ECOS Magazine - Towards A Sustainable Future

"Your smartphone might just help us understand how the natural world works. Snap a picture of a bird, tag the image with details of where and when you took it, and you could be helping scientists to understand – and quite possibly save – the world’s biodiversity. Understanding what gives rise to the massive diversity of life on earth is perhaps the great challenge of ecological research. But to be able to predict how changes to this global system will affect the plants and creatures that live within it requires linking together huge amounts of information collected at very different scales of time and space – from microbes growing in seconds to plants competing over millennia; from nutrients cycling over nanometres to whales migrating across oceans. Mobile technology is just one of the ways put forward to help link information and ideas about biodiversity, in an effort to ultimately understand what drives and maintains it. An article recently published in BMC Ecology, ambitious in scope and rich with ideas, outlines a grand vision for the future of biodiversity research that seeks to answer these questions, putting openness at its heart. Alex Hardisty from Cardiff University and Dave Roberts from London’s Natural History Museum release their vision of the next decade in biodiversity research and what needs to be done to move our understanding of the natural world into the digital age. Their white paper, written in collaboration with the Biodiversity Informatics community, was compiled through a huge community consultation effort after plans for the paper were released onto a public Google Doc. Individual contributions from 77 leaders in the biodiversity informatics field were compiled and edited by the authors to create a comprehensive vision for the future, representing a call-to-arms for funding priorities in this area ... Central to this vision, the authors argue, is a need to standardise, store openly, and link together disparate datasets in a fully interoperable way. The field of genomics serves as a useful analogy in this context, with a culture of openness in data sharing, standardisation and tool development all combining to bring advances in knowledge as the cost of sequencing technologies plummet.  In contrast, the numerous tools currently available in biodiversity informatics often employ differing architectures working on differing agendas. By creating an over-arching vision, it is hoped that commonality of purpose may bring coordination toward a common goal.  A significant barrier to progress in biodiversity research is access to data. Across disciplines, only around 6-8 per cent of researchers deposit their data in archives. In combination with the difficulty in recovering data from copyrights held by commercial publishers, and the widespread misunderstanding of differences between licensing and copyright, many researchers have been reluctant to release their data publicly. This issue is neatly summarised by the authors: ‘Despite considerable progress, biodiversity science is still reliant on data that is not as fully available, linkable, discoverable and accessible as it should be’ ..."