The objective of this project is to increase the availability of high-quality biodiversity data from the Spanish-speaking community through the GBIF network. The specific goal is to improve capacity in the participant countries and in the Latin American region in general, through two components:
- Training Series: a total of six talks and four workshops in Spanish, about Data Quality, Data Cleaning, and Data Publication using the IPT LAC. We will produce new materials and reutilize others in Spanish from other GBIF projects and programmes (i.e., Data Quality Best Practices document by CESP project CESP2020-018, and the GBIF “Guía de uso básico de OpenRefine”). All training will be open to the Spanish-speaking community and recorded for future use.
- Documentation:
- Document and video (in English and Spanish) with guidelines on how to use the regional IPT installation, with specific sections for Admin users (targeted at regional representatives and node managers) and for regular users, including practical how-to’s and expected administrative workflows.
- Document describing the training model used in this project (in English and Spanish).
Activities will be promoted through and integrated to those related with the Regional Data Portal that is currently being developed, supported by the GBIF Secretariat (https://dev.gbif.org/hosted-portals.html). The impact of the activities will be evaluated through short-term participation metrics and in the long-term by the increase in the use of the regional IPT.
Project progress
As a project planned with 100% virtual activities, the project team started with an online kick-off meeting of the team members in August 2021 to discuss the organization of project’s work. Afterwards the team has continued to meet regularly online to discuss the upcoming webinars and workshops, and to prepare the related the materials.
Dissemination of the activities (webinars, workshops) has been made by the project partner nodes, both to their publishers and to the Latin American community and for midterm reporting (January 2022) the team reported on the communications strategies used.
Since the start of the project the team has held the first round of the following series of webinars (in Spanish only). Noting that by midterm reporting, the videos available of the first and second webinars held, have already exceeded estimated numbers.
- 1st Webinar: Principles of Data Quality, October 2021
- 2nd Webinar: Application of Data Quality workflows, November 2021
- 3rd Webinar: Biodiversity Data Standards. Darwin Core and Darwin Core Archive, February 2022
The team also held the first round of the following series of workshops (in Spanish only):
- Data cleaning using OpenRefine, December 2021
- Publication of Biodiversity Data with the IPT, March 2022
After the events, participant opinion surveys have been undertaken and in the case of the workshops, attendance certificates issued to those who met the conditions of attendance. For the activities held by midterm reporting, a detailed assessment was prepared by the team – this includes lessons learnt and potential improvements for the second round of each series to be held in the second half of the project.
