In coastal forests of Eastern Africa and its islands, there is a general lack of information about the status and trends of wild pollinators. While data may exist, it is scattered across different institutions and in different formats. The Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology is planning to acquire, digitize, and mobilize this data to make it accessible to researchers and decision-makers. The Atlas of Living Australia is a comprehensive portal that hosts different kinds of biodiversity data for the country of Australia; the software for developing ALA is freely available to be adapted to other countries and contexts. The goal of the project is to develop an Atlas of Living Tanzania (ALT) to house pollinator biodiversity data with the potential to expand to other taxa.

The planning phase of this project will bring together potential project partners and end-users and explore what wild pollinator data exists. Although ALA software is accessible, the DIT team will need to see how it can be adapted to the Tanzanian context and local use and prepare a software development plan.

1.       Stakeholder engagement to secure partnerships, clarify roles, and collaboratively plan for an implementation project.
2.       Conduct initial pollinator data survey and assessment to identify data mobilization opportunities.
3.       Plan the adaption of the Atlas of Living Australia to Tanzania.
4.       Explore the capacity development opportunities among students and partners.

• Detailed project plans for creating an Atlas of Living Tanzania Pollinators module.
• A report of data holdings for digitization, mobilization, and acquisition.
• Plans that describe steps and phase of ALT based portal development and publication to GBIF using Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT).

A planning process, complete with stakeholder engagement and detailed technical plans, will enable a path for an implementation phase. The process of identifying and locating datasets will prevent DIT from duplicating research efforts and will establish trends in pollinator biodiversity over time. Furthermore, the usefulness  of an ALA-style portal, as opposed to a different kind of web portal, will be determined through this process.

Over the years, JRS has received many proposals to create portals similar to the Atlas of Living Australia that lacked the technical capacity needed to adapt the portal. The proposal we received from the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology was technically strong yet lacked the full suite of partnerships needed for success and technical detail for accurate plans and budgets.  In addition, our pollinators biodiversity portfolio in Tanzania is growing and we hope our grantees will form beneficial partnerships.  When the planning phase succeeds, we hope to invest in the first successful deployment of the ALA  infrastructure in Africa.