Extending knowledge on biodiversity data quality and publication in the Spanish-speaking community

The objective of this project is to increase the availability of high-quality biodiversity data from the Spanish-speaking community through the GBIF network. The specific goal is to improve capacity in the participant countries and in the Latin American region in general, through two components:

• Training Series: a total of six talks and four workshops in Spanish, about Data Quality, Data Cleaning, and Data Publication using the IPT LAC. We will produce new materials and reutilize others in Spanish from other GBIF projects and programmes (i.e., Data Quality Best Practices document by CESP project CESP2020-018, and the GBIF “Guía de uso básico de OpenRefine”). All training will be open to the Spanish-speaking community and recorded for future use.
• Documentation:
  1. Document and video (in English and Spanish) with guidelines on how to use the regional IPT installation, with specific sections for Admin users (targeted at regional representatives and node managers) and for regular users, including practical how-to’s and expected administrative workflows.
  2. Document describing the training model used in this project (in English and Spanish).

Activities will be promoted through and integrated to those related with the Regional Data Portal that is currently being developed, supported by the GBIF Secretariat (https://dev.gbif.org/hosted-portals.html). The impact of the activities will be evaluated through short-term participation metrics and in the long-term by the increase in the use of the regional IPT.

Project progress

As a project planned with 100% virtual activities, the project team started with an online kick-off meeting of team members in August 2021 to discuss the organization of the project’s work, and thereafter continued to meet regularly online to discuss the upcoming webinars and workshops, and to prepare the related the materials.

By final reporting the objective of the project was successfully achieved through all the proposed training events held; two rounds of both the series of webinars and the series of workshops.

• Webinar Series:

  1. Principles of Data Quality
  2. Application of Data Quality workflows
  3. Biodiversity Data Standards. Darwin Core and Darwin Core Archive

• Workshop Series:

  1. Data cleaning using OpenRefine
  2. Publication of Biodiversity Data with the IPT

The webinars and workshops were carried out in a timely matter and attendance levels exceeded expectations; a total of 3,735 people from 19 countries participated in the activities offered through this CESP project.

In addition to the above, the project team also produced as part of the project the following documentation, which are available in both English and Spanish:

1. Document “How to use the Latin American and the Caribbean
   Regional IPT developed” (EN, ES) and video (EN, ES) with guidelines on how to use the regional IPT installation.
2. Document “Model for Biodiversity Data Mobilization and Data Quality Training” (EN, ES) describing the training model used in this project.

Dissemination of the activities (webinars, workshops) was made by project partners to both their publishers and to the Latin American community in various ways, including through social networks (FB, IG, TW), as well as through the CESP project page where all events are listed and emails. To facilitate asynchronous assistance, recordings of events were also made accessible through a YouTube channel. Details of the communication strategies used in the project are available in the report “Communication strategies” and materials generated from the project, inc. training materials, are available for reuse by the GBIF Community.