The World Conservation Forum was an amazing experience with more than 800 side events and training activities held over the first four days with some 8000 participants attending from around the world.

The GBIF Executive Director made presentations at various Forum side events on:

• The launch of a joint project with UNEP-WCMC, a demonstration of the new GBIF widget tool that links primary occurrence data available through GBIF with protected areas polygons from the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA); (UNEP-WCMC side event)
• Overcoming the barriers to biodiversity data sharing (Conservation Commons side event);
• GBIF’s role in developing a global biodiversity informatics portal, in a Belgian Biodiversity Platform event ‘Bringing Knowledge to the needy’; and
• Chairing a session on ‘Mining and risks to the sector’.

GBIF had a dedicated booth where live demonstrations of GBIF tools were presented by Alberto Talavan, the Training Officer, including the GBIF data portal (data.gbif.org), the GBIF-WDPA widget (www.wdpa.org), and our work of sharing data with countries of origin (>). In addition a special poster was dislayed highlighting the relevance of GBIF’s work for the conservation community. At the booth we also distributed information on GBIF’s Work Programme and Campaigns.

GBIF, as part of the Conservation Commons (www.conservationcommons.org), submitted two motions (14 and 15 respectively) that were approved by the IUCN Members Assembly during the Members’ Assembly 10-14 October:

• Motion 14 focusses on the IUCN membership and recommends that they endorse the Principles of the Conservation Commons, ensuring open access to all non-sensitive biodiversity data collected through research and conservation efforts, and take full advantage of existing global, regional and national level open access mechanisms such as GBIF.
• Motion 15 refers to the development of data and information policies by the IUCN Secretariat that are fully in line with Open Access policies and the Conservation Commons principles.

The full text of these motions is available at: www.iucn.org/news_events/events/congress/assembly/policy/index.cfm

Many other useful meetings and interactions were held between GBIF staff and various IUCN staff and staff of other key conservation organisations during the World Congress. In addition, many other ‘GBIF-ers’, from across the GBIF Participant network, participated at the World Congress.