The inventory and assessment of biodiversity resources have become essential for policy-making and management strategies as well as for developing and testing scientific hypotheses. There is an increasing need to compile mountain biodiversity databases and to make them available on-line. At the forefront of this work is an initiative lead by the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment of DIVERSITAS in cooperation with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). The aim of the workshop is to highlight the usefulness of geo-referenced biodiversity data for the integrated analysis and spatial visualization of biodiversity information in relation to climate, land use, physiography and other important parameters. The workshop will bring together national partners from the HKH region to explore the possibility of hosting a regional platform for mountain biodiversity data from the Hindu Kush-Himalayas. Ideally, such a platform would provide easy and open access to Himalayan biodiversity data and metadata, and make it available for wider dissemination both regionally as well as to the global change
research community.