Other Initiatives Related to GBIF

There are some initiatives devoted to the study and conservation of biodiversity that are relevant due to their importance and scope, or to their affinity to GBIF. Find some of them below:

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is the first global agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. This convention was proposed in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development which took place in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1992. Since then more than 187 countries have ratified the agreement.

The Convention has three main goals:

1. The conservation of biodiversity,
    
2. Sustainable use of the components of biodiversity, and
    
3. Sharing the benefits arising from the commercial and other utilization of genetic resources in a fair and equitable way.

The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the main governing body of the convention, and it is composed of representatives of all the participants, and other organizations, such as NGOs. Nowadays, its ordinary meetings are hold every two years. The latest meeting was held in Curitiba (Brazil), in March 2006.

GBIF and the CBD signed a Memorandum of Cooperation in July 2003 given the complementary nature of both initiatives. The goals aimed include facilitating the development and implementation of approaches, technologies and best practices that will be necessary to access, share and disseminate biodiversity data via the Internet.

http://www.biodiv.org/

The mission if this initiative is to provide a forum for biological data projects, to develop and promote the use of standards and interoperability and to avoid the duplicity of efforts. There are different subgroups devoted to produce or recommend standards for digitization of natural history collections data, spatial data, descriptive data, etc.

This group was known as "Taxonomic Databases Working Group" till 2006: that is the reason of its abbreviated name TDWG.

All the information related to the TDWG is available in their web site: http://www.tdwg.org/. It is especially interesting to review the 'standards' section.