News

OBIS Training course Dakar, Senegal, 17-20 July 2017

During four days (17-20 July 2017), 20 participants from 11 French African countries (Algeria, Morocco, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, Comoros, Guinea, Madagascar, Togo, Tunisia and Senegal) gathered at the Ocean Teacher Global Academy - Regional Training Center in Dakar, Senegal, hosted by ISRA/CRODT (Centre de Recherches Océanographiques de Dakar-Thiaroye), to get training in marine biodiversity data management in order to better integrate with OBIS, to further expand the OBIS network and to give the opportunity to more scientists across Africa 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 species databases, and train participants so they can join OBIS as data providers and/or become biodiversity data managers in their country or institutions.

The participants learned how to organize, standardize, quality control (on taxa and location) and publish different types of marine species data. As a result, the OBIS platform will soon hold more data about the occurrences of various marine organisms. These data could contain species from the waters of Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Guinea and Tunisia. All these data will be available for free through www.iobis.org, and will be a great opportunity for researchers to discover their work, and will help other researchers working on similar subjects to be in touch.

At the end of this course the participants are very interested by the course material and tools delivered during the training and are ready to join as data providers and/or data managers on their country or institutions. Meanwhile, OBIS-Senegal node remains ready to accompany the trainees for the organization, quality control and publication of their data in OBIS.

The OBIS training course material (in French) is available online via the Ocean Teacher platform