Posted on

African Wildlife Poisoning Database

https://www.africanwildlifepoisoning.org/

The use of poisons to kill wildlife has a long-established place in African history. However, the rapid acceleration in this use, coupled with the move to synthetic pesticides, has been shown to have a devastating effect on populations of many species.

Poisoning is often targeted at particular species, particularly those that provide high-value by-products, but the consequences are frequently unintentional and affect any species scavenging on poisoned carcasses. This may have potentially catastrophic human health impacts, in addition to the impacts on wildlife. There is evidence that a number of different species and ecosystems are being systematically targeted.

The Vulture Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission aims to gather and collate data on historical and current incidents of wildlife poisoning to assess the scope and impact of this threat to vultures and other scavenging birds and wildlife on the African continent. This database is designed to facilitate simple, effective loading and capture of relevant data using a webform, or a data submission template, for this purpose while ensuring that sensitive data submitted will not be shared without the consent of the submitting partner/organisation.

Posted on

CITES Wildlife TradeView

https://tradeview.cites.org/

A new, interactive, online tool for visualising data and trends in the international trade in endangered species is being launched today. CITES Wildlife TradeView is a joint project between the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC). It is available in English, French and Spanish.

he purpose of CITES Wildlife TradeView is to provide users with an accessible window into the world of CITES trade data and to showcase the main trading countries, species, commodities, sources and trends over time. The platform will bolster transparency and help achieve a broader understanding of the international trade in CITES-listed wildlife. 

CITES Wildlife TradeView is dynamically linked with the CITES Trade Database, a key resource for monitoring trade in the species listed in the Convention’s Appendices. This means the new platform will show the latest information as new data is uploaded into the Database.

The CITES Trade Database contains the official data provided by all Parties to the Convention in their mandatory annual reports. It currently includes over 23 million records gathered from these reports since CITES entered into force in 1975. 

The Database will remain the official location where CITES trade data will be stored and accessed, while the purpose of CITES Wildlife TradeView is to quickly visualise specific aspects of its data, which can be used for obtaining an overview that can be showcased in presentations or communication activities. 

The platform provides three tailored dashboards, enabling users to visualise trends in international wildlife trade in the following ways:

  • Global overview: providing a high-level overview of global trade in CITES-listed species
  • Country view: exploring the CITES trade for one or more countries
  • Taxon view: exploring the CITES trade data for one or more species or taxonomic groups (e.g. by searching ‘Grey Parrot’ or looking at all birds)

Kelly Malsch, Head of Nature Conserved at UNEP-WCMC, said: “The CITES Wildlife TradeView platform will help make CITES trade data more accessible and easier to grasp, even if you are not a data expert. This will, in turn, help monitor, analyse, and communicate this important dataset on the international trade in wildlife, supporting global conservation efforts.” 

Sofie Flensborg, Officer-in-Charge of the CITES Secretariat’s Outreach and Projects Unit, said: “With the launch of the CITES Wildlife TradeView, the capacity for monitoring the trade in CITES-listed species has just taken a leap forward. This is particularly important, not just in the context of CITES implementation, but also for wider global commitments to safeguard biodiversity. As we work to tackle the global biodiversity crisis, CITES Wildlife TradeView will play a crucial role in bringing important biodiversity data to light and ensuring that wildlife trade is legal and sustainable. We are grateful to UNEP-WCMC for their effort in making this user-friendly interface.”

The development of this new wildlife trade visualisation platform was made possible through the financial support from the UK Research and Innovation’s Global Challenges Research Fund under the TRADE Hub project.

Posted on

PACIFIC DATA HUB

https://pacificdata.org

The Pacific Data Hub (PDH), is a central repository of data about the Pacific and from the Pacific. The platform serves as a gateway to the most comprehensive collection of data and information about the Pacific across key areas including population statistics, fisheries science, climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and resilience, public health surveillance, conservation of plant genetic resources for food security and human rights.

The Pacific Data Hub is an innovative programme of work, led by the Pacific Community (SPC) and supported by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The PDH serves as a regional public good that provides a single authoritative point of entry for data about the Pacific and serves as a vehicle for investment in a sustainable data infrastructure for the Pacific region.

We have built the PDH platform on our intimate understanding of the Pacific region and the enduring relationships we have forged with our members. We understand the policy and development challenges that matter to our members and we work in coordination with our development partners to not only provide quality data and evidence but also develop tools and capabilities that can inspire new insights, inform good decision-making and deliver improved development outcomes.

The PDH is part of an emerging Pacific Data Ecosystem, a partnership between Pacific Island Countries and Territories, SPC and the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) to promote greater coordination in data management, dissemination and uptake initiatives. We work closely with our members and our development partners to strengthen data management capabilities, develop capacity and improve data literacy within the Pacific region, ensuring that the data resources of our members and partners are well-managed, shared responsibly and used ethically.

We are keen to hear from you:

  • to understand how you are using the Pacific Data Hub,
  • if you would like to contribute to our data catalogue
  • or if you would like to explore opportunities for collaboration and partnership.

For more information, please contact us at datahub@spc.int.

Posted on

Systema Naturae

https://www.systemanaturae.org/

Systema Naturae is a web platform and we index research Datasets and Conservation Projects on Wildlife . We believe in Open data and the Datasets in our website are either submitted by people from across the world or indexed by our web crawler which searches the internet actively for research Datasets and Projects.

The centralization of Datasets and Projects on wildlife will help researchers, students and policy makers get access to them as well as create awareness about the conservation efforts. 

Our Mission is to save wildlife by creating awareness with the help of publicly available Datasets and Projects. Systema Naturae addresses the gap that exists between people who produce and consume the Datasets and also people who engage in conservation Projects.

We are proud of the impact we have had so far and we are fully volunteer run.  We are one of the very few portals across the internet dedicated to wildlife research Datasets and Projects, One of the Largest Indeed!

Posted on

GBIF | Global Biodiversity Information Facility

https://www.gbif.org

GBIF—the Global Biodiversity Information Facility—is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world’s governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.

Coordinated through its Secretariat in Copenhagen, the GBIF network of participating countries and organizations, working through participant nodes, provides data-holding institutions around the world with common standards, best practices and open-source tools enabling them to share information about where and when species have been recorded. This knowledge derives from many sources, including everything from museum specimens collected in the 18th and 19th century to geotagged smartphone photos shared by amateur naturalists in recent days and weeks.

The GBIF network draws all these sources together through the use of data standards, including Darwin Core, which forms the basis for the bulk of GBIF.org’s index of hundreds of millions of species occurrence records. Publishers provide open access to their datasets using machine-readable Creative Commons licence designations, allowing scientists, researchers and others to apply the data in about four peer-reviewed publications (along with more policy papers) every day. Many of these analyses—which cover topics from the impacts of climate change and the spread of invasive and alien pests to priorities for conservation, food security and human health—would not be possible without the data provided by the GBIF network.

The GBIF Secretariat prepares an annual work programme within a five-year strategic framework that receives review and approval of the GBIF Governing Board.

Vision

A world in which the best possible biodiversity data underpins research, policy and decisions.

Mission

To mobilize the data, skills and technologies needed to make comprehensive biodiversity information freely available for science and decisions addressing biodiversity loss and sustainable development.

Posted on

OBIS

https://obis.org/

VISION To be the most comprehensive gateway to the world’s ocean biodiversity and biogeographic data and information required to address pressing coastal and world ocean concerns.

MISSION To build and maintain a global alliance that collaborates with scientific communities to facilitate free and open access to, and application of, biodiversity and biogeographic data and information on marine life.

More than 20 OBIS nodes around the world connect 500 institutions from 56 countries. Collectively, they have provided over 45 million observations of nearly 120 000 marine species, from Bacteria to Whales, from the surface to 10 900 meters depth, and from the Tropics to the Poles. The datasets are integrated so you can search and map them all seamlessly by species name, higher taxonomic level, geographic area, depth, time and environmental parameters. OBIS emanates from the Census of Marine Life (2000-2010) and was adopted as a project under IOC-UNESCO’s International Oceanographic Data and Information (IODE) programme in 2009.

Objectives

  • Provide world’s largest scientific knowledge base on the diversity, distribution and abundance of all marine organisms in an integrated and standardized format (as a contribution to Aichi biodiversity target 19)
  • Facilitate the integration of biogeographic information with physical and chemical environmental data, to facilitate climate change studies
  • Contribute to a concerted global approach to marine biodiversity and ecosystem monitoring, through guidelines on standards and best practices, including globally agreed Essential Ocean Variables, observing plans, and indicators in collaboration with other IOC programs
  • Support the assessment of the state of marine biological diversity to better inform policy makers, and respond to the needs of regional and global processes such as the UN World Ocean Assessment (WOA) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
  • Provide data, information and tools to support the identification of biologically important marine and coastal habitats for the development of marine spatial plans and other area-based management plans (e.g. for the identification of Ecologically or Biologically Significant marine Areas (EBSAs) under the Convention on Biological Diversity.
  • Increase the institutional and professional capacity in marine biodiversity and ecosystem data collection, management, analysis and reporting tools, as part of IOC’s Ocean Teacher Global Academy (OTGA)
  • Provide information and guidance on the use of biodiversity data for education and research and provide state of the art services to society including decision makers
  • Provide a global platform for international collaboration between national and regional marine biodiversity and ecosystem monitoring programmes, enhancing Member States and global contributions to inter alia, the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS)
Posted on

Whale Shark Tracker

https://www.conservation.org/projects/whale-shark-tracker

In 2015, Conservation International scientists in Indonesia performed a first: We attached satellite transmitters to the dorsal fins of whale sharks. These transmitters had never been mounted on whale sharks because the species was simply too big to catch — so our scientists partnered with local fishermen who had inadvertently captured whale sharks in their nets, then dived in to attach the transmitters before releasing the sharks. Working with our partners at the Georgia Aquarium, we’ve learned a lot about the charismatic species, including their migratory movements and diving behavior — much of it new to science.​​

Posted on

Wildlife Insights

https://www.wildlifeinsights.org/

WHAT

Wildlife is important to all of us. Aside from its intrinsic value, wildlife provides critical benefits to support nature and people. Unfortunately, wildlife is slowly but surely disappearing from our planet and we lack reliable and up-to-date information to understand and prevent this loss.

Camera traps are being used all around the world to better understand how wildlife populations are changing. Camera traps have already taken millions of photos and are collecting more information every day. Yet most of these photos and data are not effectively shared or analyzed, leaving valuable insights just out of our grasp.

We need an innovative solution to overcome these roadblocks and catalyze data-driven wildlife conservation. By harnessing the power of technology and science, we can unite millions of photos from camera trap projects around the world and reveal how wildlife is faring, in near real-time. With better information, we can make better decisions to help wildlife thrive.

WHAT

Wildlife Insights is combining field and sensor expertise, cutting edge technology and advanced analytics to enable people everywhere to share wildlife data and better manage wildlife populations. Anyone can upload their images to the Wildlife Insights platform so that species can be automatically identified using artificial intelligence. This will save thousands of hours, freeing up more time to analyze and apply insights to conservation.

By aggregating images from around the world, Wildlife Insights is providing access to the timely data we need to effectively monitor wildlife. We are creating a community where anyone can explore data from projects around the world and leverage data at scale to influence policy.

Wildlife Insights provides the tools and technology to connect wildlife “big data” to decision makers. This full circle solution can help advance data-driven conservation action to reach our ultimate goal: recovering global wildlife populations. Learn more about Wildlife Insights AI.

Posted on

Movebank

https://www.movebank.org

Movebank is a free online platform that helps researchers manage, share, analyze and archive animal movement data. Movebank is hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (formerly the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology) in coordination with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the Ohio State University and the University of Konstanz. Movebank works with many partners including government agencies, universities and conservation organizations and is intended to serve as a global archive for animal movement and bio-logging data. Movebank has long-term (>20 years) funding through the Max Planck Society and the University of Konstanz and has been developed with support from the National Science Foundation, the German Aerospace Center, the German Science Foundation and NASA.

Movebank has over 20,000 users including thousands of data owners from universities, government agencies, and other research and conservation groups around the world. It is open to all researchers and organizations regardless of species, study area or source of funding. Movebank users retain ownership of their data and can choose whether and when to make their data available to the public. We encourage collaborations to re-use animal tracking data and give it a second life.

Movebank’s database is designed for locations of individual animals over time, commonly referred to as tracking data, and of measurements collected by other bio-logging sensors attached to animals, as well as information about animals, tags and deployments. Movebank has grown dramatically since its inception, due to the increasing number of users as well as advances in technology that allow the collection of increasingly high-resolution data.