Agricultural production continues to be hampered by both native and invasive insect and mite pests. Adequate biological information is essential for timely identification and management. This project will mobilize biodiversity information from specimens in agricultural insect collections with these Cameroonian institutions:
- Institute of Agricultural Research for Development (IRAD)
- International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) & Congo Basin Institute (CBI) in Yaoundé
- University of Douala (UDL)
The project team will take steps to help reorganize and upgrade collections while prioritizing specimens for ditigization and providing training to collections staff in good practices for data mobilization. Once georeferenced and properly validated, the team will publish records to GBIF.org via the CAMBIF IPT installation.
The published data will allow for the production of checklists of native and introduced pests in Cameroon to aid in management by crop protection specialists from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
Project Progress
The project has been progressing with the identification, sorting and labelling of specimens from the three agricultural insect collections in Cameroon. The information of specimens has been entered into databases using GBIF templates for each institution. As part of the project at mid-term, IRAD has been registered as data publisher with GBIF and it was expected that IITA and FS-UDo should be endorsed by CAMBIF to become registered institutions. At that moment, more than 4760, 5630 and 200 specimens were captured into IRAD, IITA and FS-UDo databases respectively. Work has been carried out to validate the scientific names copied in the IRAD collection using GBIF tools. A portion of the IRAD database containing 780 insect specimens was ready for publishing. Specimens from the other datasets are being published throughout the project timeline.
Two workshops were organised in Douala and Yaounde that have provided stakeholders with training on data mobilisation through the GBIF platform and good practices. The content of these workshops have focused on general presentation of the GBIF network, data collection, georeferencing and the data publication process. Work will now be carried out on the datasets as they are prepared for publication.
The project has ended and has captured 4768, 5637, and 500 specimens into IRAD, IITA, and FS-UDo database respectively. All three institutions have been registered as data publishers with GBIF following IITA and FS-UDo endorsement by CAMBIF. Portions of IRAD, IITA, and FS-UDo databases containing 2227, 2986, and 300 specimens respectively were published on the GBIF portail. From both insect collections, about 500 specimens have been newly identified during the project. The data validation process is still on going as a permanent activity on both collections and the published dataset will be continuously updated in the future. The insect pest list generated from all the collections was integrated in the national pest list, which now is under construction by The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural development.
There is a need for additional data to create distribution maps of major insect pest, so surveys are conducted by other projects. The project expects distribution maps of at least five insect pests to be ready by October 2019.
This programme is funded by the European Union.
