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GMBA Mountain Inventory and Mountain Portal

27.09.2018

The Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) has released new versions of its Mountain inventory and to it’s Mountain Portal.

The Mountain Portal is an interactive web platform provided by the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment of Future Earth and developed by Map of Life. It is a tool to explore biodiversity in the mountains of the world and facilitate international and cross-disciplinary collaborations on its assessment, conservation and sustainable use. It provides species lists for more than 1000 mountain ranges worldwide, global predicted distribution ranges for all listed species, and bioclimatic as well as topographic information for each mountain range.

The Mountain Portal is an open source tool designed for all types of users, ranging from citizen scientists to researchers, practitioners, stakeholders and policy makers. As such, it responds to a growing need for detailed information on the distribution of species and on past and present biodiversity patterns to predict potential changes in mountain biodiversity in response to global drivers.

The portal is an evolving resource that utilizes the power of the global community to improve mountain biodiversity and inventory information. The freshly released version of the portal includes new features such as an upload functionality for occurrences data and inventories and a dataset search tool. The GMBA Mountain Portal is available in six languages, now including Portuguese.

The new version of GMBA mountain inventory includes around 50 new mountain ranges, mostly in Asia and South America. The inventory is based on the GMBA definition of  mountains, which defines 2.5' pixels as rugged (i.e. mountainous) if the elevational difference between the lowest and highest of nine 30" grid points within these pixels exceeds 200 metres. The GMBA mountain inventory is available for unrestricted download. GMBA is expanding this mountain inventory and is greatful for contributions and feedback from the global mountain community.

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