News

OBIS Training course Mérida, Mexico, 27/2-3/3 2017

During one week (27th February-3rd March), 22 participants from Mexico gathered at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mérida, Yucatán, to get training in marine biodiversity data management and data publishing in order to spread the seeds and give the opportunity to more researchers to join the OBIS Network.

The main goal of the training course was to show how to organize, standardize, quality control (taxon and location checking) and publish different sorts of marine organisms databases, and train participants so they can join OBIS as data providers and/or become biodiversity data managers in their country/institutions.

Participants were working on very diverse data sets, such as marine mollusks of Campeche Bay, Echinoderms of the Gulf of Mexico, Macroalgae of Yucatan, Ascidians of the South of Mexican Gulf. Those data sets will be added to OBIS soon via the Caribbean OBIS node. The final output is more open access data and the opportunity for researchers to show their work, which can help establish contacts with other researchers working on similar subjects.

More OBIS training courses are planned for this year in different countries: Latin-American (Ecuador, Colombia) and Africa (Senegal). Check the OceanTeacher calendar for 2017 events here.

All the OBIS training course material (in Spanish) is available online via the Ocean Teacher platform: http://classroom.oceanteacher.org/course/view.php?id=261