INFORMATION EXCHANGE IN IABIN:

TECHNICAL ISSUES TO BE CONSIDERED IN THE IMPLEMENTATION

OF THE INTER-AMERICAN BIODIVERSITY INFORMATION NETWORK
 

April 13, 1999
 

Prepared for the Technical Meeting for the Establishment of IABIN

Brasilia, Brazil, April 15-18, 1999

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) was mandated in the action plan arising from the Santa Cruz (Bolivia) Summit of the Americas on Sustainable Development. Central to the implementation of is an understanding of the technical challenges which will need to be addressed by the participants. This study, in conjunction with the development of plans for a pilot project on invasive species in the Americas, undertook to discover and define those challenges and offer recommendations to IABIN participants concerning information exchange in light of such challenges.

Any effective framework for networking biodiversity information in the Americas must address at least the following considerations:

• The network must support distributed data.
• Any effective system must be multilingual.
• Both data standards and information technology adopted should be widely used, inexpensive, and easy to maintain.
• Any strategy developed must be scalable.
• The network should be designed to take advantage of foreseeable advances in information standards and technology.

It is recommended that IABIN support participants at a number of levels of commitment and complexity, including core sites (serving all of the Americas), national sites, project nodes, partner nodes (knowledge contributors connected to the system), and users.

The technical approaches to the implementation of IABIN should build on, and reflect, the approaches taken by other international biodiversity networking initiatives. The first step is to inventory available information, technology, and information needs. This should be done in a formal and organized fashion, developing consistent catalogs of experts, partner organizations, species and resources of concern to those experts and organizations, existing data sets, major existing scientific and management projects, and various kinds of resulting synthetic data, educational materials, and capacity-building opportunities. Because resource cataloging is almost insurmountable task if attempted for all important biodiversity resources in the hemisphere, catalogs should first be developed for a small number of well-defined environmental issues of particularly high visibility and importance. These are the IABIN pilot projects.

Individual projects must select standards and protocols to be used, including metadata strategies, data structures, controlled vocabularies, electronic publishing (including peer review) processes, etc. Web site technology, connectivity, security, and search and query technology are other technical issues which must be considered. If carefully done, the information systems developed for these pilot projects should be widely applicable to other biodiversity issues considered by IABIN.
 

Summary of Specific Recommendations

Recommendation 1: IABIN should adopt the list of databases as a minimum set for information sharing in the Americas on invasive vascular plants, invasive fish, specialist pollinators, and amphibians, insofar as funds and personnel are available.

Recommendation 2: Each country participating in each pilot should designate a primary country representative. Ideally, each country representative should both participate in or collaborate with the country's official policy toward the Biodiversity Convention and IABIN, and be affiliated with an organization with the interest, facilities, and computer expertise to host a moderately sophisticated database center and Web site.

Recommendation 3: IABIN should explore adapting the North American Biodiversity Information Network's (NABIN) "Species Analyst" approach and software to develop a distributed species mapping capability for species groups (invasive plant, invasive fish, declining amphibians, selected declining pollinators, hanta virus outbreaks), as funds allow, as a prototype for a more ambitious effort to link biodiversity databases using public-domain Z39.50 server technology.
 

Acknowledgments

This report was prepared by Dr. James F. Quinn, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California at Davis. Funding for this study was provided by the United States Agency for International Development, Project #598-0780, "Environmental Support Project," under an Interagency Agreement with the U.S. Department of the Interior. Project management was provided by the International Biological Informatics Program of U.S. Geological Survey.