News

OBIS Training course, Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico, 14-18 January 2019

During one week (14-18 January, 2019), eighteen participants from diverse governmental institutions (UNAM, CONABIO and INAPESCA), researchers and postgraduate students from Mexico gathered at the Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico – UNAM got trained in marine biodiversity data management and publishing, applying international standards and using bioinformatics tools, in order to increase the opportunity to join the OBIS network. The main goal of the course was to learn how to organize, standardize, quality control (taxon and location) and publish different sorts of marine biodiversity data. Participants were working on very diverse datasets, e.g. a marine Mollusk Collection, ROV biodiversity records from South California Gulf, Fishes from the Gulf of Mexico (many years of cruises, collecting data about fishes occurrences). At the end of the course, the participants are now ready to become data providers to OBIS and/or data managers in their country/institutions. Importantly, CONABIO and other national institutions that store data are now interested in joining OBIS with the vision of making available the large amount of marine biodiversity data that Mexico has and the training course ended with a proposal for creating an OBIS node for the Gulf of Mexico. More OBIS training courses are planned for this year. Check our Calendar.

All the training material (in Spanish) of this training course is available online at the OceanTeacher website.