About the Project
It is common understanding that action needs to be taken quickly to preserve the natural resources of Sub-Saharan Africa in the light of high anthropogenic and climatic pressures on habitats, fauna and flora. Research on conservation and sustainable management of biodiversity in the region depends on the availability of data with good spatio-temporal coverage. A database providing an overview of existing data is a prerequisite to concerted, time- and resource-efficient work. The West African Vegetation Database has been developed in the framework of the projects “Sustainable Use of Natural Vegetation in West Africa” (SUN, www.sunproject.dk) and “Biodiversity Transect Analysis in Africa” (BIOTA, www.biota-africa.org) with the objectives to reduce redundant data collection, promote the closure of data gaps and foster research collaboration. It provides the possibility for the management of vegetation data online and offline (with the help of the MS Access tool VegDa3.0 and provides incentives to researchers and institutions to advertise and collaboratively use their research data on this platform by giving users full control over the access rights to data in their user accounts. The West African Vegetation Database has received broad institutional support by a Memorandum of Understanding. It is continually improved and updated in the course of UNDESERT (http://www.undesert.neri.dk/).
Acknowledgements: We thank all data contributors and all project members participating in the local datanodes and the initial database workshops held in Frankfurt (2007) and Ouagadougou (2008). We thank the European Commission for funding SUN (INCO-031685) and UNDESERT (243906) and the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for funding BIOTA (01LC0617D1).