Jambo from Nairobi!

Between some pretty severe jet lag (10 time zone changes) and the sporadic internet access at the facility where we are staying, it has been a challenge to do anything more than the approx 8 hours per day workshops here at the Biodiversity Informatics workshop, plus getting around, eating, etc.. We are staying at the Multimedia University College of Kenya on the outskirts of Nairobi, which was built in the early 1960's on the other side of the road from the Nairobi National Park, which has lions, rhino, antelope, etc. We can see baboons, monkeys and warthogs wandering the campus in the mornings and evenings.

The workshops are covering a vast, and I do mean vast amount of material about Biodiversity Informatics. This past week, we have covered the following Biodiversity Informatics topics:

Fundamental Principals

Standards

Biodiversity Databases (one of my favorites so far)

Example from Congo Expedition exporting Darwin Core

Brahms database (botany)

Specify (species ID)

Plotting GIS coordinates using Google Maps and Google Earth

Catlogue of Life (e-infrastructure for dynamic harvesting of data)

Biodiversity Mapping / Bioportal toolkit

Fusion tables

Web access tools

Content Management systems (a great presentation about Drupal)

Yesterday, we went on a field trip to the National Museums of Kenya, which is in downtown Nairobi. We passed by one of the worst slums of the world on the way - Kiberia slum is notorious and we are advised to stay well clear of it. Once we got to the museum, we saw how plant specimens are processed for intake into the collections there. The plants and insect collections are both well into the millions. The National Museum is hard at work migrating data from hard copy to electronic, or soft copies. We also got to take a look at the bird, mammal and fish and reptile collections. I was amazed to see a huge tank in the back of the fish and reptile area with an actual specimen of a coelacanth, which has been called a living fossil or Lazarus taxon, because they seemingly came back to life. They were thought to have been extinct for something like 65 million years, but one was caught and identified in 1938 and several more have been caught since then.

At any rate, the real-life examples of how the Museum of Kenya staff are using Bioinformatics to increase the value of their collections is really exciting. I'm going to try to figure out how to post some photographs from the workshop thus far. It looks like I just have to click a few buttons - but for now I'm off to the next workshop - I think it is on Geographic Imaging Systems, and then we will go to the African Conservation Centre to see their GIS labs in action. They are tracking elephants and studying the ecology in elephant habitat.