GBIC

Through the 2011-2020 CBD Strategic Plan for Biodiversity more than 190 governments agreed in 2010 to "take effective and urgent action to halt the loss of biodiversity in order to ensure that by 2020 ecosystems are resilient and continue to provide essential services, thereby securing the planet's variety of life, and contributing to human well-being, and poverty eradication."

Implementing this plan, and meeting its 20 headline targets (the Aichi Targets) makes great demands on science to assemble and interpret the data required to help decision makers act to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity.

Fortunately, continuing developments in areas such as large-scale computing, remote sensing and rapid gene sequencing offer unprecedented opportunities to address the key scientific questions around biodiversity and to support related policy decisions. The promise of such developments will, however, only be fully realized if diverse expert communities can agree on coordinated action to mobilize the required data and informatics capabilities over the next five ten years.

The Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC) will convene expertise in the fields of biodiversity informatics, genomics, earth observation, natural history collections, biodiversity research and policy needed to set such collaboration in motion.

The conference opening plenary on Monday morning, 2 July 2012 is open to the public. The rest of the conference is only by invitation. Recommendations from the conference will be transferred into a Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook that will be available in draft form in late August.

NB. This is not an open meeting. Attendance is by-invitation only.