PIONEERING SOFTWARE FOR LIFE SCIENCES
Biodiversity Informatics at Strand
The biodiversity informatics software team at Strand works on public funded projects for developing open collaborative and participative platforms; and building databases on biodiversity and conservation of nature. This initiative is supported and sustained by public funded projects and Strand’s commitment to open source, open data as a public good. Over the years, Strand has undertaken the following projects and gained considerable expertise and open source code base for building interactive web applications.
Biodiversity Informatics Platforms
Strand Life Sciences has been working in Biodiversity Informatics since 2008. The team works on developing open collaborative and participative platforms; and building databases on biodiversity and conservation of nature.
The India Biodiversity Portal (IBP) is Strand’s contribution to help biodiversity conservation in India. IBP is designed to harness collective knowledge on biodiversity, aggregate information, and provide free and open access to biodiversity information. IBP was launched in 2008 and supported by a group of like-minded institutions and endorsed by the National Knowledge Commission to support open data in biodiversity.
Strand is the technology partner in building this enabling platform to crowdsource, curate, and aggregate biodiversity information. The platform has matured and now consists of a fully-featured webGIS module; a standards compliant species pages module; a document and open data module; and a citizen science observation module.
The open source Biodiv platform developed by Strand, powers the India Biodiversity Portal, the Bhutan Biodiversity Portal and a knowledge portal for weeds of the tropics WIKTROP. Strand works as a technology partner to build these country level and thematic portals in collaboration with domain experts and researchers.
This initiative has been supported by projects from several biodiversity conservation funding bodies such as the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, World Resources Institute, National Geographic Society and JRS biodiversity foundation among others; and sustained by Strand’s long-term commitment to the open source project and open data for public good.
Sustainable Agriculture Platforms
Since 2018, Strand Life Sciences has been working on building platforms for sustainable agriculture. Strand is the technology partner with CIRAD, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development, working on a project in the Western Uganda Rwenzori region under the EU – Switch Africa Green Program (ENV/2017/391-382), The program aims to build a technology platform for triple certification for coffee to add value with certification and fetch better prices for small growers coffee. The microservices under this project is open source and is available in the github Cropcert repository. The platform is still under development and in alpha testing and available at the demo site. The project will be scaled up over the next 4 years as a part of the GCCA+ DeSIRA project supported by the EU with Strand Life Sciences as the technology partner.