In need of a tool in the chest for your biodiversity credits ?

 Jose Arturo Restrepo-Aristizábal  

Full Stack Software Engineer and Tropical Ecologist

CTO Ecotropics

- Why Latin America and The Caribbean is a megabiodiversity superpower but at the same time is socio-economically megapoor ?

Founder @  Applied Ecology for Tropical Resources: EcoTropics

Email:  arestrepo [@} ecotropics.org 

 The Wiki Ecoinformatics Web-finder of The Americas derived from New Technologies, WEWANT assists data providers and users of biodiversity management to promptly locate through hyperlinks over 200 datasets and services deployed at http://ecotropics.pbworks.com/ and Wiki (WEWANT) collated by http://www.ecotropics.org/ .  WEWANT also equips governments and academia  with the best data and services on which to base their biodiversty planning decisions and outline manifold policy options.  In this climate change and biodiversity-depleted economy, WEWANT responds to both public and private sectors in supporting users to find biodiversity knowledge as scientific and management tools.  For example, many sectors need to identify raw materials from natural sources for biotechnology or bio-nanotechnology processes, evolve biomimicry for industrial designers, emulate biomorphism for architects, develop neobiological industries,  enact public policies, report to the United Nations conventions, run statistics analyses and models, enable better biodiversity planning for biodiversity credits, manage invasive species, develop forest carbon baselines, and elongate biodiversity  in order to compensate for reducing emissions from deforestation and ecosystems degradation through REDD Plus. Likely, biodiversity web-based information can be slow to download, exchange, and tools difficult to interact because of the lack of political interoperability among institutions.   Since 1996, the Inter American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN)  has played a unifying role between data/services providers and users, by facilitating access to digitized data, metadata, and public policy decision support online tools.  All in all, one of the major IABIN milestones and contributions is the political overlay of 34 Organization of American States (OAS) member’s countries acceptance of technical protocols and standards to share and contribute biodiversity information.  By searching through WEWANT, users could search, learn, and contribute to knowledge on specimens, species, ecosystems, invasives, protected areas and pollinators throughout the Americas Hemisphere. This navigation chart leads users through local, national, and regional ecological knowledge to retrieve keystone information they need to make better informed decisions. Ultimately, we run a monthly W3C link checker validator to avoid broken links at this knowledge hub powered by http://validator.w3.org/checklink/

Keywords: Nature elongation, Inter American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN), Ecological Informatics, Biodiversity Knowledge Management, Ecosemiotics, Biocredits, Biodiversity Credits, Climate Change, Carbon and Biodiversity Offsets, Species and Habitat banking, Semantic Web; time-series modelling; biodiversity planning; climate change; integrated water resources management; biomimicry; bionanotechnology; biomorphism; neobiological industries; applied ecology; global warming; ecoservices; ecological economics; landscape ecology; focal ecosystems; land-use changes; abundance; richness; species diversity metrics; rarity; rarefaction; evenness; bioindicators; community ecology; species assemblages; rate of change;  biogeography; evolutionary dynamics; geographic range dynamics; disturbance; vulnerability; resource mobilization; sustainable ecosystem management; unified ecosystem valuation;  cloud computing; political interoperability; shared limited resources; green banking.

Do you want to contribute to this effort ?

Please, do not hesitate in contributing with comments about the performance of any tool, service,  quality of datasets or add a new tool  linked through WEWANT

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Wiki-biodiversidad: El Buscador Web de la Ecoinformatica derivado de Nuevas Tecnologias de la Información para las Americas.

Descubriendo Datos y Servicios sobre Biodiversidad  para los Usuarios de  BioCreditos 

Jose Arturo Restrepo ¹  

Este wiki-portal asiste a proveedores de datos, servicios y usuarios que estan interesados en el manejo de la biodiversidad, a localizar a través de hipervínculos más de 200 conjuntos de datos y servicios desplegados en http://ecotropics.pbworks.com/ organizado por http://www.ecotropics.org/ .  Este sitio fortalece a los gobiernos y a la academia con los mejores datos y servicios para fundamentar sus decisiones sobre la planeación de la biodiversidad y vincularlo con el desarrollo de varias políticas públicas.  En una economía de cambio climático  y biodiversidad en declive este portal responde a sectores públicos y privados, al guiar a los usuarios a encontrar conocimiento sobre biodiversidad con herramientas científicas y administrativas.  Por ejemplo, muchos sectores necesitan identificar materias primas de fuentes naturales para procesos biotecnológicos o bio-nanotecnológicos; evolucionar en lo creado por el biomimetismo para diseñadores industriales, emular el biomorfismo para su aplicación por arquitectos, potenciar industrias neobiologicas, ratificar políticas públicas a través de sus gobiernos;  reportar a los convenios con Naciones Unidas; correr modelos y análisis estadísticos; permitir una mejor planificación de la biodiversidad; manejar especies invasoras; desarrollar líneas base para proyectos forestales de Carbono;  y  elongar la biodiversidad con el fin de compensar por la reducción de emisiones por deforestación y degradación con REDD Plus.  Probablemente, la información en línea sobre biodiversidad  puede ser lenta de descargar, intercambiar, y las herramientas difíciles de interactuar debido a falta de interoperabilidad política entre las instituciones.  Es por esto que desde 1996, IABIN   ha  jugado un rol unificador entre proveedores de datos/servicios y usuarios, al facilitar acceso a datos digitalizados, metadatos y herramientas en línea que apoyan las decisiones en materia de políticas públicas.  Pero por sobre todo, uno de los grandes logros y contribuciones es el alcance político de los 34 paises miembros de la Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA) al aceptar los protocolos y estándares técnicos para  compartir y contribuir con información sobre biodiversidad.  Al  buscar en esta Wiki sobre biodiversidad en las Américas  los usuarios pueden encontrar, aprender y contribuir con conocimientos sobre especímenes, especies, ecosistemas, especies invasoras, áreas protegidas y polinizadores a lo largo de este hermoso continente de Las Américas y su biogeografia insular.  Este portal guía a los usuarios sobre el conocimiento ecológico local, nacional y regional para obtener información clave para tomar decisiones mejor informadas.  Finalmente,  nosotros ejecutamos mensualmente un validador de hipervínculos con la tecnología W3C http://validator.w3.org/checklink/  para evitar  que los mismos se encuentren desvinculados al sistema de información.

¿ Usted quiere contribuir con nuestro esfuerzo ?

Por favor no dude en contribuir con comentarios acerca del desmpeño de cualquier herramienta, servicio, calidad de los datos, o agregar un nuevo conjunto de datos o herramienta a traves de este portal. 

I.     INTRODUCTION

The XX century brought answers to understand structural linguistics, signs, and heterogeneity of Indo-european languages by Ferdinand de Saussure [1]. Later, the semiotics synthesis of Umberto Eco [2] and ecosemiotics focus from Nöth & Kull [3], coupled with fuzzy logic linked to linguistic variables and its application into approximate reasoning, syllogistic, and computational approaches by Lofti Zadeh [5] paved the way towards embracing On-line Knowledge Management into Semantic Web led by Tim Berners-Lee [6].

As 2010 is the Year of Biodiversity, institutions note that sustaining biological diversity is a complex task that requires sound data and services at various scales about the structure and function of ecosystems, communities, socioeconomics, and ethnocultural interfaces. Diverse archives are widespread across the region about natural history, geospatial attributes, biological inventories and socio-economic events. In fact, a multitude of clues to understanding structure and function of biodiversity in the Americas are buried in the data, and it takes an entrepreneurial mindset, such as that encouraged by WEWANT and IABIN, of constant searching to find them.  As a result, WEWANT directs users to biodiversity knowledge by categorizing what they search for, through catalogs, distributed databases, geoservers, sensor webs, systems interoperability, and numerical models.

IABIN paved the way with protocols and standards to integrate data and services through platforms aimed at discovery, archives maintenance, tools, and data workflows of biodiversity holdings over proven test-beds “Table 1”. Decision making processes on biodiversity planning and management is often restrained due to the inability to access scientific datasets or getting the right web based tool on a timely manner. Hence, WEWANT guides biodiversity users such as researchers, educators, public servants, business, and policy makers to identify data and services on Internet in order to spur the implementation of the following IABIN six cornerstones of evolution.

A.    The IABIN six cornerstones of network evolution

1)    Extendable: building intuitive discoverable actions to provide efficient biodiversity interoperability of metadata, data, and Web services.
2)    Leverage: leading on existing capabilities in the IABIN user community for the creation of, for instance, portals, machine-2-machine interoperability, semantic controlled keywords, and quality control for processing data workflows.
3)    Adaptability: migrating to new and applicable IABIN technologies (i.e. semantic Web, sensor Webs, analyzer metadata through ingestion, filtering, integration, processing, analytical workflows, and publishing).
4)    Accessibility: advancing from search to access and use of the data.
5)    Integration: understanding Web services, data, and metadata integration and implementing microservicee oriented architectures through interoperability.
6)    Sense of ownership by users: facilitating web interfaces to scientists, users, and data providers to control their own content in a modern interfaced way.

TABLE I.     IABIN PROTOCOLS AND STANDARDS

a. Major IABIN contribution is the political overlay of 34 OAS members´ countries acceptance of technical protocols and standards to contribute with biodiversity knowledge.

B.    Vision of Biodiversity Credits

Evolve towards an integrated contributed network to bolster a wide range of biodiversity Web-based knowledge resources, thereby expanding IABIN user community in The Americas.   IABIN should position itself to become the premier vehicle for evidence based conservation in the Americas.

C.     Mission

Support smooth interaction with a large and diverse variety of independent biodiversity institutions of data sources and legacy applications, running on distributed platforms into a contributed web-based network approach. Furthermore, IABIN endeavor is to building and managing cooperative information systems through integrated databases, biodiversity knowledge-based systems, groupwares, data workflows, and geographical user interfaces. IABIN will also have to be intelligently interfaced with web based application software, and will need to be dynamically integrated into customized and highly connected cooperative environments in The Americas.

Such interactions may involve intuitive navigation, publishing, querying and retrieval, workflow analyses, on line education and will have to be combined with the needs of IABIN end-users, countries, conventions, mechanisms about biodiversity, climate change adaptation and mitigation.  

II.    The Biocredits Users

IABIN end users might be defined like a scientific guild, diverse, and spotty geographic community in The Americas.  These scientists and users are eager to share scientific knowledge on biodiversity, whether the information technology know-how is in place, and expect from IABIN a Web-based solution that really fit their needs. The following features are being described as IABIN end-users categories, such as:

•    Coordinating Institutions (CI): targeting each IABIN thematic network, which focuses on a defined scope or purpose, or on a group of users related by theme and geographic region.  

•    Biological Data Analysts:  targeting data managers who wish to integrate natural history data with geospatial and ecological functions and who will appreciate the value of integrated, smooth workflows.

•    Ecological Data Providers:  targeting ecologists who will be empowered through the use of their own workspaces within a comprehensive information management system by exchanging metadata, data, and Web services.

•    Ecologists and Project Developers:  targeting ecologists who seek by an integrated eco-informatics package with geospatial and taxonomical analyst tools. This suite of tools is useful for authoring, discovery, and run time series data workflows.  Ecological data encompass the biological, chemical, physical, and socioeconomic sciences and many of their sub-disciplines. Because of the complex interactions among organisms and between organisms and their environment, ecology has evolved as a science and increasingly addresses questions at broader geospatial and temporal scales, and at multiple scales [7].

•    Geographers: targeting geospatial users that need a blending of species natural history, physical geography, biogeography, and ecosystems knowledge.

•    Biodiversity Science Students/Instructors:  targeting students and instructors who will benefit from a comprehensive and precise representation of the availability of data and related services via Internet.    

•    Decision Support/Policy Makers:  targeting policy makers through the offering a conjoint of a high quality tools, data, and Web services for biodiversity reporting.   By continuing to attract more data providers and users at this level of application between science and policy, it would provide them with expanded capabilities for assessing conclusions based on IABIN available data and tools, decisions on biodiversity might be more knowledgeably assessed.  

•    Casual Googlers:  targeting the outside users to recognize the value of a dedicated IABIN Web site with scientific and learning capabilities.  Thus, IABIN will proceed “Beyond Googling Practice” to achieve accuracy of semantics and quality of biodiversity content.

•    Customs officers: supporting of biodiversity enforcement conventions through web-based sound taxonomic and sound image resolution tools.  It would be an important service at level of trafficking species/specimens through enhanced image identification at airports and embark points. These officers need a trustable source to make a decision when determining captive organisms, which are considered endangered by CITES and IUCN.

•    Business Biodiversity Offsets:  when a business decisions is explored in The Americas, corporations might take advantage to find out accurate and updated biodiversity knowledge to support critical business decisions at landscape, and ecosystems scales.

•    Software Developers:  targeting programmers to “push the envelope” in integrating software capabilities for research and development by building bridges from one functionality to another on ecoinformatics applications.  

•    Ecological Economists: providing a platform to finances by linking the IABIN Thematic Networks foundational  data with the primary sectors of the region´s economies centered on biodiversity: fisheries, forestry, agriculture, biotechnology, hydrological services, protected areas, biotrade, REDDplus,  and ecotourism. Thus, we will be supporting biodiversity data by recognizing  the value of services provided by healthy, and fully functional ecosystems.

•   IABIN e-Learning  by Doing for Biodiversity Educators and Advocates: Establishing alliances with key universities to make accredited programs to bring research on ecological informatics, ecological economics, ecological policy making and biodiversity planning. Thus we will empower academia to bring algorithms, software developers, and cutting edge models.

III.    WHAT BIOCREDITS USERS WANT

Corporations, scientists and practitioners collect petabytes of biodiversity information per year by downlinking data from satellites, handheld devices, and capturing ground-truth data over the megabiodiverse Americas.   These investments and contributions lead to construct the biodiversity knowledge. That way, the internet is cost-effective, improves and empowers decision-making at the local, national, and transboundary level.  Meanwhile, some institutions are making high quality ecological tools, baselines and observational data available on-line to users. Consequently, the past decade has seen the emergence of a “second enclosure” movement as information has increasingly been treated as a commodity subject to new proprietary restrictions [8]. Even conservation NGOs are hesitant to make their data and information freely available given the intense fundraising competition. The “intellectual property rights” are incompatible with free, equitable and universal access to essential information and data for all members of the international community. Hence the creation of the Biodiversity Commons that promotes open source policies consistent with the Convention on Biological Diversity and World Intellectual Property Organization [9].

The CHM Clearinghouse Mechanism (CHM) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and IABIN work jointly with partner institutions in the Hemisphere to link diverse, high-quality biological databases, regional information thematic nodes, and developing analytical tools maintained by partners and other contributors along with government agencies, academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, and private sectors.  Moreover, IABIN has deployed keystone standards, protocols, web-based tools; data content grants to digitize biodiversity information buried in shelves and integrate this data into interoperable value added tools.

WEWANT is an insight derived from IABIN to support Environmental and Planning Ministries with their CBD reporting, specifically on National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) when they need an embarking point to retrieve data and services to communicate to the CBD of United Nations. WEWANT links advancements on ecological informatics through the fusion of eight domains: (1) Data Management, (2) Data Analytics, (3) Numerical Modeling, (4) Metadata, (5) Reference Services, (6) Geospatial Mapping, (7) Ecological Economics, (8) Eco-e-Learning.

These domains focuses on implementation frameworks for interoperability, exchanging data, analysis of biodiversity information systems based on the union of elementary technological constructs, and the ontological realm elucidated through semantic web technology and ecology for the topics dealing with terminological, thesaurus, and controlled vocabulary problems and conventions. These domains let users to identify their common points and those divergent on ecological informatics.

IV.    NEW TECHNOLOGIES ABOUT ECOLOGICAL INFORMATICS SUPPORT USERS TO FOSTER SOCIAL, POLITICAL, TECHNICAL, AND SCIENTIFIC COOPERATION  

WEWANT allows easy access to the ever-increasing amount of earth sciences and biodiversity data being stored on the Internet.  WEWANT facilitates accuracy and quality of search results at indexing ecological knowledge through this wiki. Moreover, users could contribute with the quality of a dataset and the performance of any tool.

WEWANT has been structured to settling a benchmark based on ecological informatics resources on the Web.  WEWANT is a comprehensive compilation of links providing internet-collated information about biodiversity.  It contains pertinent current information on terrestrial, freshwater, and marine habitats.   This wiki comprehends of sidebars and navigators to find out what IABIN community is looking for.   

REFERENCES

[1]    T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, and O. Lassila, 2001. “The Semantic Web,”  Scientific American, May. 2001, pp. 35-43
[2]    U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana University Press, 1976.
[3]    W. Nöth,  “Ecosemiotics,” Sign Systems Studies, vol. 26, 1998, pp. 332-343.
[4]    K. Kull, 1998. “Semiotic ecology: different natures in the semiosphere,” Sign Systems Studies, vol. 26, 1998, pp. 344-371.
[5]    F. de. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. C. Bally & A. Sechehaye, Eds. 1916.
[6]    L. Zadeh, “Introduction,” in Fuzzy Sets and Applications  Eds. Yager, R.R, Ovchinnikov, S., Tong, R.M., Nguyen, H.T. John Wiley & Sons. 1987.
[7]    W. K. Michener, “Meta-information concepts for ecological data management,” Ecological Informatics, vol.1, 2006, pp. 3-7 doi:10.1016/j.ecoinf.2005.08.004
[8]    J. Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary Social Problems, vol.  66,  2003,  pp. 33-74
[9]    T. D. Moritz, "Conservation Partnerships in the Commons? Sharing data and information, experience and knowledge, as the essence of partnerships," in Museum International, Vol.56, 2004, pp.24-31