CoopBioPlat — A cooperative framework for building a common platform to serve biodiversity information at national level

CoopBioPlat is a Pilot Coordination Action supported by the ERANet-LaC Project (funded by the European Commission) and it aims to:

  • reach an institutional agreement to cooperate on biodiversity data portals (national, based on ALA); and
  • demonstrate technical cooperation and progress in that area.

All six partners of this proposal are “National GBIF Nodes”, and as so, are part of the GBIF global, technical infrastructure, contributing and implementing GBIF’s work programme. They are as well national biodiversity data infrastructures that take into operations the priorities and needs of their respective countries in science, conservation and management. Because the context in which biodiversity information is requested and used, a global data portal does not satisfy the national needs, and more elaborated platforms, able to cross-link and analyse raw biodiversity data with other data such as land use, protected areas, fire hazard severity zones, national red-lists, etc. are needed.

Australia is at the forefront of these developments with its multimillion-dollar project “Atlas of Living Australia (ALA)“. The www.ala.org.au is being used in research projects, urban biodiversity surveys, museum outreach activities, science education, biosecurity monitoring, natural resource management and reporting. The partners in this proposal, along with the GBIF International Secretariat, have already engaged with the ALA team aiming to produce a software package based on their platform that could be deployed and adapted to serve biodiversity data under different national scenarios. ALA developments are available here as “open source”.

This is an excellent starting point that could allow countries all over the world to implement national biodiversity information platforms in a very efficient way. However, the ALA platform as powerful as it is, is also very complex, and was not designed to be redeployed for areas other than Australia and languages other than English; documentation is also very limited. In this scenario, it makes total sense for the programmes in this proposal to join forces to tailor the ALA portal to their needs which are common in structure but different in the specifics, at a fraction what it would cost to build and maintain.

A first meeting held in June 2015 in Buenos Aires (Argentina) was focused on a multilateral MoU; a first draft was produced and works to develop a final version are continuing afterwards.

The second meeting of the working group CoopBioPlat was held in October 2015 at the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid (Spain). Software developers from Argentina, Brazil, France, Portugal and Spain attended the meeting and were assisted by David Martin from Atlas of Living Australia. The purpose of the meeting was to move forward on the development of national data portals based on ALA, with special emphasis on Species and Geospatial modules. Progress was also made in the documentation and internationalization tasks in coordination with the Encounter Bay project. Actions points that were agreed at the meeting are available here.

Partners

  • Spanish Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF.ES).
  • Argentinian Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (SNDB).
  • Brazilian Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (SiBBr).
  • Biodiversity National Institute, Costa Rica (INBio).
  • French Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF.FR).
  • Portuguese Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF.PT).
First Meeting in Buenos Aires, June 2015
Meeting in Buenos Aires, June 2015
Meeting in Madrid, October 2015
Meeting in Madrid, October 2015