Improving Brazilian capacities for national assessments, biodiversity information management and mainstreaming of scientific data into policy
| Project title | Improving Brazilian capacities for national assessments, biodiversity information management and mainstreaming of scientific data into policy |
| Implementing Institutions | Ministry of Science and Technology of Brazil and some of its institutes (such as National Institute of Researches in Amazônia, Goeldi Museum, Mamiraua Institute, National Laboratory of Comuting Sciences and National Institute of Spatial Research), Botanical gardens of Rio de Janeiro, ICMBio, Biota FAPESP Programm (University of Campinas), State University of São Paulo, Brazilian Foundation for Sustainable Development. |
| Country(ies) | Brazil |
| Abstract | The Project aims to improve brazilian capacities to conduct large scale biodiversity and ecosystems assessments and monitoring; to manage and explore big data and to strengthen the science -policy interface by establishing better ways to comunicate science findings into policy but also to communicate the scientific information that is needed in policy to the funding agencies and to the scientific community. |
| Project Description | Brazil needs (specially in Amazônia) to scale up its capacity to use the newest and more modern methods of conducting large scale assessments, specially the ones that are based on remot sensing and geospatial techniques. The country has a great capacity to generate data but lacks a national infrastrucure to manage and integrate this data and most of its researchers dont know how to structure, store and integrate their data using modern IT Technologies. Most of the scientific findings are also only made availabe to their peers because the country lacks experience on eficiente ways to communicate scientific findings to the funding agencies and to the policy stakeholders. The country would clearly benefit from a national capacity building projet to improve its way to generate, store, manage and communicate data into the relevant policies. There are, however, reference institutions that play very important roles in biodiversity assessments and in data management. Some of these institutions are listed above and will participate giving scale to the trainings that are alreadu being done. |
| Project Objectives and expected Achievables | Objective 1: to establish a large scale training program on biodiversity and ecosystem services considering the subnational diferences between the brazilian biomes. This activity will enable the country not only to conduct better assessments but also to monitor its biodiversity in better ways. The program will also deliver at least 15 diferente groups of trainers that will be able to replicate the training upon request. Objective 2: to establish a large scale training program on data structure, data publishing and data storage using the internatiional accepted standarts and the modern IT infrastructures. The program aims to train most of the Brazilian federal, state and private universities and research institutions of the country on how to prepare, store and publish (digitally) their data. Objective 3: to establish a biodiversity data national infrastructure able to secure, store, integrate, recover and use digital data associated with identifiers. Although the infrastructure is being created, much needs to be done regarding the use of digital identifiers, publishing tools, data analysis plataforms among others. The country needs tcapacity builing to deploy infrastructures, data repositories, analysis portals (such as Biovel), and to ensure data integration Objective 4: to improve the country capacity in communicating and mainstreaming biodiversity information into policyby gaining experince from countries such as South África, México, Austrália and EUA. |
| Timeframe | 2 years |
| Geographic Scale | National |
| Seeking Resources for: | Project implementation |
| Type of Resources/Support needed: | Financial, Technical |