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Biodiversity Information Science and Standards : Conference Abstract
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Jorge L Soberon
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Corresponding author: Jorge L Soberon (jsoberon@ku.edu)
Received: 02 Oct 2019 | Published: 08 Oct 2019
© 2019 Jorge Soberon
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation: Soberon JL (2019) The Path from Policies to Theory: A story from the Mexican biodiversity agency. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3: e47011. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.47011
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Abstract
Researchers often assume that the results of their work, after suitable publication, will find their way to influence policy. The Mexican biodiversity agency (CONABIO) is an example of the opposite process. Policy-makers in Mexico asked questions and demanded solutions to problems that were academically incipient or not even stated. These demands from actual users lead to the development of informatics tools, software, and eventually, theoretical developments. I will be describing a few instances of how this happened at CONABIO. The stories exemplify how questions of policy, databases, software, and theoretical developments were interlinked in the work of a government agency in a developing country.
Keywords
biodiversity, policy, CONABIO, developing country, biodiversity informatics
Presenting author
Jorge Soberon is a distinguished professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of the University of Kansas. He was a former Executive Secretary of the Mexican national agency for biodiversity (CONABIO). He has published more than 150 scientific papers, books and chapters, and twice has been identified among the 1% most cited authors in ecology in the world.
Presented at
Biodiversity_Next 2019