|
|
Story: GBIF Seed Money to Support a Consortium of Amphibian Data Providers
|
Click on the image to enlarge
|
|
The GBIF Secretariat is pleased to announce that a consortium of institutions from 8 countries has been awarded USD 464,061 to develop a georeferenced, distributed database of worldwide amphibian localities. David B. Wake and Co-PI’s, Craig Moritz and Carol Spencer of UC Berkeley, are the lead project investigators.
|
| Released on: |
06 March 2006 |
| Contributor: |
Meredith Lane |
| Language: |
English |
Spatial coverage: |
Not applicable |
Keywords: |
|
| Source of information: |
GBIF Secretariat |
| Concerned URL: |
http://www.herpnet.org |
|
The requirements of the 2005-2006 DIGIT seed money RFP were based on recommendations developed following an e-conference to set priorities that was held early in 2005. The RFP required that the proposals target the digitisation of specimens of one of the following taxa:
- Apoidea in support of the International Pollinators Initiative (IPI),
- Triticeae in an effort to link the GBIF digitisation effort to the
international efforts to conserve genetic diversity in this agriculturally important group of grasses,
- Cypriniformes (a group of fish) as indicators in support of monitoring biodiversity change in freshwater ecosytems,
or
- Amphibians in support of the Global Species Conservation Assessment for
Amphibians.
In addition, GBIF very much wishes to encourage broad networking of institutions in order to facilitate the development of larger data sets. Thus, proposals needed to be submitted by a regional or international consortium of data providers.
The 2005-2006 DIGIT Seed Money award to Dr. Wake and colleagues will expand the existing HerpNET database, originally a US National Science Foundation project for North America, to the global level. HerpNET is a collaborative effort by natural history museums to establish a global network of herpetological collections data that can be used in studying the basis for recent amphibian population declines.
Currently, HerpNET includes 44 institutions from the US, Canada and Mexico, with over 3.7 million amphibian and reptile specimen holdings in total. Twenty providers are currently available for searching on the HerpNET portal, and by Fall 2007, 51 providers will be available HerpNET and GBIF.
The DIGIT seed money award will be used to add seven additional amphibian collections to the existing network:
- Australian Museum, Sydney (AMS);
- Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Hawaii, USA (BPBM);
- Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu, Sichuan, China (CIB;
- Muséum d'histoire naturelle de la Ville de Genève, Switzerland (MHNG);
- Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, Singapore (RM);
- Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium (RMCA);
- Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, Germany (SMNS); and
- Zoological Institute Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia (ZIN)
This project will include training in digitization and geo-referencing, the installation of DiGIR servers and registration with the GBIF network for the partner institutions. On completion the project will add more than 425,000 new amphibian records of which 374,445 specimens will be newly georeferenced.
Inn addition, new HerpNET features available in 2007 and funded by this grant include: the ability to search under synonymous taxonomy, expert opinion maps from the Global Amphibian Assessment mapped along with point-locality data, and automatic links to maps from AmphibiaWeb species accounts, as well as to HerpNET data providers.
HerpNET would like to invite all natural history museums in the world that hold herpetological specimens to join the network. By adding more North American and international collections they hope to meet their goals of making a collaborative database of all herpetological collections available. Those joining have at their disposal the data standards, software and documentation that were developed for MaNIS, ORNIS, HerpNET, BioGeomancer and GBIF.
All that is needed for a collection to join HerpNET is:
- A commitment to maintain repositories of high-quality specimen data.
- To make the accompanying data available for the benefit of all.
- A server for making collections data available. If this server is not already in place, standards for purchasing a server can be found here.
- Any further georeferencing of specimens will proceed following the MaNIS/HerpNET/ORNIS Guidelines, and using BioGeomancer to increase efficiency.
The process of setting up a data provider compatible with the HerpNET system is explained on the GBIF web page How to Become a GBIF Data Provider. Of the provider options available, HerpNET currently supports the Distributed Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR) protocol using the MaNIS version of the Darwin Core 2 conceptual schema. All HerpNET participants will also be registered with GBIF, thus enhancing chances that they will be discovered by potential users.
Please Contact the HerpNET Coordinator, Carol Spencer, and the HerpNET Database Specialist, Rob Gales, to join HerpNET.
|
Please note that this story expired on 2006/04/20
|
