JRS is proud to share that the National Science and Technology Forum honored the Freshwater Biodiversity Information System (FBIS) team, Freshwater Research Centre and Kartoza with the Data for Research Award at the 2023 NSTF-South 32 Awards on 13 July. The Data for Research Award celebrates advancing the availability, management and re-use of research data in a very competitive national level process.

The NSTF awards are the largest science, engineering and technology and innovation awards in South Africa. In addition to Data for Research, the awards encourage and reward excellence in Scientific Research, Water Solutions, The Green Economy, Ocean Science, among other disciplines.

Project Director, Dr. Helen Dallas and her team at the Freshwater Research Centre (FRC) developed FBIS, a powerful, visual, data-rich information system, for South African rivers.  Each release of the Freshwater Biodiversity information System (FBIS) has enhanced functionality, biodiversity modules, spatial layers and filters, dashboards and reporting. FBIS maximizes data visualization enabling users to search, map and extract data, add new data records, and easily generate reports. FBIS harvests data from GBIF and links to IUCN for species threat status, as well as hydrological and citizen science platforms. FBIS is designed using open source software to maximize access. The system design was strongly informed by the data and reporting needs of the end-users as it aims to be best system possible for serving South African freshwater biodiversity data.

Read more about the Freshwater Research Centre grant here.