Memorandum submitted by the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility (GBIF)
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility
(GBIF) is an international body with the overall aim of furthering
technical and scientific efforts to develop and maintain a global
information facility for sharing digital biodiversity data. The
United Kingdom is one of the founding members, and a key Voting
Participants in GBIF.
GBIF appreciates the opportunity to respond
to this Call by the United Kingdom's House of Lords Science and
Technology Committee for evidence on systematics and taxonomy.
In this document, GBIF responds to questions in category (b) of
the Call, on data collection, management, maintenance and dissemination.
I. SPECIMEN DATA
GBIF wishes to recall that the United Kingdom,
as a Party of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), has
agreed to implementing the Global Taxonomy Initiative Work Programme
(http://www.cbd.int/gti/pow.shtml) and the Global Strategy for
Plant Conservation (http://www.cbd.int/gspc/strategy.shtml). In
addition the UK agreed at the last CBD COP8 to | provide free
and open access to all past, present and future public-good research
results, assessments, maps and databases on biodiversity, in accordance
with national and international legislation; (Decision VIII/11,
paragraph 3). Data on biodiversity certainly includes data coming
from natural history collections.
GBIF applauds the role that the United Kingdom's
natural history museums and herbaria have played in curating specimens
(natural history and organism-culture), especially type specimens,
from all over the world. In addition, the UK has historically
been a centre of concentration of taxonomic (including nomenclatural)
and systematic expertise. Some UK taxonomists and systematists
disseminate the products of their professional efforts via the
GBIF network.
— GBIF, through its Work Programme,
has been supportive of these efforts. Since its inception in 2001,
GBIF has provided €378,435 in "seed funding" towards
digitisation of data from natural history specimens, as well as
to populate databases of names of species. GBIF has also supported
the Catalogue of Life partnership (UK's Species 2000 + USA's ITIS)
to a total of €351,404.
The Natural History Museum in London alone holds
some 70,000,000 specimens. The United Kingdom currently serves
nearly 15,000,000 data records through the GBIF network. Of these,
174,000 are natural history museum specimen-based; 14,761,000
are records from observational Initiatives rather than being based
on the specimens that are collected and studied by taxonomists
and systematists.
— GBIF wishes to emphasise the urgency
and responsibility of the United Kingdom to liberate the data
associated with specimens and culture collections held by museums,
herbaria and other collections in the UK. These data are of potentially
vital importance to enable, among many purposes and benefits[29],
— modeling of biotic responses to climatic
or anthropogenic environmental change,
— designation of appropriate protected
areas,
— prediction of the impact of invasive
species or released genetically-modified organisms,
— establishing scalable measures of
the rate of biodiversity loss,
— documenting species present in any
given country or region,
— supporting the development of a global
taxonomic information system that will help to remove the "taxonomic
impediment".
— The United Kingdom has the unique
opportunity of becoming a world leader in the area of digitisation
and dissemination of data from natural history collections. Because
it historically has had a leadership role in taxonomic/systematic
collecting, the UK houses unique specimens and cultures (including
types) from almost every part of the world.
— At present there is a sense of disappointment
among the international systematic and taxonomic community that
the UK has not yet assumed this leadership role. This community
would enthusiastically welcome a significant increase in the rate
at which UK museums and other collections are liberating their
data.
— In the United Kingdom's House of
Lords Science and Technology Committee's report of 2 May 2002,
the importance of digitising the systematic biological collections
was highlighted. The Committee noted that this would be a move
that would both increase accessibility of these data and help
to update the archaic image of systematic biology. However, the
progress of the United Kingdom in achieving this goal to date
has not been encouraging. The current rate of data digitisation
and dissemination hampers the progress of systematics and taxonomy
not only in United Kingdom, but worldwide.
— There is a need to increase core
funding to United Kingdom collections/museums specifically for
databasing and digitisation activities.
— It is desirable that United Kingdom
museums/collections collaborate with the mega-biodiverse and other
countries of origin of the specimens in their collections to evolve
project design. This would reaffirm the UK position on free and
open access to primary biodiversity data, as well as encourage
and attract new opportunities for funding and collaboration.
— Toward this end the UK museum/collection
community, in consultation with Defra and other relevant Government
Departments, should rapidly develop a strategy for digitisation
and dissemination of its natural history data, especially those
collected as a part of publicly funded projects.
— GBIF could assist the UK in holding
— coordinated discussions with countries
of origin whose collections are held in UK museums/collections
— meetings of United Kingdom museums,
herbaria and other collections with representatives of mega-diverse
countries and countries-of-origin, together with international
funding agencies, to develop programmes of work and long-term
funding and collaboration strategies.
— In order to industrialise the process
of digitisation, UK museums/collections should explore the possibility
of outsourcing relevant components of the process to ICT firms
and R&D institutions from developing nations such as India,
Brazil, South Africa, etc., as a cost-effective option.
II. NAMES DATA
There is a pressing, global need to complete
an electronic list of all species of animals, plants, fungi and
micro-organisms so far named by taxonomy. This list requires inclusion
of all synonyms and alternate names applied to all species known
to science. Such a list is not yet complete and GBIF is playing
a key role in this endeavor through its ECAT work programme.
A complete list of names of all known organisms
is necessary as an indexing device in order to associate specimen-level
biodiversity data with other scientific data associated with the
species they represent. As a communication device, the list also
underpins international legislation, and enables practitioners
in conservation, ecology, pest control, quarantine etc to communicate
effectively.
Such a list needs to be freely available on
the internet in a form interoperable with the data on specimens,
and other biodiversity data.
The United Kingdom holds both significant literature
and staff trained in nomenclature and taxonomy. It also has a
history of developing datasets that are subsets of the envisioned
complete list.
— GBIF urges that the relevant institutions
in the United Kingdom, such as the Natural History Museum, Royal
Botanic Gardens Kew, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Plymouth
Marine Laboratory, CABI, Species 2000 and others, as well as national
funding agencies such as BBSRC and NERC, actively collaborate
to
— ensure that the full catalogue of
known life on Earth be completed by 2010, and
— that new names generated by future
taxonomic activity are automatically added to the globally shared
electronic list.
6 June 2008
29 Chapman, A., 2005. Uses of Primary Species-occurrence
data http://www.gbif.org/prog/digit/data_quality/UsesPrimaryData Back
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