New edition of the International Living Atlases Workshop, in Paris

The International Living Atlases Workshop took place in April 1-5th 2019, in the National Museum of Natural History of Paris and was organised by GBIF France, VertNet, Atlas of Living Australia and GBIF Spain. This workshop was one of the main activities in the CESP project granted by GBIF in the 2018 call. In this edition, developers from different Nodes of GBIF and other international organizations met to work on how to improve the knowledge and implementation of the Living Atlas platform in their national frameworks.

The workshop was structured in two sections. The first three days and a half were focused on technical components of the Living Atlases such as the configuration of the Atlas spatial tools (spatial and regions modules), configuring the ALA4R module, addition of other types of data in the Atlas (species lists, sensitive data, trait data, etc.) or managing the Atlas’s taxonomy.

We spent the last day and a half discussing about how to move forward in the development and implementation of a Living Atlases Community of Practise (CoP), whose main goals are i) increasing level of shared development and resource sharing (including GBIF.org), ii) supporting sustainable implementation and development of the Living Atlas platform through an open-source shared model, iii) supporting individual users, countries and thematic groups in the adoption of Living Atlas, iv) developing and maintaining training and documentation, and v) develop a governance model. During this section, the work that the community is doing to enhance the documentation available for end users of the different Atlas was also presented.

Many Nodes of GBIF participated in this workshop, such as the United Kingdom, Benin, Portugal, France, Spain, Costa Rica, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Norway, Chile, Argentina, Sweden, Taiwan, and Togo, as well as the GBIF Secretariat and other institutions which manage biodiversity data, such as the Guatemala National Council for Protected Areas, the Vermont Center for Ecostudies (USA), the Institute of Mathematical Problems of Biology (Russia), the Filipinas Biodiversity Atlas, VertNet, the Biodiversity-Hub, Danube University Krems (Austria), and the Botanical Institute from the Chinese Academy of Science.