2026-09-01 –, Himawari
Africa’s freshwater ecosystems are highly threatened yet poorly documented. This talk introduces FBIS Africa, an open-access platform designed to mobilise, harmonise, and analyse freshwater biodiversity data to support conservation, management, and policy decisions across the continent.
Africa’s freshwater ecosystems support exceptional biodiversity and provide essential services to millions of people, yet they face increasing pressure from habitat degradation, overexploitation, invasive species, and climate change. Effective conservation and management are often constrained by fragmented, inaccessible, or incomplete biodiversity data. This session presents FBIS Africa, a continental Freshwater Biodiversity Information System, building on more than seven years of experience and proven impact of the national FBIS platform in South Africa. FBIS Africa is designed as an open-access, user-friendly platform that enables the mobilisation, harmonisation, analysis, and visualisation of freshwater biodiversity data at an unprecedented scale across Africa.
FBIS Africa : https://fbisafrica.org/pages/about_us/
Platform overview : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IalhdP5Mtc0
PUBLICATIONS :
Dallas H & Shelton J. 2024. Biodiversity data at your fingertips: The Freshwater Biodiversity Information System. South African Journal of Science, 120(7/8). https://doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2024/18705
Kajee M, Dallas HF, Griffiths CL, Kleynhans CJ and Shelton JM. 2023. The Status of South Africa’s Freshwater Fish Fauna: A Spatial Analysis of Diversity, Threat, Invasion, and Protection. Fishes 8 (12): 571. https://doi.org/10.3390/fishes8120571
Kajee M, Dallas HF, Swanepoel A, Griffiths CL, and Shelton JM. 2023. The Freshwater Biodiversity Information System (FBIS) Fish Data: A Georeferenced Dataset of Freshwater Fishes Occurring in South Africa. Journal of Limnology 82 (s1). https://doi.org/10.4081/jlimnol.2023.2133
Kajee M, Henry DAW, Dallas HF, Griffiths CL, Pegg J, Ven der Coll D, Impson D, Chakona A, Raimondo DC, Job NM, Paxton BR, Jordaan MS, Bills R, Roux F, Zengeya TA, Hoffman A, Rivers-Moore N, Shelton JM. 2023. How the Freshwater Biodiversity Information System (FBIS) is supporting national freshwater fish conservation decisions in South Africa. Frontiers in Environmental Science. Vol 11, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2023.1122223
Dallas HF, Shelton JM, Sutton T, Tri Ciputra D, Kajee M and Job N. 2022. The Freshwater Biodiversity Information System (FBIS) – mobilising data for evaluating long-term change in South African rivers, African Journal of Aquatic Science 47(3): 291-306, DOI: 10.2989/16085914.2021.1982672
Indicate what is (are) the open source project(s) essential in your talk:PostgreSQL/PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers, Django, Docker
I make my conference contribution available under the CC BY 4.0 license. The conference contribution comprises the abstract, the text contribution for the conference proceedings, the presentation materials as well as the video recording and live transmission of the presentation:
Dimas Tri Ciputra is a software developer with a background in Informatics Engineering (dual Bachelor's degrees). He has been working in production software since 2013, building mobile (iOS/Android) and web applications. Since 2015, he has contributed to a range of open source projects. Outside work, he is a long-time gamer and has built small mobile games and joined hackathons, which helped shape his interest in practical, creative problem-solving.