Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) will hold its 2015 annual conference 28 September to 3 October 2015 in Nairobi, Kenya. This is TDWG’s first conference in Africa! The theme of the conference is Applications, Standards and Capacity Building for Sustaining Global Biodiversity. Subprograms will include: Digitization, Semantic Technologies, Phyloinformatics, Outreach and Collaboration, ePublications, Trait Data, and Conservation informatics.

TDWG is issuing a call for symposia or workshop proposals for the conference. They are also recruiting trainers and facilitators for a 5-day capacity building workshop for African participants at the conference, focused primarily on biodiversity collection digitization, biodiversity databases, data cleaning, and georeferencing. The workshop dates are 21-25 September 2015 (the week before the TDWG conference). Anyone interested in participating in the training workshop should contact tdwg2015@tdwg.org.  Symposium/workshop proposals should be sent to the Program Chair, Hank Bart and TDWG General Secretary by 28 February 2015 at tdwg2015(at)tdwg.org.

JRS provided funding to Tulane University in 2014 for this conference in hopes of increasing the capacity of Africans to mobilize and use biodiversity data to address conservation concerns in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2011, JRS awarded a grant to increase African participation in TDWG conferences that helped to support TDWG’s decision to hold its annual meeting in Kenya. This conference should be great, mark your calendars!