SAAMBR Post
ORI Hosts Training Workshop
Last week, ORI hosted a training workshop on data analysis as part of capacity-building for the WIO-Benth project being led by ORI.
Over the past four years, WIO-Benth has been accumulating information on offshore seabed habitats and faunal communities in the Western Indian Ocean, and the time has come to pull the various data sets together to produce biodiversity and habitat maps for the region. Assisted by experts from the Universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch, the workshop examined preliminary outputs of several analytical community/habitat models, and debated the limitations of the data as well as the interpretations of the findings.
Apart from the South Africans, there were participants from Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and Madagascar. WIO-Benth is funded by the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association; project outputs will eventually be housed by the Nairobi Convention, and will assist WIO countries with Marine Spatial Planning.