The Tunisian Biodiversity Community, Small Steps for Unity

For the last few years I spent an extensive amount of time reading and searching for scientific publications produced on the Tunisian Biodiversity and developed few observations based on which I sought to propose a solution that I will mention later on. I hope that everyone will get on board and contribute to this open research project.

The Problem: A Significant Knowledge Gap

There is a significant knowledge gap about Tunisian biodiversity. Long story short, we don’t know what we have! It’s imperative to classify and enumerate things (we conduct inventories all the time whether at our own homes or work), we have the same needs when it comes to biodiversity.

Taxonomic studies are the baseline of all consequence studies in biology and ecology, without knowing precisely what species we’re dealing with we can’t go further in investigating its biology and ecology.

Ghost Publications

Additionally, we have many ghost publications. This occurs when produced publications are kept offline in local reviews or unpublished master/thesis dissertations (it doesn’t particularly concern scientific papers but also unpublished data, pictures, videos…). This keeps valuable information off limits thus, its potential brought to its minimum.

Outdated and Fragmented Research

Many research outcomes related to the Tunisian biodiversity are outdated hence the difficulty accessing the full documents. Moreover, the overall available content is strongly fragmented and decentralized into multiple platforms which requires a lot of time to search for.

This scattered data set make it troublesome for scientists and researchers to keep a record on what is done and what’s still call for further considerations and slow the progress of science by bringing down attempts to study the Tunisian biodiversity, dividing forces and misleading focus to study taxa that urge conservation endeavors.

The Solution: The Tunisian Biodiversity Community (TBC)

To put in value years of hard-work and research held by the scientific community (whether Tunisian scientists or scientists from other countries) in Tunisia, to have a clear image on the richness of the Tunisian biodiversity, to concentrate effort to undertake critical issues in conservation and to bring together people working on the same questions, I’m suggesting the following solution as an open research project where everyone can contribute to:

The Tunisian Biodiversity Community (TBC) is a Zenodo-based community aiming to provide an open access and centralized library about biodiversity in Tunisia via curating academic and educative publications (data, scientific papers, videos, audio, pictures…).

How It Works

The platform will:

Keep DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of previously published papers with ORCID of each author to protect their rights
Give unpublished content a new DOI to facilitate citation of the publications, including direct access to its digital representation
Via keywords and CrossRef search, it is easy to detect content about a specific taxon you’re interested in

How to Contribute

It’s easy to contribute. Just follow the instructions on Zenodo website.

Link to the community:
Tunisian Biodiversity Community on Zenodo

Join the Discussion

A Facebook group is created to reinforce connections between the community members and to discuss topics about biodiversity and wildlife conservation in Tunisia.

TBC on Facebook:
Tunisian Biodiversity Community Facebook Group

Acknowledgments

I want to express my gratitude to Prof. Sophien Kamoun who introduced Zenodo to me.

Why This Matters

By centralizing Tunisia’s biodiversity research, we can:

Accelerate scientific progress by making data accessible
Reduce duplication of research efforts
Identify knowledge gaps that need attention
Foster collaboration among researchers
Preserve valuable data that might otherwise be lost
Make science more open and accessible to everyone

Get Involved

Whether you’re a researcher, student, naturalist, or conservation enthusiast:

Upload your research to the Zenodo community
Share unpublished data (photos, videos, observations)
Join the Facebook group to connect with others
Cite and use the available resources
Spread the word about TBC

Together, we can build a comprehensive picture of Tunisia’s rich biodiversity and work towards better conservation outcomes.

Originally published on Medium: The Tunisian Biodiversity Community, Small Steps for Unity