GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY

1. Building the Biodiversity Data Global Commons: Biodiversity Informatics & the Global Biodiversity Information Facility INFORMATIONFACILITY GLOBALBIODIVERSITY 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

2. Biodiversity Crisis Invasive Species Habitat Loss 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

3. What’s at Stake • 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). Intrinsic value & human wellbeing

4. Role of Biodiversity Informatics (i) Make global biodiversity information available in digital formats, and(ii) Develop tools for their analysis and understanding. • 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.

5. Data Repatriation from and to Europe 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.

6. What is GBIF? • 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). • Infrastructureto 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 X • data repository

7. Governed through a Board of 32 Voting Participants GBIF Membership • 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). 51 countries (shown) and 43 international organizations

8. Disbursed network of national, regional & thematic BIFs – Example of Spain BIF 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.

9. General Categories of Applications of Primary Species-level Biodiversity Data • 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.

10. IAS – 100 Worst Invaders 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

11. Mapping Disease Vectors 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

12. Asian tiger mosquito predicted global range expansion using Ecological Niche Modeling Applications of Primary Species-level Biodiversity Data

13. Search Filters through the GBIF Data Portal 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.

14. GBIF-Enabled Data & Monitoring 2010 Target Indicators 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.

15. Spatial Distribution of GBIF-enabled Georeferenced Data 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

16. (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).

17. Capturing Resolution in Metadata Estimate of error in horizontal positional accuracy has not been routinely captured in metadata published via GBIF. Animaliarecords 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…

18. Way Forward for Biodiversity Informatics • 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.