Fhatani Ranwashe’s research while affiliated with South African National Biodiversity Institute and other places

Researchers and policymakers have called on the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), in its role as the statutory biodiversity organisation of South Africa, to develop a coordinated and integrated biodiversity informatics hub. While biodiversity information is increasingly available from several providers, there is no platform through which to access comprehensive biodiversity information from a single source. In response, SANBI is redeveloping the Biodiversity Advisor platform, which will integrate geospatial, species and ecosystem data, literature and other data made available by a wide variety of data partners. To do so it has adopted a Service Orientated Architecture, whereby existing, independent biodiversity datasets are integrated. Consolidating such an extensive and varied set of databases, however, introduces some significant operational challenges. Solutions had to be found to address limited infrastructure, the complexity of the system, the lack of taxonomic identifiers, as well as the need for access and attribution. Solutions had to be pragmatic, given limited financial resources and limited capacity for information technology. The emerging outcome is a system that will easily allow users to access most biodiversity data within South Africa from a single, recognised platform.

Biodiversity Advisor, developed by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), is a system that will provide integrated biodiversity information to a wide range of users who will have access to geospatial data, plant and animal species distribution data, ecosystem-level data, literature, images and metadata. It aims to deliver a centralized location with open access to information to enable research, assessment and monitoring; to support policy development; to foster collaboration and advance governance. Data are aggregated from multiple, diverse data partners across South Africa including, CapeNature, the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, Iziko South African museum, the National Herbarium of South Africa and the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity. This newly developed and integrated system promotes a shift from tactically-based information systems, aimed at delivering products for individual project initiatives to a strategic system that promotes the building of capacity within organisations and networks. It has been developed by integrating SANBI’s existing authoring layers through a service-orientated architecture approach, which enables seamless cross-platform integration. Some of the key authoring layers that will be integrated are, the Botanical Database of Southern Africa (BODATSA), the Zoological Database of Southern Africa (ZODATSA), the Biodiversity Geographic Information System (BGIS) and SANBI's institutional repository (Opus). Biodiversity Advisor will provide users, policy and decision makers, environmental impact practitioners and associated organizations with free access to view, query and download any of South Africa's biodiversity data available on the system, providing them with everything needed to make decisions around conservation and biodiversity planning in South Africa. All sensitive species data, which are those that are vulnerable to collecting, over-exploitation, commercial and/or medicinal use, will be redacted and only granted access upon application. Biodiversity Advisor will encourage more effective management of data within SANBI, but also encourage the sharing of data by the biodiversity community to provide integrated products and services, which are needed to address complex environmental issues.

It is time to synthesize the knowledge that has been generated through more than 260 years of botanical exploration, taxonomic and, more recently, phylogenetic research throughout the world. The adoption of an updated Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) in 2011 provided the essential impetus for the development of the World Flora Online (WFO) project. The project represents an international, coordinated effort by the botanical community to achieve GSPC Target 1, an electronic Flora of all plants. It will be a first‐ever unique and authoritative global source of information on the world's plant diversity, compiled, curated, moderated and updated by an expert and specialist‐based community (Taxonomic Expert Networks – “TENs” – covering a taxonomic group such as family or order) and actively managed by those who have compiled and contributed the data it includes. Full credit and acknowledgement will be given to the original sources, allowing users to refer back to the primary data. A strength of the project is that it is led and endorsed by a global consortium of more than 40 leading botanical institutions worldwide. A first milestone for producing the World Flora Online is to be accomplished by the end of 2020, but the WFO Consortium is committed to continuing the WFO programme beyond 2020 when it will develop its full impact as the authoritative source of information on the world's plant biodiversity.

The e-Flora of South Africa project was initiated in 2013 by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) in support of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC, 2011-2020). South Africa's flora consists of ca. 21,000 taxa of which more than half are endemic. South Africa will contribute a national Flora towards Target 1 of the GSPC ("To create an online flora of all known plants by 2020"). South Africa's contribution is ca. 6% of the world’s flora of which ca. 3% are endemic and therefore unique. South Africa’s electronic Flora is comprised of previously published descriptions. South Africa’s e-Flora data forms part of the Botanical Dataset of Southern Africa (BODATSA) that is currently managed through the Botanical Research And Herbarium Management System (BRAHMS). To date, South Africa’s e-Flora data (http://ipt.sanbi.org.za/iptsanbi/resource?r=flora_descriptions) represents 19,539 indigenous taxa, 79,139 descriptions of distribution, morphological, habitat and diagnostic data, and 27,799 bibliographic records. The e-Flora data was recently published online using the Integrated Publishing Toolkit and henceforth harvested by the World Flora Online (WFO) into the portal. A series of challenges were encountered while manipulating descriptive data from BRAHMS to be ingested by the WFO portal; from taxonomic issues to data quality issues not excluding compliance to data standards. To contribute to the WFO portal, the taxa in BODATSA has to match with the taxa in the WFO taxonomic backbone. Once there is a match, a unique WFO taxon identifier is assigned to the taxa in BODATSA. This process presented various challenges because the WFO taxonomic backbone and the taxonomic classification system that is used by South Africa (South African National Plant Checklist) does not fully correlate. The schema used to store taxonomic data also does not agree between BRAHMS and WFO and had to be addressed. To enable consistency for future, a detailed guideline document was created providing all the steps and actions that should be taken when publishing an e-Flora, managed in BRAHMS, to the WFO portal. The presentation will focus on matching taxonomic classifications between BRAHMS and WFO; dealing with character encoding issues and manipulating data to meet Darwin Core standards.

Georeferencing helps to fill in biodiversity information gaps, allowing biodiversity data to be represented spatially to allow for valuable assessments to be conducted. The South African National Biodiversity Institute has embarked on a number of projects that have required the georeferencing of biodiversity data to assist in assessments for redlisting of species and measuring the protection levels of species. Data quality in biodiversity information is an important aspect. Due to a lack of standardisation in collection and recording methods historical biodiversity data collections provide a challenge when it comes to ascertaining fitness for use or determining the quality of data. The quality of historical locality information recorded in biodiversity data collections faces the scrutiny of fitness for use as these information is critical in performing assessments. The lack of descriptive locality information, or ambiguous locality information deems most historical biodiversity records unfit for use. Georeferencing should essentially improve the quality of biodiversity data, but how do you measure the fitness for use of georeferenced data? Through the use of the Darwin Core coordinateUncertaintyinMeters, georeferenced data can be queried to investigate and determine the quality of the georeferenced data produced. My presentation will cover the scope of ascertaining georeferenced data quality through the use of the DarwinCore term coordinateUncertatintyInMeters, the impacts of using a controlled vocabulary in representing the coordinateUncertaintyInMeters, and will highlight how SANBI’s georeferencing efforts have contributed to data quality within the management of biodiversity information.