How do we address large-scale regional imbalances in documenting biodiversity while making key data available to scientific, policy and citizen communities from the Global South?

Some perspectives from a #GBIC2 attendee

Good comment! Main causes as far as I can see:

  • limited funds for routine/regular biodiversity monitoring provided by governments
  • a large part of the biodiversity data is hidden within scientific/academic institutions and is hardly shared
  • lack of (use of) international standards for biodiversity monitoring, which would help to make such data comparable in time and over geographic areas
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Ask the Digital Humanities Community - specifically the Archives Community. They have exactly the same issues and have some working models that could be adopted. In part, recognition of the issue requires that new projects build this into any data mobilization strategies (whether that is mobilizing legacy data from museum collections OR mobilizing new data from human or machine observations). This requires building partnerships with the entities (organizations, countries, communities …) to manage expectations and help foster and guide the development of resources needed by these groups to manage data on their end (access to it, storage - if applicable). Talk with Ben Brumfield (fromthepage.com) for more ideas about communities to reach out to about this.