Led by the National Herbarium of Guinea, this project aims to mobilize the wealth of data held in herbaria and literature on Guinea’s plant species to develop the first national Plant Red List programme in West Africa, identifying Guinea’s most threatened species and key sites for their protection.
Through partnering with the Guinea government’s Ministry of Environment, Water & Forests, the project develops strong links between biodiversity data providers and key data users in the policy realm, and enables effective conservation prioritization at a national scale.
At the local scale, Guinée Ecologie and Centre Forestier de N'Zérékoré, who share expertise in community outreach and environmental training, engage with local communities who live and work within and around key sites for these globally threatened plants, in order to promote community-led management and monitoring programmes.
Through this partnership, Guinea’s capacity to mobilize and co-ordinate large scientific datasets and apply them to national biodiversity priorities will be greatly enhanced, a need highlighted in the 2014 fifth national progress report on Guinea’s commitments to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This project is aligned to Targets 2 and 5 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and so offers an important step towards fulfilling national CBD targets.
Project Progress
Organization of a project planning workshop for all the project partners to develop a detailled project implementation plan and to draw up a data sharing agreement.
Agreement on a preliminary list of priority species based on national endemic and range restricted species.
Training of two project team members in data capture, databasing and georeferencing at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew (UK).