International Living Atlases workshop - how to improve data use with Atlas of Living Australia modules

Description

To highlight their publishers and their data, the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) have created an internationally-renowned and powerful adjustable platform. Since 2014, it has been installed, configured and used by multiple nodes and institutions. The Living Atlases community, created by the users of this toolset, has increased over the years. The number of atlases based on the platform (13 as of March 2018) proves the positive impact of past workshops.

As participants have become more skilled, however, the number of goals to achieve and elements to improve have increased. For instance, there is an expressed need to work on end-user training and supporting documentation. Indeed, there is a demand to fill the gap of missing tutorials or exercises concentrated on the full exploitation of these data portals not only to assist participants at a national level, but also the global GBIF community which will help to increase the capacity to analyze GBIF-mediated data.

This project organized a workshop around the ALA geolocation modules, including the spatial portal and the “Explore region” tool, but also on analysis elements such as ALA4R.

GBIF France hosted this 1-week event at the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN) in Paris, inviting participants from 15 GBIF nodes in Africa, North and South America, Asia, Europe and Oceania. A key focus was on improving the link between GBIF and the national atlases by adding citations, licenses and DOIs. In addition, the workshop provided opportunities to present some use cases illustrating how institutions could share some technical challenges or impediments (hosting, technical staff, etc.).

A second outcome of the project was to work on improving the documentation for the end-users. Exercises on how to use these atlases had been produced as well as videos (see Resources page or the official news promoting their use. All these resources have been developed in English and translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese.

This project was a part of the Capacity Enhancement Support Programme founded by GBIF and co-founded by participants. It took place between August, 1st 2018 and July, 31st 2019.

Participants

Organization Role
GBIF France Leader
ALA (Atlas of Living Australia) Co-coordinator & co-founder
GBIF Spain Co-coordinator & co-founder
GBIF Portugal Co-coordinator & co-founder
GBIF Brazil Co-coordinator & co-founder
GBIF Sweden Co-coordinator & co-founder
Canadensys Co-coordinator & co-founder
GBIF Benin Partner
GBIF Togo Partner
GBIF Norway Partner
NBN (National Biodiversity Network) Partner
CBIF (Canada Biodiversity Information Facility) Partner
TaiBIF (Taiwan Biodiversity Information Facility) Partner

Agenda & Resources

Agenda
Reports
Videos
End-user exercises
Other resources