May 22, 2019, Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn graciously presided over the opening ceremony of International Conference on Biodiversity 2019 (IBD 2019) at Centara Grand & Bangkok Convention Centre at Central World. The conference was jointly organized by Biodiversity-Based Economy Development Officer (BEDO) and National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, in collaboration with the and other alliances on May 22-24, 2019.
Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn also paid a visit to the exhibition on “Discovers the Treasures and Unique Biodiversity in Thailand (From the Mountain to the Sea),” which highlighted innovations that help to protect and promote Thailand’s biodiversity. Examples of showcases featured are Smart Patrol that applies information technology to monitor plants and animals for conservation purposes, Soft Coral Propagation that uses breeding technology to rehabilitate marine ecosystem and ecotourism, and C-Aoss/CapsultArtoOcean Sediment System that uses eco-friendly artificial wood to expedite sedimentation to prevent coastal erosion.
BIOTEC, National Biobank of Thailand (NBT), National Omics Center (NOC) and Thailand Bioresource Research Center (TBRC) showcased the latest technologies and infrastructure as the country’s platform to strengthen biodiversity preservation and utilization. National Biobank of Thailand (NBT)NBT is the nation’s infrastructure aims to store variety of seeds and germplasm, microbes, animal cell lines, as well as human genome in the form of data. The Center is established with the purpose of long-term conservation and sustainable utilization of Thailand’s biological resources. National Omics Center (NOC)NOC is a national infrastructure with the mission to conduct research and provide services in omics technologies, including metabolomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and genomics, to industry and academia. Thailand Bioresource Research Center (TBRC)
The TBRC Network facilitates the coordination of exchange of biological information and resources and develop mechanisms enabled by big data technology to broaden access to biomaterials to the society. TBRC houses the collection of 85,864 microbial strains.
With the theme of “Bio-Wealth Country,” IBD 2019 aimed to serve as a knowledge-sharing platform for biodiversity, which includes topics, such as taxonomy, bioresource application, and in-situ and ex-situ conservation and rehabilitation of habitats. The conference hosted a total of 116 international and regional experts to share their latest development on four topics, including species in natural ecosystem, utilization of bioresources, impact and threat, and biodiversity management. Additionally, 16 botanists from the world’s leading botanical gardens were invited as keynote speakers to share their knowledge on the role of botanical gardens that maintain documented collections of plants for the purposes of conservation and education.
