The first community meeting of the year is coming soon, on 26 January, from 15:30 to 17:00 CET!
We will start the meeting with Amber Hartman Scholz (Leibniz-Institut DSMZ). With her, we will discuss the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement (BBNJ), which will enter into force on 17 January. The BBNJ Agreement aims to protect marine life in the high seas, and is especially relevant as it covers Marine Genetic Resources (MGRs) and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits requirements related to them.
Then, Samuel Vanden Abele (Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences) will present Bop.Co, a species identification unit jointly run by the Institute of Natural Sciences and the Africa Museum. Bop.Co specialises in the identification of policy-relevant organisms and their derived products, using DNA analysis tools and expert taxonomic knowledge – a great example of DNA barcoding applications.
The final presentation will be about the BGE paper “Empowering national capacity for DNA-based approach to species identification and biodiversity monitoring” by authors Elizavet Kaitetzidou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and Michał Grabowski (University of Łódź). The paper preprint is available here.
The Community Meetings are free to join for all iBOL Europe members. You can join our community here – that’s also free!
| Photo by Jörg Braukmann, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. |
