Living Atlases

During the Pacific regional meeting around BID projects, Anne-Sophie Archambeau, the GBIF France Node Manager, presented the Living Atlases community. The discussion opened by this presentation helped the BID project leads to work on the possibility of using Atlas of Living Australia modules for creating a regional platform using National Biodiversity Network Atlas from UK, as an example.

Through the CESP program from GBIF, GBIF France has helped Canadensys to install and configure its own data portal based on Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) tools. One of the main goal of this partnership is to improve the documentation in English but also in French. By this way, the community will be open to French-speaking countries, espacially in Africa. During this workshop, we redefined all the documentation architecture and Fabien Cavière from GBIF France took the lead in order to improve this part in the community. Documentation is the key factor to make this community work.

During the Caribbean regional meeting around BID projects, Marie-Elise Lecoq, GBIF France lead developer, presented the community. The discussion opened by this presentation helped the BID project leads to work on the possibility of using Atlas of Living modules for creating a regional platform for Caribbean countries.

During the European Nodes Meeting 2017, several presentations were made by members of the community in order to present their work to the GBIF European community. A technical workshop between advanced members was organized as a side event to this meeting.

The NBN Atlas Wales and the NBN Atlas has been launched in march 2017. Adding to the NBN Atlas Scotland, they are the three first steps of the UK biodiversity network.

During the conference, GBIF France team with the help of the community presented the Living Atlases as well as the Atlas of Living Australia modules. Through a talk, GBIF France technical team was able to describe an existing example of national data portal based on ALA platform in order to show how it works for potential future users of these tools. The community wrote its first poster showing its members and its projects.

Since 2015, GBIF Portugal is an active member of the ALA community. Thanks several workshops and partnership with other participants, they were able to launch their new data portal in production in October 2016.

The 3-day International ALA Workshop was held in Madrid (Spain) between the 3rd and 5th of October 2016. This workshop brought together software developers from GBIF Nodes of Australia, France, Germany, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Sweden as well as the member organization Canadensys to enhance the development of national data portals based on the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). The Australian, French and Spanish Nodes assisted the other Nodes based on their previous experience. The host for this course was GBIF Spain (GBIF.ES).

Following this 3-day workshop, a 2-day workshop was proposed for members of the CoopBioPlat project. The main goal was to review the state of each national data portal based on ALA and move forward on the developments of Species and Geospatial modules.

In July 2016, during the GEO BON conference, a session and hands-on workshop with "National Biodiversity Monitoring Network" as main subject had been proposed by iDiv, Atlas of Living Australia and other institutions. During this session, two presentations have been made about Atlas of Living Australia tools and community. All abstracts from this session are available on the official website (beginning at page 99).

During the GBIF France 10th anniversary, GBIF France technical team presented the new spatial portal based on Atlas of Living Australia modules.

The NBN Atlas Scotland has been made possible by the partnership formed by SNH, Scotland’s Environment Web (SEWeb), the Atlas of Living Australia and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation of Australia (CSIRO), Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), the NBN Trust, RSPB and the Scottish Biodiversity Information Forum (SBIF), with funding from the SEWeb LIFE+ project and SNH.

Thanks to the help of Atlas of Living Australia and GBIF, the National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica (INBio) implemented a new portal based on ALA tools. The Atlas of Living Costa Rica (CRBio) has been financed by a project grant of the Costa Rican government.

Paco Pando, former GBIF Spain node manager, talked about the power of a open source platform and collaborations linked to it for the entire open source community around the biodiversity during the public symposium of the GBIF Governing Board in 2015.

During the conference, GBIF France team with the help of the community presented the Living Atlases as well as the Atlas of Living Australia modules. Through a poster and a talk, GBIF France technical team was able to describe an existing example of national data portal based on ALA platform.

CoopBioPlat brought together GBIF nodes in Argentina (SNDB), Brazil (SiBBr), Costa Rica (CRBio), France, Portugal and Spain to produce an institutional agreement to cooperate on developing national biodiversity data portals based on the ALA portal. The meeting also aimed to further the customization of the ALA Platform by GBIF Nodes. This 2nd meeting focused on IT developments. Developers among the project’s partners were assisted at the meeting by David Martin from ALA.

CoopBioPlat was a Pilot Coordination Action, funded by ERANet-LAC of the European Commission, and was implemented over 18 months.

More information is available on the website of GBIF Spain.

Since the Atlas of Living Australia workshop, GBIF France technical team has worked on the national GBIF data portal based on Atlas of living Australia. For this release,they installed the registry and biocache modules. They launched this new tool during the GBIF France annual steering comity.

Organized as side event of the 2015 European Nodes Meeting, this workshop was a sequel to the 2014 GBIF/ALA Workshop in Canberra and brought together developers and node managers working on national installations of the ALA software. This was the first workshop where developers outside Atlas of Living Australia began to teach about platform future

Since the beginning, GBIF Spain has been part of the ALA community. They have worked on the Spanish National Biodiviersity Data portal of GBIF for several months before launching it in production. The data portal is available in Spanish, Catalan and English.

The second workshop linked to the community had been hosted by Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). It was open for developers interested by ALA platform. There were people from Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, France, Malaysia and Spain.

The Biodiversity Information Facility of Costa Rica CRBio (CRBio), in collaboration with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), is pleased to present its II Workshop about Tools for the Management, Sharing and Use of Biodiversity Information.

The aim of this workshop is to strengthen participants’ capacity to use information technologies to integrate, analyze and share information to support decision making related to biodiversity.

This practical workshops will be divided in two sections; Section I is composed of public presentations and section II will include technical training about the tools developed by ALA.