The CEPF grantee, Strand Life Sciences Pvt. Ltd., shares their lesson with us as they embark on their important work to create an open collaborative information system for biodiversity in the Western Ghats.
According to R. Prabhakar, Director, the most important lesson learned thus far and an impetus for the project is that open sharing of biodiversity data is important and essential for long-term conservation of the Western Ghats.
There is a lot of information available on the biodiversity and conservation of the Western Ghats. This is distributed among various and diverse interest groups. While there is a realization that biodiversity data is a public good and should be available on open and free access, there are several issues in sharing the data, ranging from the sensitivity of the biodiversity to intensions of scientific publication before information can be shared. Also the availablity of an attractive, user-friendly and trustworthy platform for open sharing of information is lacking. Ideally, the platform should aggregate information from various sources, and serve it in attractive ways. These are the objectives of the CEPF project.
We have conducted consultative meetings with stakeholders and have met all of the cepf grantees to present the objectives of the portal. We have collected notes and feedback from these meetings and made an assessment of the data available from each of the CEPF projects. We intend to contact each one of the grantees, build a relationship with them and solicit data for the portal from each of the grantees. We will evolve a robust, simple and acceptable data sharing policy in consultation with the data providers. We plan to build an extensive information system which will serve diverse needs, will be an aggregator of diverse information and will be an example of a participatory biodiversity and conservation portal among all the biodiversity rich areas across the world.