About

The Biological Survey of Canada: The way forward! (http://www.biology.ualberta.ca/bsc/bschome.htm)

The Biological Survey of Canada has been studying Canada’s biodiversity for almost 30 years, with an emphasis on Arthropods.  We’ve done it by bringing people together to share ideas and projects about biodiversity, and now include members and collaborators across the country.

Where should we go from here?  We need your ideas.  The BSC is now a volunteer not-for-profit organization, still dedicated to studying Biodiversity.

Our website has publications on Canadian biodiversity (many of them available as free downloads), as well as information on Canadian arthropods and who is studying them.  We also publish a journal aimed at providing high quality illustrated keys to the Canadian arthropods, also available free on-line.

What’s missing?   what direction should we go in?  Here’s your chance to help focus the mission of the Biological Survey of Canada!

Thanks to everyone that has joined the discussion here!  Some great ideas are coming in.  Now we have to focus them.  For example, a major gap in how to work on arthropod biodiversity has been identified: how do we get more funding to enthusiastic amateurs to do their work. The BSC is now a charitable group, and we can raise money for this sort of initiative.  But we need help to move on this.  Anyone out there want to volunteer to take on this important job?  if so, please contact Donna Giberson (giberson@upei.ca), and we’ll put you to work.

We also need to raise our public profile so others know how important our work is.  One possibility is to host a biodiversity event, and make sure the Biological Survey is acknowledged (see the new posting on this topic on this blog).  Any other ideas?  Use this forum to weigh in.

23 thoughts on “About”

  1. I have been reading with great interest the recent comments regarding the value and potential ways of recording Canada’s biodiversity, especially the challenging numbers of arthropods. This interest has developed over a number of decades through my former positions as a Vertebrate Curator and Museum Director at the Manitoba Museum, an amateur passion for collecting and studying arthropods, and participation on a number of government and NGO committees dealing with species at risk and conservation. As the Zoological Editor and an author of The Encyclopedia of Manitoba (2007; 814 pages), I recruited 10 colleagues in biology to submit 200 articles representing all major taxa (from protozoans to mammals and birds) in the province, including terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems. With actual and estimated numbers of species in certain taxa, this was in effect the first attempt at a bio-inventory of Manitoba, and various arthropod taxa were well represented. A list with estimated numbers of Manitoba animals, plants, fungi and algae were highlighted in an article entitled “Buzzword Biodiversity” on the NatureNorth.com website (see “biodiversity” in the index), which demonstrated a remarkable diversity of phyla and species. The next obvious step was to lobby for an all-taxa checklist of species in Manitoba, one that could be useful for conservation activities and compatible with other Canada-wide inventories (such as Wild Species reports by the CWS). While species lists and status evaluations have been produced for the more-prominent taxa, over 95% of Manitoba’s biota (likely numbering in the hundreds of thousands of species) will not receive attention for many decades, if ever. Consequently, I have approached the Manitoba Region of the Nature Conservancy of Canada and the Manitoba Conservation Data Center to consider funding and recording an all-taxa bio-inventory of the province, which can be added to over the years as various specialists develop species checklists. This will ensure that bio-inventory research accumulates in a central repository, and will not be lost as taxonomists and ecologists retire and pass on. It will include notes on species’ distribution, habitat, status and other data as available. Hopefully such an inventory will contribute significantly to national inventories, direct research, and provide information on how to manage wildlife areas. Stewardship of wildlife and wild lands can only be as effective as the knowledge base, for we cannot manage properly what we don’t even know is there. Ambitious, yes, but Canadian biologists and organizations have made great strides, and the members of the Arthropods section of the Biological Survey of Canada have a major role to play.

    • Thanks for these comments, Robert. Your points about the importance of regional efforts and the multiple ways to move forward are well taken. Other province-focussed efforts include sites like the Strickland Virtual Museum, which has already produced 2500 insect species pages for Alberta: http://www.entomology.ualberta.ca/ Also British Columbia has its e-Fauna and e-Flora: http://biodiversity.bc.ca/ There must be others like this elsewhere. What would be helpful now would be to try to link them in a way that supports the regional efforts and motivations at the same time that there is more Canada-wide coordination and visibility.

      • And, the only effective way to do that is to ensure everyone talks the same language. That is, all such thematic checklists need to have a common transport mechanism such as Darwin Core Archive, used for both specimen and checklist data (and you don’t need a computer degree or a nerd in your lab to make one), plus a non-restrictive Creative Commons license (preferably Public Domain) such that an obstructionist need for attribution does not get in the way of a dynamically updating master list.

  2. Hi all;

    This blog has been quiet for a little while; I hope it’s not too late for more comments. Anyway, here goes with some ideas:

    In thinking about the BSC, I believe we should look at the name of the organisation – “Biological Survey of Canada – Terrestrial Arthropods”. Phrased another way, the function of the BSC is to answer the question – “what arthropods live in Canada?”. Our logical mandate is to document the occurrence of species in Canada. Thinking about it that way, I can’t help thinking the BSC hasn’t really seized its obvious mandate very effectively.

    I don’t mean to be critical of what BSC has done so far (some very fine projects and products over the years), but rather I wish to point out what it hasn’t done. On my desk right now is Danks 1979; “Canada and its Insect Fauna”. I believe this was the first major product from the BSC; an overview of what lived in Canada. It slightly predates my academic involvement in Entomology and I use this book regularly, especially page 243 and its table suggesting there are estimated to be 66,498 terrestrial arthropod species in Canada. To me, the obvious next step for the BSC after that “opening position” should be to elaborate; fill in the details: “what ARE all those species that live in Canada?”. I’ve marvelled over that number many times; the fact that almost half of those were as yet undiscovered, is what continues to fuel my interest in the field. Certainly much of the work of BSC and its members has focussed on that column of Danks’ table. But what about the 33,672 that are ALREADY KNOWN to occur in Canada? And how do you know that you’ve got something new, if you don’t know what’s already been found here? That’s really basic information, but it’s scattered all over the place. What are those “known” species? How do I go about finding out more about them? Those are really basic questions that BSC could be answering.

    So, what about a one-stop site that provides that information? An electronically updated list of the terrestrial arthropod species known to live in Canada, ideally broken down by province and/or ecozone. Canada has published checklists for spiders, Hemiptera and Coleoptera, but the latter is 20 years old. What about the other orders, particularly the remaining “big three”; flies, wasps, leps? The information is out there, but static taxonomic publications get out of date. Let’s pull it together, make it readily available, and keep it current. What an amazing resource that would be to the beginning researcher, or for someone coming at a group from another discipline. We can’t keep saying “yeah, well, there’s a lot of data, and it’s complicated”. Not for 30 years, anyway, and still retain some credibility.

    There are even some possible partners out there who are also interested in this information; one that immediately comes to mind is the National General Status Working Group of the Canadian Wildlife Service. They’re pulling together “species-by-province” conservation ranks for many groups of organisms, including speciose groups such as spiders and ground beetles in the latest report (Wild species 2010, available online very soon). I’m involved in pulling together information on moths for the next report; it’s a big group but it can be done.

    Anyway, that’s my suggestion for BSC: answer the obvious question “what lives in Canada?”. From there, some obvious add-ons would be databases of specific records (as suggested earlier on this blog), bibliographies of the pertinent taxonomic literature, an update to Danks 1979, online catalogues to connect synonyms with valid names… many possibilities beyond the central question. BSC could be the go-to source for information on Canada’s arthropods – from overviews of higher taxonomic groups, to species lists and bibliographies. I think that would make us highly relevant to many people.

    I realize the BSC has only limited resources, but its always done good work by channelling other resources and energies into particular directions. I’d argue that what’s been lacking is an overall vision of an “end product”. How about we do our best to answer the question – “what terrestrial arthropods live in Canada?”

    Greg

    Greg Pohl
    Collections Manager, Forest Biodiversity Researcher
    Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service
    5320 – 122 St., Edmonton, AB T6H 3S5 CANADA

    • Greg, thank you for those thoughtful comments. Personally I agree with you that a kind of “encyclopedia of Canadian biota” is a very appropriate focus. In fact, we have discussed this sort of thing multiple times at BSC board meetings, and many facets of it have already been implemented. The problem is that we just don’t have enough people to seriously fill in the next level beyond Danks (ed) 1979.
      Instead, the BSC has focussed on particular biotas, and the upcoming second volume of Arthropods of Canadian Grasslands is evidence of that. Have you seen the excellent first volume yet? See: http://www.biology.ualberta.ca/bsc/english/grasslands.htm In addition, under the leadership of Steve Marshall the BSC has facilitated the growing number of groundbreaking issues in the Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification (http://www.biology.ualberta.ca/bsc/ejournal/ejournal.html ).
      So I think it is fair to say that the BSC has made real strides toward your vision. We could add to that the more regionally focussed efforts like the Strickland Virtual Museum ( http://www.entomology.ualberta.ca/ ) with its 2500 species pages for insects that occur in Canada, while somewhat similar efforts are ongoing in British Columbia (http://www.geog.ubc.ca/biodiversity/efauna/) and elsewhere. What we need now, I think, is an integration of these efforts at a national level.
      The BSC has tried to provide some of this coordination for terrestrial arthropods, but unfortunately now our support from the Canadian Museum of Nature for maintaining our website and many other things has been cut. We now depend on the over-stretched time and skills of a few BSC board members and a few volunteers. This brings me to my point. How would you like to volunteer to help out the BSC in achieving your vision? We are not short of server space for our website, but rather the people to keep it up to date and to implement new features. David Shorthouse is hard at work building a resource for public access and updating of the BSC localities database, and we have been able to arrange for a separate server that he can do his programming on. If you would like to contribute to some ongoing aspect of the BSC, or initiate a new feature, we should be able to at least facilitate the server space.

      Felix

    • Greg, I agree that this can and should be the overriding vision of the BSC: a kind of virtual encyclopedia of Canadian arthropod life. The BSC has made real strides toward it, through things like the Grassland Arthropods of Canada (Vol. 2 coming soon) and the Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification (led by Steve Marshall). But you have pinpointed the real problem, which is that our energies can only stretch so far. So how would you like to contribute to that vision by setting up something for the Lepidoptera of Canada? Server space is available, and we recently been able to arrange more for Dave Shorthouse, who is building a utility for public corrections and additions of the localities database. Your volunteer energies would be very welcome!

      • There are several themes in Greg’s post that need unpacking. Permit me to summarize. First, the BSC “products” to date have been top-down, unstructured narratives that are not conducive to broad-brushed compilations or re-use (i.e. where are the upload and download buttons and how does one extract all the names within?). Second, there are not yet opportunities for bottom-up participation to enhance these products. There is currently no incentivized, scalable way to hone Hugh’s estimate of the number of arthropod species in Canada.

        At a Canadensys meeting some time ago, I suggested that one approach to developing a true bottom-up product could be to make use of Simon Fraser University’s Open Journal Systems as a “Checklist Publication”. Rather than adhering to the typical rigid nature of a publication workflow that of course has its own costs and overhead, such a product would instead be used as a repository of checklists with a rather generous approval system. That is, the major stipulation for acceptance of a manuscript is an included, standards-based file (e.g. Darwin Core Archive) with a public domain license in addition to the typical free-form narratives and flat lists in similar publications. Authors of course get a publication that they can put in their CVs, but any aggregator such as the BSC could harvest these checklists into a more comprehensive structure that CAN be filtered, downloaded, and re-used with its own public domain license.

        As an aside, there are several production-ready tools developed here at the Marine Biological Laboratory that are capable of extracting scientific names from free-form text and there are also collaborative tools for editing & re-organizing names into structured lists for later filtering and re-use.

        Besides re-purposing the Common & Historical Collecting Localities of Canada into something more dynamic and editable, I am also installing Drupal on the BSC server and will make use of a suite of classification modules that me and the LifeDesks team wrote that permits import from Excel using several typical formats, export as Excel, and publishing as versioned Darwin Core Archive files.

        So, it’s just a matter of connecting the dots and devoting some time to make this happen. What will help however are government and foundation funds for a more robust infrastructure (one OpenBSD server at UofA is nowhere near sufficient) and to employ someone on a contract basis to get this infrastructure up & running and ready for business. In the meantime, let’s see how far I can get with this one machine as a proof-of-concept that the BSC can later use as a jumping off point to source additional funds.

    • I’d like to echo Greg’s comments below. In addition I have a solution:

      using a database like Specify, that is set up to be a data provider to GBIF, begin loading all published records for all Canadian arthropod species known. Rather than completing ‘specimen’ records these would be ‘observation’ records based on literature ‘observations’. This is an approach I’m headed towards in Alaska. (I combine literature and specimen records in the same format in my database).

      Ideally, a good checklist should have all records traceable to the specimens on which those records are based, however, we can save considerable steps by pointing each record to a publication (which in some cases has their own ‘specimens examined’ data, but in others this is lacking).

      The advantage here is that the checklist would be in the same datastructure that is now considered ideal for global data sharing so it wouldn’t suffer from lack of compatibility that often happens when people design their own data systems.

      Getting the data up can be done quickly if each record is NOT geo-referenced but rather simply linked to a generic ‘province’ level location. Geo-referencing could be done later, or not at all, but the advantage of having an online checklist of all known records in a format that can be queried from GBIF should be compelling!

      -Derek

    • Chandra – Good idea. Felix can you follow up with Cedric? Perhaps the ‘blog master'(?) could write up a short item for the next issue of the Bulletin? Pending available space, Cedric might be able to fit it into the March issue if he receives the item by Feb 10 or so.

      • Kevin, this is in motion now, which I understand from Donna is thanks to Chandra’s willingness to include it in her next student report for the newsletter. This blogging business is taking me some getting used to!

  5. It’s good to see some discussion on this topic and undoubtedly I’ll have more ‘pithy’ comments to post in the future.

    For now, however,… can a link to the BSC’s website be incorporated at the top of each page?

    Given the purpose of the blog, such a link would seem useful to promote the BSC.

    Kevin

  6. Hello Everyone!
    I have been reading the off-blog dialogue on the future of the BSC with interest, and especially as a past member of the BSC and the current Chair of the ESC Science Policy and Education Committee (i.e., I’m looking for a rallying project)…….and more importantly, as someone who is only just now learning how to overcome the mental barriers that I have placed before myself in getting things moving in life.

    Thank-you David for your gentle shake and thank-you Felix for your BSC information re-sent and passionate response. Where there are complaints there are commitments, and there is no doubt that the BSC members, and Canadian entomologists (amateurs and professionals alike….but let’s not forget that the professionals are really amateurs at their core) really do care about what they do, and about the preservation of biodiversity and the environment.

    So it really is a matter of calling upon and focusing that passion somehow to benefit both the BSC and the ESC…..to raise our public profile and somehow make us a beacon for those that care. Let’s use this as an opportunity to use new media to enter an exciting phase of communication about us. About 1/3 of the ESC membership are students…..so why not inspire them to help us (both BSC and ESC) across the country, together with amateurs and professionals.

    As for ideas, anything is possible……e.g., let’s create a media-engaging, fund-raising event with biodiversity as a theme, arthropods as the mascot group, so that a broad sector of the public can be made aware of us (BSC and ESC) and an important environmental issue such as biodiversity……let’s create a Foundation within the BSC where any funds raised from such event(s) can be used for various causes, such as the support of amateurs that Cris mentioned or further BSC initiatives…..let’s publicly tout the benefits of the BSC and their amazing productivity during this time of financial restraint (it would surely be an inspiration for similar volunteer groups….standing up and making a difference has a way of rippling out to others)…..let’s have a National Insect Appreciation Day (suggested by Kevin Floate) or a day where everyone “twitters a critter” or something equally crazy (just ask the student membership to come up with ideas and see where it goes)……Now that the BSC is a not-for-profit corporation, this opens doors for applying for all sorts of funding; some of it also foundation based that is aimed at groups like ours…..let’s host a public dialogue on biodiversity/entomology issues (see http://www.sfu.ca/dialog/study+practice/programs+courses.html as an example….what I found after being inspired by Mark Winston’s plenary talk on entomology and communication at the Vancouver ESC meetings).

    Donna has written a great editorial on the BSC in the fall newsletter…on its past, present and future identity. She mentions the positive side to the “grassroots approach” taken by the BSC and the big ambition of the founders that believed that “a small group of motivated entomologists could tackle the largest group of animals in one of the largest countries in the world, all with a minimum of funding”. Why can’t we carry this same ambition forward? Just remember that it is our choice to either see the world as endless possibilities or endless barriers to success.

    Just recently I have had my eyes opened as to how powerful each of us can be simply by jumping in and doing…..but more importantly, connecting and sharing our ambitions with others. I have started an environmental group in Lethbridge by getting artists and scientists together communicating and potentially creating environmental art. It has been an amazing thing to watch ideas catch on and people get inspired…..so I see that something similar could be set in motion for us.

    Let me know what you think can be done, and then let’s do it.

    Rose

    • Rose – Aynsley let me know about this forum and saw that you were soliciting some involvement from the ESC Student Affairs Committee – that you wanted to do a Student Wing in the Bulletin on it? Let’s talk!

  7. I like the idea of a searchable list of hard-to-find localities in simplified format. I have a list on hand that could be added. It does not have GPS coordinates.

    I also like the idea of broadening the effectiveness of the BSC by teaming with the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution.

  8. This is off the top of my head and as such may be way off any desired target, but here goes: as a risk assessment entomologist for the CFIA, I have to answer the question “Is species X present in Canada?” many times. I don’t know if there is a resource for on-line publication of hobbiest collection records, but I would like to see such a resource. Perhaps the Biological Survey could host it and publicise the fact at entomological society meetings and naturalist club meetings (either by email or presentation). These collections records would necessarily be unvetted, but if ones of “interest” appeared (say a new invasive species, or a disjunct distribution record) the name of the collector would be on record and one could go to that person and verify that record. I see the publication being an annual list from all submitted collections, in a simple Excel file that could be downloaded and sorted by the user. I’m sure there are better ways of doing this, but simple would be entirely suitable, I think.

    I’d like to add that I tried David Shorthouse’s simplemappr and found it amazing.

    • Martin, this is an excellent idea. However, it will take a lot more resources than it seems, and the Canadensys group is in the process of building these for a Canada-wide system that will be searchable globally. Stay tuned for a new NCE-Knowlege Mobilization application by Canadensys that will take this to the next level. Meanwhile, you can see on version that is focused on the Strickland Museum of Entomology at the Strickland Virtual Museum:
      http://www.entomology.ualberta.ca/
      This site already hosts a quarter million specimen records, including many that are in amateur collections such as that of Charley Bird.

      • Felix — the site you give is one of my favourites, used all the time in my work! Something similar for all of Canada would be great.

        Cheers,
        Martin

  9. There are a number of gems in the BSC holdings that could be revitalized and leveraged in interesting ways. One in particular that has potential is Rob Roughley’s Common and Historical Collecting Localities linked from your homepage. I downloaded this Excel file and reconstituted it into a proof-of-concept http://collections.simplemappr.net/. Because there are a number of specimen digitizing efforts, there are surely instances where localities on collection labels cannot be adequately georeferenced. Thus, a web service off Rob’s data (with opportunity to correct and enhance) could prove useful to many folks. On the flip-side, a simple user interface into these data just might be a catalyst for bigger and better things.

    • David, the website is wide open for you to do exactly that – build a web service off the collecting localities database (which by the way is not just from Rob, but a huge proportion was contributed by Danny Shpeley). You are the person with the expertise who could make this happen, and we would be happy to work with you to get you the needed access.

      • Would be happy to do so. For starters, the code and database are available for download at the bottom of the page via the link above. Feel free to forward to whoever maintains the server(s) that run the BSC website and have them contact me.

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