La Bioespeleología: un mundo por descubrir

La Bioespeleología: un mundo por descubrir

jueves, 13 de septiembre de 2012

Se busca colaboración para un proyecto

Estimados amigos, os pongo un correo en busca de colaboración para un proyecto sobre biodiversidad. Copio el correo enviado y os adjunto el archivo por si es de vuestro interés. El Grupo de Espeleología de Villacarrillo (G.E.V.) va a colaborar en lo que sea necesario, ¿y vosotros?.
 

 
Dear colleague,

We hope this message finds you well. As you probably know, the European Commission funded a project under the FP7 called BioFresh (Biodiversity of Freshwater Ecosystems: Status, Trends, Pressures, and Conservation Priorities). The main aims of BioFresh is to build a global information platform for scientists and ecosystem managers with access to all available databases describing the distribution, status and trends of global freshwater biodiversity. BioFresh integrates the freshwater biodiversity competencies and expertise of 19 research institutions (www.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu).

Within the BioFresh, the University of Granada in collaboration with the University of Barcelona have started to collaborate on a contingency fund project named “MacroMED: Macroinvertebrates in Mediterranean climate watercourses”. The main of this project is to recompile and merge data of existent macroinvertebrate taxa from mediterranean rivers over the world (Mediterranean Basin, South Africa, Chile, California, and Australia). As you known, mediterranean-climate regions constitute top biodiversity hotspots of the world, despite occupying only 1,2% of land surface. However, the knowledge regarding freshwater biodiversity patterns and processes remains scattered and incomplete, and a lot of information is found as grey literature (thesis, reports, etc), which does not reach the broad audience. Therefore, the idea of the MacroMED is to bring all these datasets together and make them available to the general public through the BioFresh platform.

We are thus contacting you as a taxonomic specialist working on a mediterranean-climate region to ask you about your willingness to participate to the MacroMED project. There are two ways of participating in the project:

1) by providing already digitalized data from your taxonomic group/s of expertise.
2) by providing your literature (pdf files or hard copies) from your taxonomic group/s of expertise.

The first option would be really much appreciated; as it will speed up the process of having the MacroMED project completed but if you do not have your species data digitalised we would also be very happy to receive your publications on species occurrences to be digitalised. As you can see, we are only seeking for occurrences of species data (all that is not at species level is not needed) and for environmental characteristics of the sites (UTM coordinates, altitude, physic-chemical characteristics,
sampling techniques). Data/literature on species traits (e.g. life-cycle data) would be also appreciated.

We would really much appreciate your collaboration with the MacroMED project. By doing that we can ensure that you will have all your data digitalized and have access to other macroinvertebrate data in mediterranean-climate regions. In case you would like to participate and contribute with expertise, we would really much appreciate if you could indicate us your willingness and send us your literature or already digitalised data to:

Francisco Blanco (paco.blanco@mediodes.com)
Carmen Zamora Muñoz (czamora@ugr.es)
Dpto. Zoología, Facultad de Ciencias
Universidad de Granada
C/ Severo Ochoa, s/n.
18071-Granada, Spain

Once we receive your willingness to participate in the project, we will also send you an agreement of collaboration signed by us.

We hope you find this initiative interesting and we look forward to collaborating with you. It would be a pity that your taxonomic group of expertise and your region is not considered in the MacroMED database.

Please, let us know if you need further information on the project.

Kind regards,