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The Fourth Annual GBIF Science Symposium included presentations by eight invited speakers, who addressed issues of monitoring of biodiversity change, particularly in Africa. Conservation was a strong theme running throughout all of the PowerPoint talks. Biographies of the speakers, their abstracts and the PowerPoint presentations can all be accessed through the links given here.

The symposium included considerations of both terrestrial (Simon Mduma: Ecological baselines and monitoring ecological change) and marine (David Obura: Applying new technologies to the monitoring of coral reefs) environments. It included consideration of the interaction of conservation policies with human livelihoods (Emma Archer: Biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods in a marginal environment) and the current status of conservation efforts (Gavin Maneveldt: Biodiversity conservation: Its current status in South Africa).

In addition to these studies, consideration was given to international and global concerns by Stella Simiyu (Implementing the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation in Africa), Martin Sharman (Biodiversity data acquisition and assessment after the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment), and Guy Midgley (Projecting and monitoring climate change impacts on terrestrial biodiversity).

All of the presentations pointed out reasons that the data that GBIF works to make available are critical to humanity's potential for gaining an understanding of the impacts that it is having on the Earth and for mitigating and managing these impacts.

The program of the Symposium also included the presentation of the 2006 Ebbe Nielsen Prize to John Wieczorek of the University of California at Berkeley.