JRS Biodiversity Foundation

The National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica

Organization: The National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica – INBio

Project Location: Costa Rica

Web Address: www.inbio.ac.cr

Title of Grant: "Towards a New Generation of Naturalist Citizens: Generating and Delivering Multimedia Biodiversity Information and Knowledge to Empower Citizens"

Grant Amount: $199,114 over 2 years

Principal Investigator: Erick Mata

Organization Background:

INBio is a non-profit public interest non governmental organization of the civil society. It was established in 1989 to support the efforts on generating knowledge of the biological diversity of the country and promote its sustainable use. It operates in close collaboration with diverse government agencies, universities, enterprises and other public and private institutions in and out of the country.

Its mission is to "promote a greater awareness of the value of biodiversity and thereby achieve its conservation and improve the quality of life of the human beings". Its vision is to "be a Center of Excellence that generates information and knowledge to:

Instill values (education for the general public),
support policy making processes (policies by local, national and regional governments), and
support concrete conservation actions (by NGO’s, communities, etc.)"

The core process of the institution consists of capturing, processing and transferring the information and knowledge about the biodiversity of the country to society. This core process has been implemented through different strategic programs that are described in the following section (Description of Organization Program).

Grant Description:

This two-year project focuses on developing and using innovative computer-based tools to improve the generation and delivery of biodiversity information from Costa Rica, in different digital formats, with three main purposes: 1) instill values in the general public (education); 2) support policy making processes; and 3) support concrete conservation actions.

The Problem:

Since its inception, INBio has articulated an information management core process that turns data gathered in the field by taxonomists and parataxonomists into usable biodiversity information.

This core process relies not only on the coordinated work of INBio’s staff and a large network of renowned scientists from many countries, but also on pioneering work in biodiversity informatics that supports the institution’s scientific, technological, educational, and conservation activities. As a result, the institute has become a de facto referent in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) to support biodiversity conservation efforts, both in developing and developed countries.

INBio’s biodiversity informatics strategy is based on the information building blocks concept, whereby scientifically validated pieces of basic information (building blocks) are developed through a rigorous methodology that provides final users not only with building blocks at the specimen, species, and ecosystem level, but also with a flexible mechanism to put the building blocks together.

This strategy is based on the premise that any realistic path towards biodiversity conservation inevitably involve active participation of educated citizens that have up-to-date, scientifically validated, relevant, easy to use and accessible knowledge and information.

INBio’s core process needs to be enhanced to take advantage of new technology and the higher and evolving needs of the educators, policy makers and conservationists

The Solution:

This project aims at improving this core process along three main lines.

Deliver static and dynamic multimedia information: Scaling up and streamlining the process of generating and delivering static and dynamic information, particularly multimedia data (photographs, illustrations, maps and videos).
Generating new types of building blocks; for example, structured natural history descriptions and identification keys or other knowledge-based identification systems that enrich the possibilities users have to combine the basic building blocks.
Taking the whole current information management core process one step beyond; namely, to turn it into a biodiversity knowledge management core process where final users will be able to integrate higher level multimedia information and interfaces along with new knowledge building blocks (such as identification keys).

Global Impact:

Through the availability of easy to use biodiversity knowledge and multimedia information, a new generation of naturalist citizens can be empowered to turn biodiversity conservation into a practical, widespread and sustainable activity. For example, in the long run we aim at having each Costa Rican become an "expert in botany", i.e., to be capable of quickly identifying any tree or plant because there are identification keys and possibilities of making high level queries to INBio’s information systems. Either through the use of images or attributes of the plants, we anticipate that in the near future any person can use a PDA to access this knowledge that was only in the hands of experts before. This citizen can be an elementary school teacher, a student, a conservation area manager, a customs agent, an expert botanist, a farmer, an amateur taxonomist, a politician, or, in general, anybody who needs biodiversity information to learn more about it, to use it sustainably, or to make concrete decisions about its conservation.