Well, I’m back now from a workshop in Ottawa on biodiversity that was held late last week, and it was very interesting. It was organized by the Canadensys group (U of Montreal), NatureServe Canada, and the Federal Biodiversity Information Parnership (FBIP).
The aim was first to move toward a more coordinated network of networks that deal with biodiversity data publication in some way. About 30 people representing a great range of institutions and groups were there. To keep things manageable for discussions, as well as due to the relatively short time to get it organized, it was by invitation only. But it was heartening to see that 3 of the board members of the BSC were there (Joe Shorthouse, Dave Langor and myself), as well as a recent board member (Chris Buddle), all invited for different reasons.
The second aim was to bring people together to get feedback for an application to the NCE – KM (knowledge mobilization) grant program. The application is in this instance led by Canadensys but with full participation by NatureServe Canada and FBIP and full support by numerous other groups. We did indeed hear a lot of well-articulated viewpoints from people representing a spectrum of data providers (e.g. CNC-AAFC) to data users (e.g. mining industry, even PHAC). One of the clear priorities was metadata. In practical terms that means inventory of what databases exist, as well as what they contain.
So I think that the workshop was really productive and, as one of the participants as well as a co-organizer, I was encouraged and grateful for the number of people who took the time to participate, some coming from substantial distances. It is clear that there is a strong and diverse assemblage of people concerned about many aspects of biodiversity data across all taxa, and especially its publication (the newly broadened term that also includes releasing data on the internet). Now it will be a worthy challenge to help the interactions – and data flow – among them to be more efficient. One of the other messages that was heard loud and clear was that it is not enough to just dump raw data on a website – interaction with user groups is essential to refine the fields that are shown and to design utilities to make the biodiversity data more digestible. I hope that anyone reading this blog post will keep that feedback coming – just click on the “Reply” feature below.
But, to get back to the reason for the BSC blog site, it was also heartening to see the significant role played by the Biological Survey of Canada, in partnership alongside a number of other major players. Things are moving forward!
Felix Sperling
The Biological Survey of Canada 