The Center of Excellence in Biodiversity and Natural Resource Management (CoEB), hosted at the University of Rwanda, in collaboration with its partners in government and private sector aimed at developing a Rwandan Biodiversity Information System (RBIS) to support decision-making for conservation and sustainable use of Rwandan ecosystems. In Rwanda, biodiversity data is scattered and found in different formats which has been fastidious to develop policies to govern the conservation of Rwandan Ecosystems.
With the technical assistance provided by Kartoza from South Africa with additional support from the Freshwater Research Centre (FRC) in South Africa, the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium, South African National Biodiversity Institute and the Conservation Biology Institute in USA, a community of practice has been established at the CoEB to receive support of the RBIS development.
The RBIS included three main components, and was developed in five phases, with regular roll-outs of system modules and improvements to get early use and buy-in. The first phase involved a preparation of the technical platform for the three main components that included biodiversity records and collections using open source software with links to existing data sources and connected to GBIF, where new data sets were uploaded; a resource site (knowledge component) with Content Management System (CMS) software where publications, reports, photos and other information were to be made available for support decision-makers, researchers and the broader audience of individuals interested in biodiversity in Rwanda; and lastly, an analytic and mapping capacity (e.g., spatial layers that included land use/land cover, water quality indicators, forest covers, ecosystem types maps and other layers to develop along the development phase) with a map server installed following the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) standards and completed by a CS-W server.
This project was capitalized on existing open-source software, particularly that created for FRC’s system in South Africa (Freshwater Biodiversity Information System – FBIS), and GeoNode, GeoServer and PostgreSQL software for the database development. Our intent was to extend the system to the whole country, but we started small and built expertise and a community of practice around data management, sharing and use for decision-making. We capitalized on information collected during the planning phase with data providers, data users and policymakers. Working with Kartoza allowed us to capitalize on modules already developed in FBIS, mapping to our RBIS requirements.
We put emphasis on building capacity of our technical team to manage the system internally, and our data managers to manage biodiversity occurrences and physico-chemical parameters. For project sustainability, the RBIS should be endorsed by the government and be constituted by permanent staff recruited to maintain the system functionalities. To date, the RBIS’s greater milestones include a creation of a dynamic system that would be an open access web-based portal to inform about biodiversity occurrences across spatial scale (here, we also add images and acoustic information wherever applicable). Additional features include an incorporation of water quality and meteorological data.
For more visit Rwanda Biodiversity Information System (RBIS)