Building the Biodiversity Data Global
Commons:
Biodiversity Informatics & the Global
Biodiversity Information Facility
OUTLINE
Role of Biodiversity Informatics, Role of GBIF
Data Repatriation
Disbursed Network of Functional BIFs
Applications of Integrated, Primary, Species-level, Biodiversity Data
Progress To Date in Moving Towards Full Operation
Way Forward
European Environment Information and Observation Network
National Reference Centres Biodiversity Workshop
European Environmental Agency, 28-29 September 2009, Copenhagen
Dr. Eric Gilman, GBIF
EricLGilman@gmail.com

Habitat Loss
Invasive Species
Overexploitation
Biodiversity loss (species extinctions, loss of populations and genetic diversity) and change (e.g., population evolutionary characteristics, population sizes, species’ distributions, species composition, ecosystem area and health).
Pollution Climate Change

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Intrinsic value & human wellbeing
Ecosystem Services: Biodiversity underpins ecosystems’ abilities to provide provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting services.
Growing Economic Case: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) estimated that not meeting the CBD
2010 target would result in 7% losses in
GDP by 2050. E.g., Animal pollinator services contribute €153B annually (10% of global ag production).

(i) Make global biodiversity information available in digital formats, and
(ii) Develop tools for their analysis and understanding.
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Foundation for biodiversity science: Because human threats to biodiversity extend across broad spatial and temporal scales, monitoring, forecasting, and risk assessments require data to be integrated.
Economies of scale: Pooling datasets allows repeated use.
Resolve the digital divide & repatriates data to countries of origin: Open access to research-grade data and rich metadata provides more equitable access.

Europe shares 3.4M data records located in 193 other countries and territories;
1.6M records located in Europe are from 15 countries/orgs outside of Europe.

International organization enabling free Internet access to global biodiversity data.
Establishment endorsed by OECD science ministers in 2000.
Established via non-binding MoU, global network of
‘Participants’ (member Countries & organizations).
-Infrastructure to publish biodiversity datasets online;
- Tools, standards & protocols for data publishing and access to interoperable datasets;
- Metadata catalogue to enable dataset discovery;
- Training, network of experts, & mentoring.
Rights and responsibilities remain with data owner/custodian

Governed through a Board of 32 Voting Participants
51 countries (shown) and 43 international organizations
• 5% annual growth in country membership since initial 17 OECD countries joined at inception in 2001;
• 7 of 18 megadiverse countries not members;
• Oceania, Asia and
Africa are underrepresented – few developing country members
(24) and of these, few are Voting members (9).

Legal Framework/Funding: GBIF Spain was created via Ministerial Resolution establishing the Spanish Research Council as Spain’s BIF coordinating unit, and allocating a permanent budget (€990k/yr);
Node Data Portal: Spain data portal enables data publishing and free access to ~2M records from 40 institutions.
Training & Mentoring: Digitization, data quality, standards, analytical tools nationally and actively building capacity of other countries within the GBIF network.
Count / one degree cell
1 - 9
10 - 99
100 - 999
1000 - 9999
10000 - 99999
100000+

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Species’ distributions: Currently the main use of GBIF-enabled data – ecological niche modeling;
Species richness: GBIF web-based filtering tools by country and within protected areas, but limited due to taxonomic, spatial and other gaps;
Species abundance/population size: Not currently possible via GBIF-enabled data because metadata standards do not routinely capture information on sampling effort. However, methods exist to estimate sampling effort – e.g., species accumulation time series curves can be used to estimate natural history collection effort.

Applications of Primary Species-level Biodiversity Data
There are sufficient sample sizes from the GBIF portal to support robust species distribution modeling for 83 of 100 of the species on the global “100 Worst Invaders” list (Global Invasive Species
Database)
.
Asian longhorn beetle

Applications of Primary Species-level Biodiversity Data
Modeled native range of
Asian tiger mosquito in Asia from GBIF-enabled records.
Fastest spreading alien invasive mosquito.
Transmitter of: Dengue, La
Crosse, St. Louis, Eastern
Equine, Ross River, Rift
Valley, & West Nile Viruses
Peterson et al., 2005 Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical
Medicine and Hygiene

Applications of Primary Species-level Biodiversity Data

Tools to Support Applications of Primary Species-level Biodiversity Data
Web-based filters allow searches, classification, aggregation, and disaggregation of the 100GB of GBIF-enabled occurrence data records.
Taxonomy
Scientific name
Common name
Classification
Type status
Geospatial
Country
Region (of 23)
Bounding box
Latitude
Longitude
Elevation
Depth
Coordinate status
(with/without coordinates)
Coordinate issues
(none/issues detected)
Protected area
Datasets
Data publisher
Dataset name
Host country
Other details
Occurrence date
Year range
Year
Month
Institution code
Collection code
Catalogue number
Basis of record
Image URL
(present/absent)

Applications of Primary Species-level Biodiversity Data
Employing integrated datasets of primary species-level occurrence data to monitor CBD species-based indicators:
• Trends in abundance and distribution of selected species:
WWF Living Planet Indices, Global Wild Bird Index;
• Change in status of threatened species: IUCN Red List
Index, and Sampled Red List Index;
• Trends in IAS: Indices for the number of invasive alien species per country, impact of IAS on extinction risks, and policy development.
Collen and Rist (2008) investigated the usability of GBIF-enabled data to monitor European SEBI 2010 Biodiversity Indicators – finding problematic spatial and taxonomic gaps. Of SEBI2010 biodiversity indicators, GBIF supports monitoring species’ distributions.

Moving Towards Full Operation
Distribution of >145M georeferenced records. Records fall predominantly within North
America and Europe. Over two-thirds fall within only three countries: 42, 15, and 13% in the USA, Sweden, and UK, respectively

(a)
(b)
Moving Towards Full Operation
Inventory of GBIF portal by (a) kingdom; (b) animal kingdom for selected phyla and classes.
Coverage is biased towards well-studied groups, especially birds, mammals and fishes.
Invertebrates are generally underrepresented (insects comprise >60% of described species but only
9.5% of GBIF records).

Estimate of error in horizontal positional accuracy has not been routinely captured in metadata published via GBIF. Animalia records within Spain and southern France, show gridded mapped resolution – GBIF cannot publish raster data, so center is reported as point occurrence – without capturing this transformation in metadata, the data might be misused…

• Fill data portal taxonomic gaps (invertebrates – insects);
• Fill data portal spatial gaps (Africa, Asia, Oceania);
• Complete comprehensive inventory to ID species richness by tax group & region, & temporal coverage (in-progress);
• Modify data and metadata publication standards to capture resolution and sampling effort ;
• Develop tools to enable publication via GBIF of raster and polygon-based data types (in progress);
• Augment dataset publication –change policies and enforcement; funding for digitizing and publishing the ~3 billion specimen records in natural history collections; increase data publication through growth in GBIF membership.