The 12th annual National Biodiversity Planning Forum, hosted by SANBI, was held from the 23rd to the 26th June at the Salt Rock Hotel and Beach Resort in KwaZulu-Natal. This year’s event was again exceedingly well attended, boasting over 200 participants. Highlights on the programme were the two keynote addresses by leading South African scientists. Professor Bob Scholes from the University of the Witwatersrand interpreted the five recent global scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the local context, highlighting implications for biodiversity impact and policy change. Dr Kerry Sink from SANBI shared her experience, as part of the Operation Phakisa team, to fast track the expansion of South Africa’s marine protected area network as part of this Presidential Initiative to unlock South Africa’s ocean economy. These were followed by 3 days of stimulating presentations and discussions on a number of topics, some of which included the following:
Integration of biodiversity planning into the SIPs
Protected area expansion
Ecosystem classification and mapping
Assessing and mapping ecological condition
National Land Cover 2013/14
Implementing biodiversity plans
For more information on the 2015 Biodiversity Planning Forum click here(Link on Wordpress Biodiversity Advisor is not available - review). Please click here for the 2015 Biodiversity Planning Forum programme and click on the links below to access the presentations.
Welcome to Biodiversity Advisor 2.0!
Biodiversity Advisor, developed by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) and its Data Partners, is a system that will provide integrated biodiversity information to a wide range of users who will have access to geospatial data, plant and animal species distribution data, ecosystem-level data, literature, images and metadata.
The integrated information comes from our much-loved Botanical Database of Southern Africa (BODATSA) also known as Plants of Southern Africa (POSA), Zoological Database of Southern Africa (ZODATSA), Biodiversity Geographic Information System (BGIS), SANBI's institutional repository (Opus) and others.
The system is still under development, so you may find a few bugs/issues. If you do, please report it via the error reporting button available in various sections of the website or provide us with any useful feedback you may have via the ‘Give us feedback’ option available in the sidebar menu. You can create a free account for yourself by clicking on the user profile icon which will take you through to the login page. Here you can choose the ‘Create an account’ option or simply fill in your details if you have an account already. Having an account on Biodiversity Advisor will provide users with free access to biodiversity resources.
In future, Team SANBI will be able to log in using their day-to-day login details, BGIS users will be able to use their existing accounts and details, and general users will be able to log in using their LinkedIn profile, but for now you will need to create an account.