BIODIVERSITY AND PHYLOGENETICS RESEARCH METHODS WORKSHOP

The training workshop on biodiversity and phylogenetics research methods was organised by Tulane University ,the National Musuems of Kenya and University of Nairobi .It was facilitated by Dr. Nelson Rios,Prof. Hank Bart and Ray Schmidt researchers from the Tulane Univerisity.It was held from 24thto 27th September 2013 at the National Museums of Kenya.

The workshop was aimed at building the capacity of its participants in biodiversity and phylogenetic research methods. Biodiversity and phylogenetics research methods are important in environmental conservation and management.Biodiversity research aims to understand processes of species co-existence at different spatial and temporal scales. Much of this research has centered arounddocumenting abundance of species and distribution patterns,which, is of tremendous importance for documenting current biodiversity and testing fundamental ecological theories.Documenting species diversity is however a practical challenge therefore making the process unreliable especially in microbial communities and macroscopic organisms thus is a hinderance to conservation biology.Phylogenetic research methods fill this gap by making it easier to indentify organisms through molecular sequencing data and morphological data matrices.Phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relationships among groups of organisms such as species and populations. The participants were drawn from various institutions such as Kenya Wetlands Biodiversity Research Group (KENWEB),National Museums of Kenya(NMK), University of Nairobi (UoN) and Tulane University.

The participants were trained on :

• Biodiversity data standards such as Darwin Core Standards.
• Communication format or protocals like DiGir,DwCA and IPT which manage biodiversity data.
• sharing biodiversity and how to manage the various portals of sharing such data.
• Cleaning biodiversity data using the Open Refine software.
• Georeferencing biodiversity data using GEOLocate software and Quantum GIS softwares.
• Proper field data collecting procedures.
• Molecular laboratory methods .
• Molecular Genetics and systematics .
• Phyloinformatics- overview and demonstration.
• Morphological study of museum species,taxonomic diagnosis and species description.

The workshop came to an end on 27th september with a certificate awarding ceromony facilitated by Dr.Dorcas Sigana.