At the NBN conference in November 2014 Peter Doherty (Program Manager for the Atlas of Living Australia) gave a presentation about the A$50 million worth of investment they have made in Australia to build infrastructure to manage biodiversity data and information (see the ALA website). That infrastructure is open source, has multiple implementations delivering a range of products and services including analysis tools for data interrogation. Many countries are now using, or investigating using, this platform for their own national biodiversity portals.
Since then, the NBN Trust has been working with the Atlas team in Canberra, the Natural History Museum (UK Species Inventory) and CEH (for spatial environmental layers), to create a demo atlas for the UK. The NBN wanted to investigate whether this system could be an alternative solution to meet UK data infrastructure needs. The current working title for this is the “UK Wildlife Portal”. UK biological records from GBIF were used in the demo along with web services from GenBank, the Biodiversity Heritage Library as well as images and content from the Encyclopedia of Life.
Figure 1: Screen shot of the demonstration site: UK Wildlife Portal – a UK implementation of the Atlas of Living Australia.
Since January 2015, the Trust Secretariat has attended workshops and meetings in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England to discuss whether this is the right approach for the UK to take. Feedback so far has been very positive although with some caveats surrounding the need to ensure protection for sensitive species records (which the system caters for) and to ensure Network members are supportive of the initiative.
The NBN Trust is now preparing a business case for a UK Atlas, in conjunction with government agencies and NGOs across the UK, to explore this opportunity further. This will examine whether a single atlas (or nested group of country-specific atlas implementations for Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England) would meet NBN member needs (as identified in the reviews undertaken by the Trust over the last 10 months – see NBN Gateway Technical and User Review). It is believed that the Atlas of Living Australia infrastructure can deliver a platform that will transform how biological data are stored, visualised and analysed in the UK.
Figure 2: Screen shot of what the Atlas of Living Scotland could look like as a nested part of a UK atlas implementation.
Support for maintenance of the NBN Gateway will be ongoing as that is the central and critical mechanism for data sharing by the Network in the UK. Further updates on this work will be provided in the coming months.