The Federal Republic of Nigeria, home to nearly a quarter of the total population of sub-Saharan Africa, has joined GBIF as a Voting Participant.
With the signature of the Permanent Secretary, Hassan Musa, of the Federal Ministry of Environment on the GBIF Memorandum of Understanding, Nigeria has taken its place among 44 voting members of the GBIF Governing Board. The ministry has also reconfirmed the leadership role of the Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria (FRIN) in representing the country in GBIF-related activities, both at national and international levels.
In 2016, Nigeria blazed the trail for African countries as the first country to join the network through their connection with the European Union-funded Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) programme. Since then, its institutions have played an active part in six GBIF projects: five BID-funded ones and a sixth within GBIF's Capacity Enhancement Support Programme (CESP).
The evidence of BID's impact on data mobilization in Nigeria is equally striking. Prior to the start of the programme, all of the available data about biodiversity in the country came from sources outside it. Today, ten Nigeria-based institutions have also joined the GBIF community, providing four times as many records (716,610) as institutions abroad made available (~175,000) in 2016. Three quarters of the Nigerian records come from datasets published by the A.P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute (APLORI), which is now unchallenged as the largest source of data about biodiversity in Nigeria.
The use of GBIF-mediated data by the country's researchers has also grown significantly in the same period, thanks in no small measure to the successful outreach connected with BID-funded projects. Prior to 2016, Nigerian-based authors had published just four peer-reviewed papers that relied on data from the GBIF network. But since the programme's start and the country's entry into GBIF, researchers affiliated with Nigerian institutions have authored 37 peer-reviewed journal articles, exploring a wide spectrum of topics including climate change, ecology, agriculture and invasive species, among others. Researchers around the world have likewise made wide use of the data published by Nigerian institutions, with FRIN, the national node's host institution, tallying data citations in 342 peer-reviewed articles since first publishing in 2018 (see the complete list of citation counts in the table below).
"We're excited to see Nigeria take its place among GBIF's voting membership, where they can represent the national network of data publishers and users that they've cultivated since the start of BID," said Joe Miller, executive secretary of GBIF. "Their efforts thus far have established a solid foundation for evidence-based research and policymaking on biodiversity conservation and sustainable use as well as addressing the need for increased data skills and capacity identified in their most recent National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan."
Current data publishers from Nigeria
| Organization | Publishing start | Datasets | Occurrence Records | Peer-reviewed citations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria | 2018 | 20 | 43,351 | 329 |
| University of Lagos | 2018 | 63 | 27,033 | 50 |
| Obafemi Awolowo University | 2018 | 1 | 528 | 29 |
| The Federal University of Technology, Akure | 2018 | 1 | 661 | 26 |
| University of Ibadan | 2019 | 1 | 549 | 27 |
| Akwa Ibom State University | 2019 | 1 | 836 | 24 |
| Lagos State University | 2019 | 3 | 792 | 27 |
| Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) | 2019 | 1 | 152 | 25 |
| National Park Services | 2019 | 2 | 189 | 53 |
| A.P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute (APLORI) | 2022 | 3 | 578,362 | 10 |
| University of Calabar | 2022 | 20 | 11,415 | 13 |