The Future Okavango (TFO) – Scientific support for sustainable land and resource management in the Okavango basin. The Okavango basin with its variety of savanna woodlands and wetland ecosystems linked by the central lifeline of the Okavango River is a global hot-spot of accelerating change and land use conflicts. It terminates in the Okavango Delta, the world's largest inland delta and the largest freshwater swamp south of the equator. The TFO project will analyze ecosystem functions and services within this trans-boundary basin of high international visibility and high potential transferability of results to other tropical and sub-tropical regions.
Contact: Prof. Norbert Jürgens

Southern African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Use (SASSCAL) – a Regional Science Service Centre (RSSC) in Southern Africa. SASSCAL is a joint initiative of Angola, Botswana, Namibia,South Africa, Zambia, and Germany, responding to the challenges of global change.
Contact (scientific coordinator of the preparation phase): Prof. Norbert Jürgens

BIOTA AFRICA is an interdisciplinary and integrative research initiative that analyses the change of biodiversity on the African continent.

This interdisciplinary and integrative research project aims to identify, evaluate and, where appropriate, adjust existing strategies to cope with droughts in order to develop farming practices adapted to changing climatic conditions in semi-arid areas of South Africa and Ethiopia through an action research approach.
Contact: Dr. Ute Schmiedel, www.mechal.org

The Global Plants Initiative (GPI), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is a collaboration of more than 150 botanical institutions worldwide. It is a long-term effort to build a comprehensive online research tool aggregating and linking presently scattered resources such as plant type specimens as well as taxonomically relevant literature and related materials. These are made available to students, scholars, and scientists around the globe via the JSTOR Plant Science portal. The Herbarium Hamburgense hosts large collections of plants from all continents, especially from colonial times. Currently, all type specimens and other historically important records are registered electronically and scanned to provide the data via the online portal of the Herbarium Hamburgense, JSTOR Plant Science and the GBIF network on the internet.
Contact: Dr. Hans-Helmut Poppendieck , Dr. Matthias Schultz

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international non-profit organisation to provide free and universal access to data regarding the world's biodiversity.