National Moth Week: Indian Biodiversity Portal is data partner

By Thomas, India Biodiversity Portal

Just wanted to let you know that the India Biodiversity Portal, will be a data partner of the National Moth Week from this year (19th-27 July). Following up on success of the Neighborhood trees campaign that we organised last month, we would like to do something similar for the National Moth Week  in coordination with a wide network of individuals who may have a stake in moths of India.

The IndianMoths group on IBP will host the collection of the Moth observations during the NMW. We already have about 3000 observations on the group and many still require identification.

The immediate objective of the exercise would be to get citizens to contribute (upload) observations  of moths from across the country. However, unlike trees and other species groups, moths would require experts to help identify the observations. We are hoping to gather a group of moth experts that will be able to interact on the portal. 

In the run-up to the moth week (and afterwards), we are hoping to be able to get such experts to contribute towards moth species pages. In addition, they can also contribute checklists of moths from various regions, moth-related documents and also upload observations too.

We hope that in time, the portal will help aggregate enough content and information on moths that will be beneficial to anyone looking for open information on the moths of India. 

We are also building a system that allows curators to curate content within species pages. We will also shortly have a name curation interface that will allow curators to build a species list for India by curating species names that come in to the portal from various sources (mapping accepted names to common names, synonyms, subspecies, adding classifications etc.). All these efforts we hope, will help to build a common platform for moth experts of the country to interact upon and curate information on. 

We request you to sign up on the portal (if you haven't already) and help in any way you can to aggregate and curate content on moths. If you have any kind of data that you would like to upload please do so directly or let us know so that we can help if needed.

The India Biodiversity Portal

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