Biodiversity and Climate Change Scenario Development

for the GEOSS Interoperability Pilot Process

Hannu Saarenmaa1,5, Jeremy Kerr2, Stefano Nativi3,4, Éamonn O Tuama1 & Motomi Ito6

1 GBIF Secretariat, 2 University of Ottawa, 3 Italian National Research Council – IMAA, 4 University of Florence, 5 University of Helsinki, 6 University of Tokyo

GEOSS Architecture and Data CommitteeMeeting, Tokyo, 14-15 May 2007

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Outline• Background

• Interoperability scenarios between biodiversity and other Societal Benefit Areas.

• Some ideas for demonstration

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The 2010 Biodiversity Target

• Convention on Biological Diversity's (CBD) sixth Conference of the Parties adopted the Strategic Plan for the Convention in Decision VI/26. The Decision says "Parties commit themselves to a more effective and coherent implementation of the three objectives of the Convention, to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on earth."

• The World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002 confirmed the 2010 biodiversity target and called for "the achievement by 2010 of a significant reduction in the current rate of loss of biological diversity".

www.gbif.org

Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)

• International organisation launced under the OECD Megascience Forum in 2001– 40 countries, 33 int’l organisations members

• Network of primary data– 200 providers in 30 countries, connecting over 1000

databases, 124 million records of in-situ observations• Infrastructure

– UDDI Registry, Data Portal, Cache of all data, Web Services

• Building on Biodiversity Informatics Standards (www.tdwg.org)– Darwin Core, ABCD, DiGIR, BioCASE, TAPIR, ...– MoU with OGC

www.gbif.org

Portal

Data providerProvider Services

RequestMarshaller

QueryEngine

Registry

InstitutionsProvidersServices

( UDDI )

ResourceMetadata

ResourceMetadata

GBIF Component Architecture

Index

Name providerProvider Services

ResourceMetadata

ResourceMetadata

CacheMetadata

Accounting

SOAP

DiGIR

HTTP

other

Data Portal

Data providersProvider Services

Providerquery

RequestMarshaller

QueryEngine

Availableproviders

Registry

InstitutionsProvidersServices

( UDDI )

User

ResourceMetadata

ResourceMetadata

Index

Name providersProvider Services

ResourceMetadata

ResourceMetadata

Metadataand name

query

Cachedpartialdata

response

Full dataquery

Full data

response

Metadata and

statisticsSynonyms

Publishavailability

Data CacheMetadata

Accounting

SOAP

DiGIR

HTTP

other

e.g., BioMoby web service

National and Thematic Portals

www.gbif.org

Makes available through the GBIF mechanism 900,768 in-situ records from 55 databases.

Will provide (in this year): • Fully customized new portal

• Available GBIF data using Japanese language

• Japanese vernacular names• Scientific name dictionary

• DNA barcoding database for Native species of Japan

• Start of project in 2007.

•Etc.

GBIF-Japan National Node

GBIF-Japan Data portal: http://gbif.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/portal/index.html

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Scenarios for interoperability between biodiversity and other SBAs such as climate change

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Pilot Phase 2 – Cross-System Interoperability Scenarios

• Develop scenarios that require the exchange of data and information between GBIF and other disparate systems– Address needs identified in one or more of the Societal Benefit

Areas.– Ensure relevancy

• Create interoperability arrangements between GBIF and another system – Analyze the entries in the GEOSS Service Register for the

systems to be made interoperable. Where the registered standards are insufficient to support interoperability, work with technical experts to identify solutions

– When a solution is identified it will be circulated for approval and, upon acceptance, this arrangement will be entered into the Interoperability Register

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The process of developing scenarios

• A scenario is a description of a person's interaction with a system.

• Scenarios is user language help focusing the work on user's requirements.

• Scenarios should not be technical, and therefore their development should fit for participatory design activities.

• They should confine complexity to the technical level (where it belongs).

• Develop through interviews with users and experts.• Scenarios can be formalised into use cases. A scenario is

an instance of a use case. A use case specifies all possible scenarios for a given piece of functionality (incl. actors, requirements, constraints, all scenarios)

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There are several interesting biodiversity cross-SBA scenarios

• Climate change threatens to commit 15-37% of species to extinction by 2050.– Accelerating the mass extinction already precipitated

by widespread land use changes. • Biodiversity has cross-linkages with many other

Societal Benefit Areas (SBA): – Climate change: Impacts to and adaptation of species– Ecosystems: Reforestation, desertification, and loss

of species – Agriculture: Impacts of invasive species on crops– Health: Spread of infectous diseases– Industry: Search of new drugs– Land Use and Poverty: Loss of natural habitat

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Ortalis poliocephala

in Mexicobefore (green)

vs. after (red)

Biodiversity & Climate Change & Land Use scenario

Town Peterson & al. 2002

The species will be pushed

to marginal areas

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Biodiversity & Climate Change & Health scenario

Where are malaria vectors likely to find appropriate climate and environmental conditions in the future?

Here, we present the average of two scenarios created by the Hadley Climate Change Center … for the year 2050.

quadriannulatus

merusmelasgambiae

Anopheles arabiensis

Red areas will be more appropriate to the mosquitoes in the future, blue areas less

Town Peterson with Mark Benedict and Bex Levine

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Biodiversity & Agriculture (Forestry) scenario

Places where the Asian Long-horned Beetle has been recorded in the USA (Chicago and NY)

Red: Highest Probability of invasion

Source: Town Peterson

Distribution model of the invasive Asian

Long-horned Beetle applied to North

American-based on climatic conditions

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BD-CC Scenario Step 1/8:Decide on selected species

• An analyst needs to report on the impact of climate change to biodiversity.

• As the entire biodiversity is too broad an area, the question will have to be limited to some “selected species” (CBD decision VIII/15.12). There are no guidelines on how the selection should be made. For practical reasons, the following criteria can be used: 1) availability of data, 2) biological and ecological representativeness, 3) expected susceptibility, 4) importance. This usually leaves only well known groups such as mammals, amphibians, birds, butterflies, trees, vascular plants, etc. as possible target species.

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BD-CC Scenario Step 2/8:Set criteria for data

• The data usually needs to span at least 30 years to catch significant trends.

• The data would ideally be georeferenced in order to be able to analyse shifts of distribution.

• It could cover only selected species, or larger groups of species, depending on criteria used.

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BD-CC Scenario Step 3/8:Investigate data availability

• Traditionally, it is assumed that data is off-line, so this involves contacting the relevant administrations and research groups to find out whether and on which groups of species they have sufficient data.

• Online data exchanges, like GBIF will be queried on the availability of the data for interesting groups in interesting areas.

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BD-CC Scenario Step 4/8:Improve quality and access to data

• If data is not available, relevant research groups may be notified of the need to make data available.

• If data is available, it will be downloaded for analyses.

• Serious effort on data cleaning is usually needed.

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BD-CC Scenario Step 5/8:Choose approach for modelling

• Depending on the species group, density of data, and the known environmental requirements of the species, an approach for modelling is selected.

• Typically this is based on Ecological Niche Modelling (ENM). This technique analyses change of distribution based on knowing from historical data the environmental conditions where the species has lived in the past, and where such conditions are projected for future.

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Example: ENM using the OpenModeller Framework

• A flexible, user friendly, cross platform environment where the entire process of conducting a fundamental niche modeling experiment can be carried out.

• Client-server architecture enabling the existence of different client interfaces (desktop, command line and web-based).

• Tasks can be performed in a distributed way, including the possibility of running separately the algorithms in remote cluster machines.

• Source code is available at sourceforge.

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BD-CC Scenario Step 6/8:Acquire and transform climate change and

environment data

• Typically for ENM, it is determined that data layers (rasters) of temperature, rainfall, vegetation, land use cover, etc. are needed. The resolution of data is determined, and different resolutions may be tried, but 1*1 degree cells are often the starting point. The layers include historical data, and projected future scenarios, and cover the area of interest.

• The layers are acquired from online and offline sources (make use of GEO Clearinghouse!)

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BD-CC Scenario Step 7/8:Execute models

• One or more modelling algorithms for ENM are selected and their parameters set.

• The models are executed for each selected species.

• The resulting maps are stored for analysis of shifts of distribution and trends of abundance.

• Summary statistics are calculated showing how many species expand, contract and move.

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BD-CC Scenario Step 8/8:Present the results

• The statistics are presented in a draft report. (Also make available via GEO Portal!)

• The data providers will be informed that their data has been used, and they will be asked for comments and eventual more contributions to improve the data and validate the results.

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Summary:

Open ModelerActivity

Diagram

Apply GARP, BioClimand other models

Ecological Niches

Distributional Shifts

CategoricalClimate Maps

Region Shift

Distributional Shifts inEcological Niches

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Towards a Demonstration

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Demo steps: Work in progress1. Write a formal and expanded use scenario

– Candidate species group: Modeling the impact of climate change on the distribution of the butterflies of Canada and Alaska.

2. Use GBIF web services to access and retrieve the biodiversity data – using GBIF Data Portal centrally– getting the data from the individual data providers

3. Access and retrieve via Web Services climatological data: Interoperability with GBIF registry and GEOSS registries using GI-go/GI-cat ISO19115 metadata as gateway– Average temperature layers, rainfall layers, land cover layers

4. Run the Open Modeller Web services using the SOAP interface– Upload of both Climatological and Biodiversity layers– Create and run models, get outputs

5. Put together a demonstrator user interface, – Include link in GEO Portal and output results in WMS to it.

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Demo AJAX Interface to Open Modeller Compute Servers

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GBIF & Other GEOSS Components Interoperability Approach

Presentation onGBIF and GEO Portals

GEOSSRegistry

Climatological and EnvironmentalData

Processing onDistributed

OpenModellerComputeServers

In-situBiodiversityRecords

GBIF Registry

www.gbif.org

Thank you!