Senior government advisers back plan involving Indian GBIF node

Hyderabad, India – Proposals for a ‘national grid’ for biodiversity information in India have gained backing from leading government advisers.

The aim is to unlock large volumes of Indian data currently inaccessible to decision-makers and the public, using biodiversity specialists to mobilize the content.

The project was outlined at the launch of a draft National Biodiversity Information Outlook on the sidelines of the 11th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP11), being held in Hyderabad.

The event was supported by the most senior scientific adviser to the Government of India, Dr Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, science member of the Planning Commission chaired by the Prime Minister.

The project is coordinated jointly by India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA). The WII hosts the national node for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and the NBA is the official body responsible for implementing the National Biodiversity Act, including a mandate to make biodiversity-related data available for policy making.

The NBA’s chairman, Dr Balakrishna Pisupati, told the launch event that the aim of the project was to bring together biodiversity data currently scattered in many institutions around India, enabling policy making and prioritization to be better informed than it is at present.

The Dean of the Wildlife Institute of India, Dr Vinod Mathur, said one problem was that many biodiversity data collected for research projects or PhD programmes were lost once the project was completed.

“These data need to be put into the public domain,” said Dr Mathur. He said the data publishing model provided by GBIF would help to achieve that, but the task had to be accomplished at the country level. “GBIF is offering the best tools and processes available for biodiversity informatics, and countries need to tweak those processes but need not reinvent them.

“We are extremely grateful to GBIF, which has helped us by training our technical staff and our faculty, and we look forward to continuing partnership with GBIF in the coming years,” Dr Mathur added.

Listen to audio interview with Dr Vinod Mathur here.

Download a summary of the NBIO from the open-access journal Current Science (.pdf, 35 KB).

For more information please contact:
Vinod Mathur
Wildlife Institute of India (WII)
vbm@wii.gov.in

Vishwas Chavan
GBIF Secretariat
vchavan@gbif.org

Tim Hirsch
GBIF Secretariat
thirsch@gbif.org