Dear all,

It is great to see so an increase in traffic on this mailing list. The group from Sao Paulo University would like to offer some background information on their work to highlight how the ALA tools are being used within a monitoring project for the reserves and national parks in Brazil.

The project will span over 300 reserves and parks, within which a variety of data will be collected in accordance with various monitoring protocols. These data are typically spreadsheet based and accommodate single species observation data, abundance data, transects, number of collection units per time etc. The data will be prepared and hosted within one or more instances of the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) in consistent formats to enable a central integration system to harvest the data and offer a discovery mechanism. This integration system will be based on a customisation of the ALA tools, and in particular the modules for the hubs, biocache, collectory, sandbox and the spatial portal, and using local dictionaries and national species lists for taxonomic organisation.

The current focus of work is on mastering the codebase by tackling the translation into Portuguese and understanding the mechanisms to organise the data to national species lists. Once the skeleton pieces are in place, work will commence on defining the exchange formats and exploring how to accommodate and index the new data types.

The project aims to pilot with a handful of reserves and protocols in 2014, and then target a larger scale rollout in 2015 across many reserves. The project is being led by the Research Center on Biodiversity and Computing at Sao Paulo University, in conjunction with the Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMbio), of the BrazilianMinistry of Environment’s and is funded by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) Gmbh.

For more information on the project please contact Antonio Saraiva (saraiva@usp.br), Biocomp leader, or Pedro Correa (pedro.correa@usp.br), project coordinador.

Best wishes, Tim