Credit: ATREE

The India Biodiversity Portal is the outcome of the collective realization and appreciation of the importance of biodiversity informatics by all the partners. There has been global recognition of the importance of this in the last few years.

ATREE set up an Eco-Informatics Centre in 2005. This Centre is dedicated to the study of biodiversity informatics, and to provide an informatics angle to all research studies undertaken by ATREE. The paucity of publicly and freely available biodiversity information for the Indian subcontinent was an additional motivating factor for this initiative.

Partner organizations approached the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) in mid 2006 with a proposal to set up the India Biodiversity Portal. The NKC took up the proposal under their portal initiatives programme. ATREE was designated as a champion organization by the NKC to prepare a discussion paper and build the India Biodiversity Portal.

At the inaugural national workshop held at the NKC in Oct 2007, ATREE presented a discussion paper for the building and management of the India Biodiversity Portal. After much discussion it was decided that there is a need for such a facility that will enable large scale public participation and provide open and free access to the information in the non-governmental domain.

ATREE raised and re-allocated resources for the first phase of this initiative. This work was started in earnest in May 2008 in a project mode with the express charter to build the first cut of the India Biodiversity Portal in six months. It was to have the beginnings of an enabling platform and to seed it with basal and representative spatial data to show the functionality, capabilities and possibilities of such a facility.

ATREE's EIC team was fully allocated to work on the portal. The technology partner and the design team were contracted in May 2008, and work started in June 2008.

Documents and other reports related to the portal

• Discussion paper presented at the NKC meeting in October 2007.
• Letter from the NKC for building the India Biodiversity Portal.