Liberia Prepares for Biodiversity Data Gathering - allAfrica.com

"A professional workshop on Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) that is aimed at providing anyone, anywhere open access to biodiversity data information about all types of life on earth, is currently taking place at the Forestry Development Authority (FDA) Headquarters in Monrovia. Coordinated through its Secretariat in Copenhagen, GBIF provides data-holding institutions around the world with common standards and open-source tools that enable these countries to share information about where and when species have been recorded. Accordingly, this organization's index of hundreds of millions of species occurrence knowledge derives from many sources, including everything from museum specimens collected in the 18th and 19th century, to geotagged smartphone photos shared by armature naturalists in recent days and weeks. The GBIF network draws all these sources together through the use of the Darwin Core Standard, which forms the basis of GBIF organizations index of hundreds of millions of species occurrence records...."