BioNoMo: the Biodiversity Network of Mozambique

Mozambique biodiversity richness plays a pivotal role to achieve the sustainable development of the country. However, Mozambique’s flora and fauna diversity still remains broadly unknown and poorly documented. To properly address this issue, one of the strategic needs expressed by the Mozambican institutions was the development of a national biodiversity data repository to aggregate, manage and make data available online. Thus, a sustainable infrastructure for the standardisation, aggregation, organisation and sharing of primary biodiversity data was developed. Named the “Biodiversity Network of Mozambique” (BioNoMo), such a tool serves as a national repository of biodiversity data and aggregates occurrence records of plants and animals in the country obtained from floristic and faunistic observations and from specimens of biological collections. In this paper, the authors present the structure and data of BioNoMO, including software details, the process of data gathering and aggregation, the taxonomic coverage and the WebGIS development. Currently, aggregating a total of 273,172 records, including 85,092 occurrence records of plants and 188,080 occurrence records of animals (41.2% terrestrial, 58,8% aquatic), BioNoMo represents the largest aggregator of primary biodiversity data in Mozambique and it is planned to grow further by aggregating new datasets.