scholarly journals Biodiversity Informatics in Brazil: A personal perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Saraiva ◽  
Bruno Albertini
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
Global South ◽  
Biological Data ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Personal Perspective ◽  
Biodiversity Informatics ◽  
Large Country ◽  
Biodiversity Science ◽  
Biodiversity Information ◽  
Brazilian Biodiversity

Biodiversity informatics (BI) plays an important role in helping us know, protect and use biodiversity sustainably. It encompasses activities from data digitization, standardization, sharing and aggregation, to supporting decision and policy making. In a country like Brazil, with a large continental geographic area containing ca. 15% of the planet’s biodiversity, the challenge is even greater: stakeholders are widely distributed over a large country and the amount of data is huge. Brazil has been a part of the international BI community, including Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), for around two decades. Initially represented solely by the Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental (CRIA), gradually other groups from universities, museums and institutions joined the arena. Despite the broader group of stakeholders now involved, the local community is not strong enough. From a human resources point of view, the country has very good universities that train competent professionals both in information technology (IT) and in biology or related fields. Concerning the IT professionals, not surprisingly, other industries and job opportunities are usually more attractive and few people even know about BI. This is probably not unique to Brazil. Biological sciences professionals, for their part, usually have little literacy in computing and are equally unaware of BI as a field. On the institutional level, museums, universities and other biological data owners often lack IT support for biological data management, including digitization, and systems development/maintenance. This may reflect the lack of appreciation of the importance of data and of BI as a foundation for good biodiversity science and management. The same happens when it comes to funding. Biological collections are not adequately funded and lack more than a few episodic programs to support collection and museum maintenance and digitization. This lack of infrastructural funding highlights the tragedies of the fires at the Butantan Museum in 2010 (80,000 snakes, 180,000 spiders) and the Museu Nacional in 2018, (20 million biological specimens and objects of the Brazilian and world history and art were lost). The exception is the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), which has been supporting projects since 1999 on biodiversity and BI via its successful Biota-FAPESP program, the first to tie biodiversity projects to data digitization and sharing in Brazil. The lack of institutional engagement and support, and funding affects the sustainability of many initiatives and puts at risk the long term data availability. Due to political reasons, Brazil only joined the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in 2012 as an associate (non-contributing financially and non-voting) member with a commitment to become a voting member within five years. Until recently, the Brazilian Biodiversity Information System (SiBBr), Brazil’s GBIF node, was also hindered by politics from having a solid, stable national governance and funding to help “consolidate a solid national infrastructure on biodiversity data”, and to unite the growing Brazilian BI community around it. In the international scenario, while political, cultural and funding reasons may have hindered more equitable collaborations (e.g., tools development and sharing) with countries in the Global South, competing Global North-centric projects have prevailed. Although most remaining biodiversity is in the Global South, where local engagement is crucial, in many cases southern partners still often only act as data providers. Collaborative work is required with genuine co-creation, empowering all parties. Initiatives like the Living Atlases community must be recognized and welcomed as a positive shift. Despite all of these challenges, it can be surprising how much Brazilian biodiversity science has achieved throughout the years, and it gives us hope that in the future, if some of these issues are addressed, a lot more can be done. Education and training, continued funding and institutional support, governance, and international collaboration are essential.

scholarly journals African Biodiversity Challenge: Integrating Freshwater Biodiversity Information to Guide Informed Decision-Making in Rwanda

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e26367
Author(s):  
Yvette Umurungi ◽  
Samuel Kanyamibwa ◽  
Faustin Gashakamba ◽  
Beth Kaplin
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Freshwater Ecosystems ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Biodiversity Informatics ◽  
Freshwater Biodiversity ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Albertine Rift ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Freshwater biodiversity is critically understudied in Rwanda, and to date there has not been an efficient mechanism to integrate freshwater biodiversity information or make it accessible to decision-makers, researchers, private sector or communities, where it is needed for planning, management and the implementation of the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP). A framework to capture and distribute freshwater biodiversity data is crucial to understanding how economic transformation and environmental change is affecting freshwater biodiversity and resulting ecosystem services. To optimize conservation efforts for freshwater ecosystems, detailed information is needed regarding current and historical species distributions and abundances across the landscape. From these data, specific conservation concerns can be identified, analyzed and prioritized. The purpose of this project is to establish and implement a long-term strategy for freshwater biodiversity data mobilization, sharing, processing and reporting in Rwanda. The expected outcome of the project is to support the mandates of the Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA), the national agency in charge of environmental monitoring and the implementation of Rwanda’s NBSAP, and the Center of Excellence in Biodiversity and Natural Resources Management (CoEB). The project also aligns with the mission of the Albertine Rift Conservation Society (ARCOS) to enhance sustainable management of natural resources in the Albertine rift region. Specifically, organizational structure, technology platforms, and workflows for the biodiversity data capture and mobilization are enhanced to promote data availability and accessibility to improve Rwanda’s NBSAP and support other decision-making processes. The project is enhancing the capacity of technical staff from relevant government and non-government institutions in biodiversity informatics, strengthening the capacity of CoEB to achieve its mission as the Rwandan national biodiversity knowledge management center. Twelve institutions have been identified as data holders and the digitization of these data using Darwin Core standards is in progress, as well as data cleaning for the data publication through the ARCOS Biodiversity Information System (http://arbmis.arcosnetwork.org/). The release of the first national State of Freshwater Biodiversity Report is the next step. CoEB is a registered publisher to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and holds an Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) account on the ARCOS portal. This project was developed for the African Biodiversity Challenge, a competition coordinated by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) and funded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation which supports on-going efforts to enhance the biodiversity information management activities of the GBIF Africa network. This project also aligns with SANBI’s Regional Engagement Strategy, and endeavors to strengthen both emerging biodiversity informatics networks and data management capacity on the continent in support of sustainable development.

scholarly journals Towards a Post-Graduate Level Curriculum for Biodiversity Informatics. Perspectives from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Community

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Parker-Allie ◽  
Francisco Pando ◽  
Anders Telenius ◽  
Jean Ganglo ◽  
Danny Vélez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Biological Data ◽  
Initial Assessment ◽  
Biodiversity Informatics ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Academic Teaching ◽  
E Learning ◽  
Learning Platforms ◽  
Global Biodiversity ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Biodiversity informatics is a new and evolving field, requiring efforts to develop capacity and a curriculum for this field of science. The main objective was to summarise the level of activity and the efforts towards developing biodiversity informatics curricula, for work-based training and/or academic teaching at universities, taking place within the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) countries and its associated network. A survey approach was used to identify existing capacities and resources within the network. Most of GBIF Nodes survey respondents (80%) are engaged in onsite training activities, with a focus on work-based professionals, mostly researchers, policy-makers and students. Training topics include data mobilisation, digitisation, management, publishing, analysis and use, to enable the accessibility of analogue and digital biological data that currently reside as scattered datasets. An initial assessment of academic teaching activities highlighted that countries in most regions, to varying degrees, were already engaged in the conceptualisation, development and/or implementation of formal academic programmes in biodiversity informatics, including programmes in Benin, Colombia, Costa Rica, Finland, France, India, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan and Togo. Digital e-learning platforms were an important tool to help build capacity in many countries. In terms of the potential in the Nodes network, 60% expressed willingness to be recruited or commissioned for capacity enhancement purposes. Contributions and activities of various country nodes across the network have been highlighted and a working curriculum framework has been defined.

scholarly journals Making Biodiversity Data Social, Shareable, and Scalable: Reflections on iNaturalist & citizen science

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Citizen Science ◽  
Biodiversity Informatics ◽  
Strategic Decisions ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Helping Others ◽  
Advance Research ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Since 2008, iNaturalist has been crowdsourcing identifications for biodiversity observations collected by citizen scientists. Today iNaturalist has over 25 million records of wild biodiversity with photo or audio evidence, from every country, representing more than 230,000 species, collected by over 700,000 people, and with 90,000 people helping others with identifications. Hundreds of publications have used iNaturalist data to advance research, conservation, and policy. There are three key themes that iNaturalist has embraced: social interaction; shareability of data, tools, and code; and scalability of the platform and community. The keynote will share reflections on what has (and has not) worked for iNaturalist while drawing on other examples from biodiversity informatics and citizen science. Insights about user motivations, synergistic collaborations, and strategic decisions about scaling offer some transferable approaches to address the broadly applicable questions: Which species is represented? How do we make the best use of the available biodiversity information? And how do we build something viable and enduring in the process?

scholarly journals Completeness of Digital Accessible Knowledge of the Plants of Ghana

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Asase ◽  
A. Townsend Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Geographic Distance ◽  
Northern Ghana ◽  
Biodiversity Informatics ◽  
Primary Research ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Herbarium Data ◽  
Research Grade ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Providing comprehensive, informative, primary, research-grade biodiversity information represents an important focus of biodiversity informatics initiatives. Recent efforts within Ghana have digitized >90% of primary biodiversity data records associated with specimen sheets in Ghanaian herbaria; additional herbarium data are available from other institutions via biodiversity informatics initiatives such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. However, data on the plants of Ghana have not as yet been integrated and assessed to establish how complete site inventories are, so that appropriate levels of confidence can be applied. In this study, we assessed inventory completeness and identified gaps in current Digital Accessible Knowledge (DAK) of the plants of Ghana, to prioritize areas for future surveys and inventories. We evaluated the completeness of inventories at ½° spatial resolution using statistics that summarize inventory completeness, and characterized gaps in coverage in terms of geographic distance and climatic difference from well-documented sites across the country. The southwestern and southeastern parts of the country held many well-known grid cells; the largest spatial gaps were found in central and northern parts of the country. Climatic difference showed contrasting patterns, with a dramatic gap in coverage in central-northern Ghana. This study provides a detailed case study of how to prioritize for new botanical surveys and inventories based on existing DAK.

scholarly journals A Stochastic Frontier Approach to Measuring Inefficiency of Local Communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-29
Author(s):  
Lejla Lazović-Pita ◽  
Lamija Šćeta
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Stochastic Frontier Analysis ◽  
Stochastic Frontier ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Technical Inefficiency ◽  
Frontier Analysis ◽  
Selection Of Variables

Abstract The significance and methods of measuring inefficiency of local communities has been gaining prominence in the last decade. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the level of technical inefficiency in the sample of local communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) for the year of 2017. We implement parametric stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to conduct an input-oriented stochastic parametric approach to measuring technical inefficiency of local communities in BiH. The results of our work are complementary to previous research indicating relative technical inefficiency of local communities in BiH. On average, BiH local communities’ total expenditures can be reduced by 46.8 percent without reducing output levels to achieve the result of the local community on the best practice frontier. Since our analysis and selection of variables are driven by data availability, the future research plans to include more variables.

scholarly journals Botanical Sampling Gaps Across the Cameroon Mountains

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moses Nsanyi Sainge ◽  
Jean-Michel Onana ◽  
Felix Nchu ◽  
David Kenfack ◽  
A. Townsend Peterson
Keyword(s):  
National Park ◽  
Biodiversity Hotspot ◽  
Important Task ◽  
Biodiversity Informatics ◽  
Botanical Survey ◽  
Mountain Ranges ◽  
Priority Areas ◽  
National Herbarium ◽  
Biodiversity Information

With the emergence of a new field, biodiversity informatics, an important task has been to evaluate completeness of biodiversity information that is existing and available for various countries and regions. This paper offers a first and very basic assessment of sampling gaps and inventory completeness across the Cameroon Mountains. Because digital accessible knowledge is severely limited for the region, we relied on qualitative evaluations of inventory completeness, supplemented by large amounts of data from the National Herbarium of Cameroon (YA) database. Detailed botanical inventories have been developed for Mt Cameroon, the Kupe-Mwanenguba Mountains, Mt Oku, and the Mambila Plateau, leaving substantial geographic and environmental coverage gaps corresponding to Rumpi Hills, Mt Nlonako, Kimbi Fungom National Park, Bali and Bafut Ngemba, Mt Bamboutos, Kagwene, and Tchabal Mbabo. This paper provides a roadmap for a comprehensive botanical survey for this region. Completing this survey plan, the resulting data will allow researchers to track changes in biodiversity and identify priority areas for conservation on the various mountain ranges that make up this important biodiversity hotspot.

scholarly journals ITIS and the Global Taxonomic Backbone

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Mitchell ◽  
Thomas Orrell
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Data ◽  
Biological Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Global Database ◽  
The Public ◽  
Taxonomic Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Biological Data Management ◽  
Biodiversity Information ◽  
Scientific Name

The Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) provides a regularly updated, global database that currently contains over 868,000 scientific names and their hierarchy. The program exists to communicate a comprehensive taxonomy of global species across 7 kingdoms that enables biodiversity information to be discovered, indexed, and connected across all human endeavors. ITIS partners with taxonomists and experts across the world to assemble scientific names and their taxonomic relationships, and then distributes that data through publicly available software. A single taxon may be represented by multiple scientific names, so ITIS makes it a priority to provide synonymy. Linking valid or accepted names with their subjective and objective synonyms is a key component of name translation and increases the precision of searches and organization of information. ITIS and its partner Species2000 create the Catalogue of Life (CoL) checklist that provides quality scientific name data for over 2.2M species. The CoL is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) taxonomic backbone. Providing automated open access to complete, current, literature-referenced, and expert-validated taxonomic information enables biological data management systems, and is elemental to enhancing the utility of the amassed scientific data across the world. Fully leveraging this information for the public good is crucial for empowering the global digital society to confront the most pressing social and environmental challenges.

scholarly journals An Australian Perspective on Local Government Investment in Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 6590
Author(s):  
Scott Dwyer ◽  
Claudine Moutou ◽  
Kriti Nagrath ◽  
Joseph Wyndham ◽  
Lawrence McIntosh ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Electric Vehicle ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Government Investment ◽  
Large Country ◽  
Charging Infrastructure ◽  
Electric Vehicle Charging ◽  
Ev Charging

Electric vehicle (EV) adoption is growing worldwide with increasing market pull from consumers and market push from manufacturers of vehicles and charging equipment, as well as others in the supply chain. Governments have begun developing policies to support EV uptake and local governments, in particular, are examining what role they should play. In Australia, a large country with low population density, EV uptake has been slower in comparison to other similar economies. This paper discusses the status of EV charging infrastructure deployment in Australia with regards to local governments, by considering the extent to which they are relied upon for the deployment of such technology and what motivates them to act. It also covers the work undertaken by the authors with one local government in developing an EV charging infrastructure business model that will help the local community adopt and benefit from EVs. An applied use of the business canvas methodology adapted to suit local government interests is presented to assess the risks and benefits that different business models offer. The paper offers insights into the strategic and pragmatic responsibilities local governments balance in seeking to expand the EV charging infrastructure in their jurisdiction.

scholarly journals A Google Sheet Add-on for Biodiversity Data Standardization and Sharing

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Augusto Salim ◽  
Antonio Saraiva
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Data Sharing ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Biodiversity Informatics ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Data Standardization ◽  
Darwin Core ◽  
Rest Api ◽  
Biodiversity Information

For those biologists and biodiversity data managers who are unfamiliar with information science data practices of data standardization, the use of complex software to assist in the creation of standardized datasets can be a barrier to sharing data. Since the ratification of the Darwin Core Standard (DwC) (Darwin Core Task Group 2009) by the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) in 2009, many datasets have been published and shared through a variety of data portals. In the early stages of biodiversity data sharing, the protocol Distributed Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR), progenitor of DwC, and later the protocols BioCASe and TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval (TAPIR) (De Giovanni et al. 2010) were introduced for discovery, search and retrieval of distributed data, simplifying data exchange between information systems. Although these protocols are still in use, they are known to be inefficient for transferring large amounts of data (GBIF 2017). Because of that, in 2011 the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) introduced the Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which allows more efficient data transfer, and has become the preferred format for publishing data in the GBIF network. DwC-A is a structured collection of text files, which makes use of the DwC terms to produce a single, self-contained dataset. Many tools for assisting data sharing using DwC-A have been introduced, such as the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) (Robertson et al. 2014), the Darwin Core Archive Assistant (GBIF 2010) and the Darwin Core Archive Validator. Despite promoting and facilitating data sharing, many users have difficulties using such tools, mainly because of the lack of training in information science in the biodiversity curriculum (Convention on Biological Diversiity 2012, Enke et al. 2012). However, most users are very familiar with spreadsheets to store and organize their data, but the adoption of the available solutions requires data transformation and training in information science and more specifically, biodiversity informatics. For an example of how spreadsheets can simplify data sharing see Stoev et al. (2016). In order to provide a more "familiar" approach to data sharing using DwC-A, we introduce a new tool as a Google Sheet Add-on. The Add-on, called Darwin Core Archive Assistant Add-on can be installed in the user's Google Account from the G Suite MarketPlace and used in conjunction with the Google Sheets application. The Add-on assists the mapping of spreadsheet columns/fields to DwC terms (Fig. 1), similar to IPT, but with the advantage that it does not require the user to export the spreadsheet and import it into another software. Additionally, the Add-on facilitates the creation of a star schema in accordance with DwC-A, by the definition of a "CORE_ID" (e.g. occurrenceID, eventID, taxonID) field between sheets of a document (Fig. 2). The Add-on also provides an Ecological Metadata Language (EML) (Jones et al. 2019) editor (Fig. 3) with minimal fields to be filled in (i.e., mandatory fields required by IPT), and helps users to generate and share DwC-Archives stored in the user's Google Drive, which can be downloaded as a DwC-A or automatically uploaded to another public storage resource like a user's Zenodo Account (Fig. 4). We expect that the Google Sheet Add-on introduced here, in conjunction with IPT, will promote biodiversity data sharing in a standardized format, as it requires minimal training and simplifies the process of data sharing from the user's perspective, mainly for those users not familiar with IPT, but that historically have worked with spreadsheets. Although the DwC-A generated by the add-on still needs to be published using IPT, it does provide a simpler interface (i.e., spreadsheet) for mapping data sets to DwC than IPT. Even though the IPT includes many more features than the Darwin Core Assistant Add-on, we expect that the Add-on can be a "starting point" for users unfamiliar with biodiversity informatics before they move on to more advanced data publishing tools. On the other hand, Zenodo integration allows users to share and cite their standardized data sets without publishing them via IPT, which can be useful for users without access to an IPT installation. Additionally, we are working on new features and future releases will include the automatic generation of Global Unique Identifiers for shared records, the possibility of adding additional data standards and DwC extensions, integration with GBIF REST API and with IPT REST API.

scholarly journals Harvestmen occurrence database (Arachnida, Opiliones) of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Brazil

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valéria da Silva ◽  
Manoel Aguiar-Neto ◽  
Dan Teixeira ◽  
Cleverson Santos ◽  
Marcos de Sousa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Consultation ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
Northern Brazil ◽  
Global Biodiversity ◽  
The Government ◽  
Biodiversity Information ◽  
Brazilian Biodiversity

We present a dataset with information from the Opiliones collection of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Northern Brazil. This collection currently has 6,400 specimens distributed in 13 families, 30 genera and 32 species and holotypes of four species: Imeri ajuba Coronato-Ribeiro, Pinto-da-Rocha & Rheims, 2013, Phareicranaus patauateua Pinto-da-Rocha & Bonaldo, 2011, Protimesius trocaraincola Pinto-da-Rocha, 1997 and Sickesia tremembe Pinto-da-Rocha & Carvalho, 2009. The material of the collection is exclusive from Brazil, mostly from the Amazon Region. The dataset is now available for public consultation on the Sistema de Informação sobre a Biodiversidade Brasileira (SiBBr) (https://ipt.sibbr.gov.br/goeldi/resource?r=museuparaenseemiliogoeldi-collection-aracnologiaopiliones). SiBBr is the Brazilian Biodiversity Information System, an initiative of the government and the Brazilian node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which aims to consolidate and make primary biodiversity data available on a platform (Dias et al. 2017). Harvestmen or Opiliones constitute the third largest arachnid order, with approximately 6,500 described species. Brazil is the holder of the greatest diversity in the world, with more than 1,000 described species, 95% (960 species) of which are endemic to the country. Of these, 32 species were identified and deposited in the collection of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi.

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