News and Events

The Portuguese Node of GBIF is pleased to announce the start of operation of the Biodiversity Data Portal of Portugal, available from today at the address dados.gbif.pt. This portal provides access to information on biodiversity of ten national institutions that publish occurrence data through GBIF, and data published by foreign institutions to Portugal. In total, more than 1.6 million occurrence data available for consultation.

Thirteen College F3 members participated in a training workshop about GBIF within the project Agrotraining, which is supported by the GBIF Capacity Enhancement Support Programme. The two days training course, allowed participants to familiarize themselves with the resources and tools of GBIF.

The project submitted by the Portuguese Node of GBIF Portuguese, in partnership with the Spanish GBIF Node and the College F3 (Food, Farming and Forestry), University of Lisbon, was selected by GBIF to be funded with 10 000 EUR under the Capacity Enhancement Support Program 2016.

The submissions of proposals to the 2016 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is open until 29 September 2016. The challenge winners will receive 20 000 € and 5 000 € prizes the first and second classified, respectively. Results will be announced in the next Governing Board 23, next October, in Brasilia.

This year, the challenge targets data gaps and biases, in the following cases:

The biodiversity information and the role of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) was the main topic of a seminar held at the Instituto da Biodiversidade e Áreas Protegidas in Bissau, last July 14. The seminar was co-organised by IBAP and the Portuguese Node of GBIF. In this seminar, there were also presented IBAP's activities site devoted to the management of biodiversity information in protected areas, through databases and geographic information systems.

In the last two months there was the publication and updating of three sets of records by national institutions, whose data are already available through GBIF.

It is already on the 14th of July, that the Instituto de Biodiversidade e das Áreas Protegidas (IBAP) of Guiné-Bissau hosts, at its headquarters in Bissau, the seminar The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the availability of biodiversity data about Guinea-Bissau. The seminar is co-organized by the IBAP and the Portuguese GBIF Node, and runs under the GBIF_PALOP project to promote GBIF on African Portuguese-speaking countries.

The importance of the participation of Mozambique in GBIF was the topic for discussion in a workshop held in Maputo, co-organized by the Eduardo Mondlane University (Department of Biological Sciences) and the Portuguese Node of GBIF. About 40 participants from universities, natural history museums, research institutes and Mozambican NGOs also gained better understanding about the objectives of the GBIF network, its operation and the requirements and implementation process of a national node.