ACC wins bid to host the Annual Biodiversity Information Standards Conference

On behalf of Kenya, ACC won a bid to host the Annual Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference for the first time in Africa.  The conference will be held in Nairobi, Kenya from 28th September – 1st October, 2015 at the Windsor Golf Hotel and Country Club.  The African Conservation Centre (ACC) firmly believes that knowledge on the national status of our biodiversity will greatly enable us to make strategic interventions in its conservation.

TDWG is the premier international organization developing standards for disseminating biodiversity information via the Internet.  The TDWG annual meeting is the venue for learning about the latest advances in biodiversity informatics. TDWG conferences attract a broad cross-section of professionals who work with biodiversity information (information providers, aggregators, indexers, IT experts and end-users), including taxonomists, ecologists, computer programmers, geographers, librarians and information scientists.  Meetings also commonly attract managers and staff of national and international biodiversity information projects and facilities (e.g., Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Encyclopedia of Life, Atlas of Living Australia) and representatives of foundations and industry.

The theme of the 2015 meeting will be “Applications, Standards and Capacity Building for Sustaining Global Biodiversity” in recognition of the importance of application of biodiversity data in sustainable development and in sustaining local, regional and global biodiversity.  The meeting will feature workshops, invited plenary lectures, contributed talks, software demonstrations, and poster sessions spread over a five-day period.

Additional information on the meeting can be found at http://www.tdwg.org/2015-conference/.