IABIN: A VIEW OF ITS PAST AND A VISION FOR ITS FUTURE

Keynote Address, presented at the U.S. IABIN Consultative Meeting

October 15, 1998

by

Brooks B. Yeager

Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs

U.S. Department of the Interior

Introduction

Good morning. It's great to be here. I approach the podium with some trepidation, looking at some highly technically qualified people. As Denny [Fenn] revealed when he introduced me and mentioned my background, I am not a scientist and certainly not a specialist in infomatics. My role in IABIN then is that of a prospective user and a representative of other prospective users. However, as I'll explain, I believe my particular perspective might be quite useful to you.

I want to offer today a few things that might help you, as you convene over the day and a half, to think about the framework of IABIN and what we have to accomplish. Denny has done a great job outlining the objectives for the meeting and a framework for preparing for the meeting in Brazil. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about what I describe as the informal history of IABIN, to give a picture of how it's emerged over time to where it is now, and perhaps a bit about the vision of what IABIN could be and should be, and a little bit more, perhaps, about my own purposes and objectives that I see for this meeting

First of all, I want to emphasize that IABIN is a high priority for the United States Government. It's very significant that it was a presidential commitment in the Santa Cruz summit process. A significant amount of attention in the State Department and in the White House has been given to this initiative, with the expectation that we'll follow through and deliver on the commitment. Vice President Gore, among others, is very enthusiastic about this. Our former Deputy Secretary, John Garamendi, had the opportunity to talk to Gore about the project, and the Vice President saw many potential linkages with issues in which he is involved, including the GLOBE project and other information initiatives. The Department of the Interior and the State Department have taken this commitment very seriously.

I want to thank Denny Fenn and his team, particularly Gladys Cotter, who has led this effort for the Biological Resources Division, because we would not be here talking about the practical realities of IABIN that we'd like to offer to the international community if it hadn't been for the extensive amount of technical, practical, logistical, and conceptual work that's been done by Gladys Cotter, Bonnie Carroll, Bobbie Bauldock, and Denny Fenn, and others, so my thanks to them. I also want to thank the U.S. Agency for International Development for the support they have given, because that's been very important in getting us to where we are now. I'm also glad to see folks in the working groups who are already heavily involved in the project, as well as John Busby. I know that there are folks here from MABnet and other organizations that have been involved in this.

We've already done some consultations with what we in Government like to call Civil Society, which means all of you who know more than we. And we expect to do more, because Denny was right: although this is an initiative of governments, which is an important thing to remember, it cannot succeed without broad support in scientific, museum, university and NGO communities. Therefore, one of our objectives in this process is to keep IABIN open -- all the way from concept to implementation -- and that's something that I think has broad support among key players.

An Informal History of IABIN

I'd like to tell you a little about the informal history leading up to the Miami Summit. The U.S. had proposed that one of the objectives in the natural resource area for the Western Hemisphere be a much more aggressive effort to mobilize information about biodiversity. We called it at the time, "The Decade of Discovery," thinking a poetic title would help us, but it didn't, because we didn't have the practical underpinnings in Miami. We got agreement on the poetic title, but we didn't have an agreement for practical follow-through at the time. We were frustrated because we knew we had taken the first step towards something that could be quite important, but we hadn't yet framed how we could take the next steps. In the preparation for the Bolivia summit which was a follow-up to Miami, USAID supported something that was quite useful, actually. It was called the Inter-American Commission on Biodiversity. I served on that commission, along with a number of very interesting and illuminating people, including Braulio Dias, who was in the Brazilian Environment Ministry at the time, and Juan Mayr, who was then the head of a Colombian NGO and has since become Colombia's environment minister.

As we talked in the meetings of the Commission, it became quickly apparent that a number of countries, including the U.S. and Brazil but also including Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Canada, were actively working to assemble their own national biological information infrastructures on some level or were partners in some bilateral project to share information across borders. The U.S. was developing the National Biological Information Infrastructure, and Brazil was assembling large sectors of biodiversity information and had established a distributed computer network as well. That was the project in which Braulio Dias was particularly interested. I told Braulio about the on-going project between what was then the National Biological Survey and CONABIO in Mexico to develop sectorial approaches to information sharing on things like amphibians and other important issues. There was also a trilateral agreement on wildlife conservation among Canada, Mexico, and the United States that had as one of its working tables an information working table. Braulio told me about a Brazilian and Colombian effort to assemble taxonomic data.

Braulio and I concluded, somewhere after our second beer, that this was a very interesting set of information initiatives, and that if they all went forward in complete obscurity to each other, we would likely have the same chaos at the end of the process that we were starting with at the beginning. So we started to think about what could be done to make sure that there was an effort to capitalize on all this national and bilateral effort in a multilateral framework and to harmonize in some form the efforts being made to achieve the objectives that Denny so eloquently talked about -- transparency of data, ability to compare data across national boundaries, assurance that data collected in Brazil on, say, invasive species was going to be comparable and useful to a U.S. researcher who was worried about invasive species in Florida, and vice versa.

We were aware of some needs that already existed. At that time, we were starting to worry about the future of the tri-national migration of Monarch butterflies. We were aware that we needed data from Canada and Mexico about that migration; all the data we had was from the U.S. We have also been interested historically in the issue of migratory birds, some of which come from as far south as Patagonia, many of which come from Central America and Venezuela into the U.S. We know that they're not our birds. We see them in spring and summer, and others see them in our winter. Where there are declines in those bird populations, we know that we can't fully understand those declines without having data from all parts of the migration. There was already an effort to a North American Biodiversity Information Network (NABIN) that focused on migratory bird data. This was an effort of the Commission on Environmental Cooperation, one of NAFTA's environmental commissions; it was one of their better efforts, actually.

So it became apparent that there were some broad generic needs that could give rise to a very useful effort in this area. We agreed that, number one, access to information is absolutely critical to sound decision-making on natural resource policy. You can't develop these kinds of policies isolated within your national borders and in your bureaus in Washington and Brasilia and Mexico City. Since many vital natural resources cross political boundaries, it's clear that there's a level of efficiency that can be achieved by being able to use information from transnational sources and from being able to have a useful information base for collaborative efforts among nations and civil society. Ultimately, the Commission recommended the commitment to an Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network. That recommendation was carried through by some good shepherds into the Santa Cruz summit where it was ultimately agreed to and became the practical application. But it's still a concept -- a concept and a working agenda -- and a concept is not always so easy to explain.

The IABIN Concept

So, what is IABIN? When I asked myself that question, my first answer was that IABIN is a very hard thing to pin down, because it's not any one thing. When you invite people to a meeting on IABIN, if they're not already information specialists, they tend to start getting an "edifice complex." They start thinking of secretariats and buildings somewhere, and giant vaults of information to which only they would have access. That is not what IABIN is.

First of all, IABIN is a forum. It's a forum for developing solutions to common problems in the information area and in the area of biodiversity information. It's a forum that has to be open to governments and to non-governmental groups, particularly because the most useful information and the most useful wrestling with information problems is done in the private sector. So, it clearly has to be an open forum.

Second, it's not a brand new thing. There's all this stuff going on already and it's all very good stuff. The whole idea of IABIN is to create a framework in which all the efforts already going on can identify boundary problems that need to be solved in order to be able to work together better. So, number two, IABIN is the resulting virtual, digital network of information. I remember one time when the Secretary of the Interior announced very early in the Administration -- when we were trying to obey Denny's maxim about getting it all done in the first six months -- that we were going to achieve the goal of having a virtual department. We were in a political meeting where we were all friends, so we broke down laughing. But in this case, a virtual network has to be established, so that a researcher in Costa Rica can reach into New York and find information about Costa Rican birds and Costa Rican plants as transparently as if he were in the museum in New York. And vice versa. That's the ultimate goal.

Third -- and I think this is an important point to raise now, because IABIN has, in some sense, a host of problems to solve; Denny mentioned four of them, threw them in your laps and said "help us solve them" -- if IABIN is going to be successful, it is going to be successful because it produces benefits in sectors. In that sense, IABIN is its pilot projects. We have started working in a number of areas where we think working together to exchange information across borders and to make information complementary across borders is going to provide lots of benefits for people like me and my colleagues, who have to make decisions about policy issues and have to have information on which to base them.

For example, a huge emerging problem is invasives -- exotic invasive species. It's a giant economic problem in the United States: it's a giant problem on our range lands; it's a giant problem in the Florida Everglades; it's a giant problem in our rivers. We know that these problems are related and that we can't solve them without understanding the natural systems in which our invasive species were constrained in their former environments and the pathways they've taken to get to us. So we have to share information across borders to solve this problem. If we're going to have an early alert system, if we're going to have control systems, if we're going to have cooperation to deal with the problem, we are going to have to have a much better complementary exchange of information.

Another area is amphibians. We are very excited at the moment and very concerned about spotty anecdotal, but very troubling, evidence there are amphibian declines taking place across the planet. We're seeing declines in the Sierra Nevadas that look a lot like declines in the mountains of Costa Rica. We don't understand what the problem is for sure, but we understand that there is a problem, and that it's something we have to work on very seriously. Having a pilot project on amphibians would help us enormously, because we would be able to draw on a wide number of sources of data about the baselines of amphibians, about the trends in amphibian decline, about the causes and reasons. But, in order to be able to use that data, we have to know that it is collected in a compatible way, that the quality of the data is reasonably equivalent across national boundaries, and that it can be relied on and used for decision-making purposes.

There are similar issues with migratory birds, with tropical flora. In fact, you quickly exhaust yourself going through the possibilities of using this kind of a network. So that's quite exciting.

Finally, I would say IABIN is its users. That's very important for us to remember, because in a meeting like this we tend mostly to be information providers -- except for me, that is, and that's why I'm here speaking to you, because I'm a user. In order for IABIN to be something that's taken seriously and supported over time, it has to produce useful information for policy makers, for science, for academic institutions; it has to provide interesting access for researchers; it has to broaden the base; it has to provide information for Latin American researchers about resources that they feel have been squirreled away in US museums, universities, and federal departments for far too long. It has to produce value, and it has to produce it early. And I suspect that the way it's going to do that is through its pilot projects.

Success Factors for IABIN

So what will IABIN do if it's successful? It's going to foster progress, we hope, in several different areas, probably more that you can help us think of. One is in transboundary trends analysis. I talked about a couple of areas where that, clearly, is going to be valuable.

Second, it will create an infrastructure for information sharing. We have some partial infrastructures so far. In particular, I'm thinking of the MAB system, despite the fact that it's under continual political attack in the United States. It's actual value is that it has a set of land units that can act as platforms for the exchange of information about protected, semi-protected, and developable areas and the management systems for those areas. We haven't successfully used IABIN or any other system to start a large scale flow of information about the problems that we share in the Americas. I think that IABIN offers us the opportunity to do that.

And finally, IABIN offers a framework through which we can exchange basic and advanced tools for information access and broaden the access to information in the developing part of the Western Hemisphere. That's why Brazil is doing a background study on Internet topology in the Americas as part of the preparation for our upcoming meeting. And it's an opportunity for us to share tools. One tool that I'm looking forward to demonstrating and sharing outside our national boundaries is MetaMaker, a tool that helps create metadata.

The points to make about IABIN, then, are that it's virtual and therefore hard to pin down; that it's not an edifice; that it's a working agenda, coupled with pilot projects, coupled with on-going efforts; and that it can add value. If it's successful, it will help partners work together efficiently and share problems. It will help develop information links among the countries of the Americas and achieve some new economies of scale. It will provide continuing forums for collaborating on information barriers and opportunities, and most importantly, it will lead to compatible data for transnational analysis across the Americas.

An Example of Biodiversity Information Applied

I was thinking about amphibians -- Denny's map -- with Terra Incognita labeled as "Here be dragons." I think we say, "Here be salamanders," because we don't know where they are. So it would be very useful for that. I'll tell you one story that just popped up on everybody's radar screens that should be a convincing story about why information sharing is going to be so useful.

Earlier this summer, a man camping in Illinois discovered a beetle in his pickup truck. It was coming out of some wood that a neighbor had given him. He happened to be a curious guy -- which is fortunate, I think, for Illinois -- so he turned to the Illinois Natural History Survey Web Page to see if he could find out something about this bug. He identified it as an Asian Long-Horned Beetle. On the web site, he saw a warning about the beetle -- which turns out to be one of the greatest deforesters that God ever created -- and so he called the US Department of Agriculture to report it. The USDA is now embarked on a major national alert program and is trying to work with China to see if we can end the shipping practices that have allowed these bugs to come into the country in Chinese shipping crates. Because there's no known antidote to these guys, they are really a "Terminator" species. And what they terminate is the woods they dwell in. We're going to have a large problem if they get out over a large range in the United States. It's going to make Dutch Elm disease look like a picnic.

We need data for the identification of this species; for understanding the geographic origin of the species; for understanding its habitats and life history; for understanding if there might be any control mechanisms, natural predators, pesticides that could be used to control it; for understanding where it occurred and what had happened in other exotic occurrences; and for convincing the policy establishment -- the Mayor of Chicago and others -- that it is necessary to take radical steps to deal with it. So, when the information systems work, we can actually deal with some of these issues. If the information isn't there, or we don't know how to get it, then we've got a problem we can't solve.

Conclusion

The government of Brazil has taken a very significant step in hosting this upcoming summit meeting. It's going to be a big meeting. We're very excited about it. We're very thankful to Braulio Dias for shepherding this effort through the Environment Ministry of Brazil. He's recently been promoted, no doubt because they thought he would stop banging on their doors if they gave him more responsibility, but he seems to be doing very well. I hope that the results of today's meeting will allow us to bring a very coherent and constructive approach to Brazil to complement Braulio's leadership and the efforts of individuals such as Cristian Samper of Colombia, and others who have really worked hard to produce a reality out of this concept that was developed a few years ago. So, I think Denny's done a better job of giving you your charge than I can. I wish you luck. I hope that we have a successful exchange and hope that you can add to our portfolio of ideas to address the challenges we face so that we can realize the benefits of IABIN. Thank you.