The BID-GBIF 2021-2023 Project.
Olive Sunbird. Photo by Franciska Sprong
To echo the words Tamilisai Soundararajan, ‘ First, we must learn to love nature. Then comes conservation’. One of the best ways we get to learn and grow to love our environment is through research. Research unveils the hidden beauty in creation and equips us with just the right information we need to better understand and conserve animals, trees, habitats, etc.
The A Rocha family helps to protect 450,000 hectares of tropical forests across four African landscapes. Yet a wealth of information, or data, on these landscapes, is still too poorly accessible, as it is either buried in reports or museum collections. If digitized and published, these data could be used in making informed and sound conservation decisions and policies.
Project training for data collection and publishing
With funding provided by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation, A Rocha Kenya is excited to be working on another Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) project Raising the profile of data for the conservation of four forested African landscapes led by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This regional project is looking to use biodiversity data to better conserve biodiversity-rich but threatened forests of Atewa in Ghana; key coastal forests of Kenya (Dakatcha, Taita Hills, Shimba Hills, and Kaya Forests); Kwande and Oban-liku in Nigeria and West Bugwe in Uganda.
Working on the retrieved data
In this project, five A Rocha organizations (Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Eden Care Initiative-Nigeria, A Rocha International) are partnering with the National Museum of Kenya, African Butterfly Research Institute (ABRI), Kenya Wildlife Service, National Forest Authority in Uganda, Council for Scientific Industrial Research- Food Research Institute in Ghana and A.P Leventis Ornithological Research Institute in Nigeria. The eleven organizations are coming together to mobilize, share and use biodiversity data across the four African countries to help with the conservation of the four forested African landscapes.
If you wish to look at our previous BID project, please click here. You can also catch the ongoing project here.
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