Armenia, which joined GBIF as a participant in 2020, is a globally significant centre of agrobiodiversity located in the Caucasus, itself of one of the world's most important biodiversity hotspots.
In this project, GBIF France will mentor the Armenian GBIF node by providing virtual capacity-building workshops on technical topics (the GBIF IPT, the R programming language, OR, ALA basic modules) and developing a website and portal to be hosted by GBIF France.
GBIF Armenia will develop a one-day training module in e-learning modules structured for reuse within the platform and provide on-site training for up to 70 people on contributing and using to the infrastructure.
The goals of this project are to:
- Establish a well-developed national node infrastructure
- Assess the potential for bibliogeographic resources
- Analyse stakeholders’ needs and levels of preparedness for data digitization and usage
- Set up a national web portal for digitization and mobilization of biodiversity data
- Empower national and international GBIF committees through ALA
The mentoring will use English as the common language to facilitate interactions between nodes staff, decision-makers, members of monitoring committee and other stakeholders.
Project progress
In December 2021 the project held an “Opening Symposium”, which after taking into consideration stakeholders needs was organized in the hybrid form to increase the stakeholders awareness, interactions and impact with the project. This involved approx. 60 direct participants and about 1,500 participants and post-event communication was disseminated via different channels including a special video of the First Channel of National Public Television which was broadcasted and press releases.
Other channels of communication used by the project to promote this event included ANAU’s official web page and social media channels YouTube and Facebook, for which a special GBIF Armenia Facebook page was created.
This event was organized as part of the project’s deliverable ‘Raising awareness and dissemination’, which aims to raise awareness among Armenian scientific communities, decision makers and other sectors about GBIF, National Participation and this project. The project acknowledges that by changing the format for this event from online to hybrid, their targets set for achieving their deliverable have already been met with this event alone.
Due to the time required at the start of the project to finalize cofunding arrangements, implementation of the project has been delayed and activities prolonged. The project has adapted its implementation however and utilized time with other activities, which included reviewing the stakeholders list and working on methodology for stakeholders analysis based on novel Quadruple Helixes approach. The project team has held regular meetings to discuss and monitor project implementation and now continues work to realize the project and reach its desirable results.
Since the midterm report the project team have held in September- October 2022 a Capacity Building Training on Digitization of Biodiversity Data, which aimed to teach interested students, scientists, specialists, farmers, NGO representatives of the agrarian, environmental and biological fields of higher education the modern methods and skills of bio-digitalization of biodiversity data management and publication, such as IPT tools, Open refine program, iNaturalist etc.
