Environmental Information: Placing Biodiversity Phenomena in an Ecological and Environmental Context

Authors

  • Arthur D Chapman Australian Biodiversity information Services
  • Mauro E.S. Muñoz Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental (CRIA)
  • Ingrid Koch Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental (CRIA),

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17161/bi.v2i0.5

Keywords:

species modeling, environmental data, environmental modeling, climate data, data quality, scale.

Abstract

Environmental models are increasingly being used as surrogates to determine plant and animal species’ distributions for a range of uses. This use of models has become an important part of the recent science that has become known as biodiversity informatics. Because of the nature of species data, considerable effort has often been spent in managing the quality of those species data, but less time has generally been spent on determining the quality and efficacy of the environmental data against which the species data are being modeled. This paper examines a range of environmental data being used in species distribution modeling, and looks at how they are prepared, their quality and use, and some of the commonly encountered pitfalls and problems in using these data in species’ distribution modeling.

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Author Biography

  • Arthur D Chapman, Australian Biodiversity information Services
    Mr Arthur Chapman spent over 20 years working in a number of capacities for the Australian Government - including for the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS and the Environmental Resources Information Network (ERIN) , mainly in data management, information analysis, environmental modelling, development of environmental decision support systems and information presentation. Mr Chapman has advised on data management and environmental modelling in a range of institutions and agencies around the world, including in Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, the United States, Canada, Indonesia, a number of Mekong Delta countries, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and England. For the past year, Mr Chapman has been working at CRIA in Brazil, assisting development of innovative and practical on-line environmental data cleaning tools, as well as improving environmental data, methodologies and tools available in South America for environmental modelling, reserve selection, data management and visualisation. Over the past thirty years, he has been a member of a number of International organizations and committees, including the OECD Megascience Forum Working Group on Bioinformatics (the precurser of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility - GBIF), the G7 Environment and Natural Resources Management (ENRM) Experts Working Group, the Technical Experts' Group on Clearing House Mechanisms under the Secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG), International Organisation for Plant Information (IOPI), and is presently a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Biota/FAPESP program in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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Published

2005-05-09

Issue

Vol. 2 (2005)

Section

Articles (peer-reviewed)

License

Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. All articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

How to Cite

Chapman, Arthur D, Mauro E.S. Muñoz, and Ingrid Koch. 2005. “Environmental Information: Placing Biodiversity Phenomena in an Ecological and Environmental Context”. Biodiversity Informatics 2 (May). https://doi.org/10.17161/bi.v2i0.5.