An IUCN/OASIS biodiversity project aims to better tap the vast sea of statistical data on endangered species and protected areas for better information sharing and decisions by business and government. 

One of the huge challenges in biodiversity conservation is managing the vast quantities of data generated so people can use it, said Tom Hammond, senior program advisor at The World Conservation Union (IUCN).  Much biodiversity data is either unavailable or not easily accessible because of fragmentation of data, lack of access or interoperability, IUCN said.

The US Geological Survey’s National Biodiversity Information Infrastructure (NBII) program is essentially tackling domestically, the same questions that the IUCN/OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) partnership is at the international level, “trying to integrate all the biodiversity data and information generated at county level and federally, into one common [information] infrastructure,” Hammond said: “NBII is part of this process.”  Canada and other of IUCN's 80 member countries are essentially trying to do the same thing, Hammond said.  Many initiatives to improve access to and leveraging of biodiversity data are taking place in governments, scientific and research organizations and in the private sector, Hammond said: “Very few of these initiatives are talking to each other."

Biodiversity information could be accessed in common ways no matter where the information is being maintained, Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS said: “Data gets managed wherever it’s best gathered and managed.”  Organizations that need the data shouldn’t need multiple kinds of interfaces to access it, Gannon said.  “This is a common refrain that many, particularly companies in the resource sector – oil and gas, mining, forests, agriculture – many companies are beginning to step up and say,” they need to make better, more informed decisions about where they conduct their business on the ground, Hammond said. 

Seventy-six organizations have committed to open access to biodiversity data by signing up to a global partnership called the Conservation Commons, Hammond said.  They are conservation groups, scientific organizations, government agencies like NASA and NBII, companies like Rio Tinto, Shell and Chevron, Hammond said: “From a private sector company’s point of view, that’s fairly significant because that gets down to issues of disclosure. Many of these companies generate their own data when it comes to their field operations and these companies have formally signed up to say they will make available the data that they generate for whatever field operations they’re involved in."

Geospatial approaches will be “the platform upon which we’re going to generate a lot of this work,” because the data is from some geographic place on the planet, Hammond said: “Essentially what we’re doing is identifying the minimum standards we need so we can at least share data.” The work builds on open standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium, global and regional species taxonomy standards, on-line publishing and referencing, Service Oriented Architectures and others, IUCN said. The work of a group called Biodiversity Information Standards will also be involved. 

The first step in the process will be identifying what standards work is out there that can be leveraged and what’s missing, Hammond said: “There’s a minimum list of criteria that you absolutely have to have access to” if you’re a CEO or a director of a government ministry making a decision.  Endangered species, protected areas, key biodiversity areas outside of protected areas, critical ecosystems for the generation of ecosystem goods and services like water, fiber, maintaining soils and non-timber forest products “is a very short list of some very key ecosystem and biodiversity elements that we would like to make sure that anyone would have access to,” Hammond said.  A June meeting in Arlington, Virginia (USA) will begin to tackle the issues. There will be 3 major thrusts: 1) Species; 2) Habitat; 3) Biodiversity conservation vocabulary, which deals with scientific publishing.

OASIS and IUCN have been working together for about a year, Gannon said.  OASIS will form a Biodiversity Conservation Member Section to work with IUCN’s Biodiversity Conservation Standards initiative and the Conservation Commons, IUCN said.   An OASIS steering committee will identify various data standards committees and the order that the work progresses.