this course but what we see as far as information, this is my opinion, may be it's completely wrong,and may be we can have a good argument about it btu what do we see as far as information, here is a complilation of biodiversity hot spots distribution and protection of conservation priority areas here are the hot spots around the world and there are some really interesting things in here notice that all of madagascar is a hot spot right but notice that the only thing important in South Africa is this southern and south western fringe all that other stuff, notice, Sorry John but Congo is pretty much left out so where does this come from and what drives this being important versus this not that the NIgerians pay their dues and the Congolese not or what's behind this? in this case I have looked at this quite carefully and it's apparently a distillation of diversity and threat that's what it is on paper, but there is no quantitative protocol htere is no XXXXX that takes you to identifying a hotspot so again if the DRC doesn't look at it's interests and do it's information development we can't sit back and wait for global interest to do this for them here is another one. "Important bird areas in Africa and the associated islands" priority sites for conservation. what do they all have in common? I could have put up 20 more examples. what do these have in common? they all refer to the biodiversity. and they are all in some sense spatial or geographic OK interestingly they are all developed by global entities some organizations that calls itself world.. something or mammals of... but not any entity that is interested or focussed on any region and so these organizations have global interests and global motives and their objectives are their objectives. they may be very noble but they may not serve the continent or region, national subnational or local interests certainly there have been such efforts. hre is an example from Colombia that relates protected areas to endemic bird areas and protected areas to well preserved forests and here is something I pulled off the Zambi page where it's a relation of protected areas to priority and and potential quaters to connect up areas so this sort of product comes out of national and regional efforts that can look to national and regional interests but it's an awfully complex field so this is from a paper that a couple of us got together and published few years ago it's a framework. it may not be the best or the only framework but essentially it takes us through genotype through phenotype through organisimal operations the environment to the affects of humans and we kind of front and center put niche and population ecology basically because that's the field that we have worked in and over here biodiversity loss and we have all of these information products that come out of that it might be hypothesis as far as the evolutionary history might be taxonomy might be information about geographic distribution forecast of change and very specific conservation management strategies but to take on these challeneges like I showed you examples of we really need to take some set of this network and tie the pieces together for example for XXXXXXXXXXXXXX of movements of large African mammals maybe we need to deal with geographic distributions and environment, human presence and get that piece of this network this requires expertise, experience, infrastructure so that's the motivation behind why develope biodiversity informatics institutions here in South Africa or in Kenya or where ever what we are trying to do in this course is talk about the "why" and we'll do that via a series of 4 case studies Zambi?? Conabi, XXXXXX, KU we are going to talk about strategies or atleast elements of strategies that are potentiially important in implementing institutions of this sort. I hope that there will be a lot of ideas of interest thrown around and debated I hope you can keep this at a first name basis lets have some good in depth discussions and in creating the program we tried our very best to leave a lot of time for discussion and then the perpetual goal of of XXXXXXXXXXX and I also want to capture it digitally so that it can go beyond this group of people so here is a really quick overview of the program where you see blue is where I'll be talking to you so this is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. this is the morning and this is the afternoon so you can see this green block and that is Taniya and Selvan talking to us about some of the Zanbi experience i'll come back after lunch and give a brief comment about importance of open access to data and then look at this, round table and open question and answer which is to say free form whatever you guys want to talk about so make a list of questions, jot things down, let's make very good use of that free time most of the afternoon after lunch tomorrow we are going to start out with 3 videos that are lectures and topics that Jorge Soberon taped for us so tomorrow we'll start out with some general comments from Jorge Soberon about what is policy and how does biodiversity and biodiversity information relate to and translate into policy Then Krishtalka will talk to us about an academic example how you take the university of Kansas and make it into the biodiversity informatics institution after lunch I will come in with some general commentary about what Icall the biodiversity initiative gain. essentially you come in raise $10 million very quickly and play a bunch of people exist for 5 years and disappear and then look at this more time for discussion 3rd day I'll start off with some comments from XXXXXX about sharing data vs XXXX data, what XXXX likes to refer to as data crocodiles I'll give some comments. we'll have a bit of a discussion and in the afternoon we'll get back to the XXXX example this is a stand alone institution in Brazil that has done some very very nice work at XXXXX biodiversity data at Brazil and another video from Jorge and a discussion. hopefully live with Jorge we'll come for some more conabio on friday morning more of Kris but he's wearing a XXXX XXXX this time some commentary from XXXXXXXX on similar lines and then a lot of more discussions so you see 30, 40, 50% of this course is what we make of it by having some really good really incisive really carefully XXXX out discuaaions so don't be shy. each day we'll start the lectures at 9 and in 2 hrs a half hour break so that you can shake the cob webs out of your heads another hour and a half and then lunch another hour and a half a break and then another hour, then we stop so a lot of break time and ideally that time will be spent in one on one discussions or five on five discussions but the idea is use the whole day. we will ask you to be out at the cabs in hotel by 8.15 so we are here well in advance of nine and that's kind of the constant plan. you can basically plan on that. we'll try not to run over time but I'm sure we are doing that already here are the paople that will be talking with you. Taniya, XXXX, Chris and Jorge in electrons if not in person and then Kate is sitting over there most of you've had a lot of communication with Kate and you know me. so from Kate and from me anything we can do to help you just let us know