Collating biodiversity occurrence data for conservation

Abstract

Plant and animal checklists, with conservation status information, are fundamental for conservation management. Historical field data, more recent data of digital origin and data-sharing platforms provide useful sources for collating species locality data. However, different biodiversity datasets have different formats and inconsistent naming systems. Additionally, most digital data sources do not provide an easy option for download by protected area. Further, data-entry-ready software is not readily available for conservation organization staff with limited technical skills to collate these heterogeneous data and create distribution maps and checklists for protected areas. The insights presented here are the outcome of conceptualizing a biodiversity information system for South African National Parks. We recognize that a fundamental requirement for achieving better standardization, sharing and use of biodiversity data for conservation is capacity building, internet connectivity, national institutional data management support and collaboration. We focus on some of the issues that need to be considered for capacity building, data standardization and data support. We outline the need for using taxonomic backbones and standardizing biodiversity data and the utility of data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and other available sources in this process. Additionally, we make recommendations for the fields needed in relational databases for collating species data that can be used to inform conservation decisions and outline steps that can be taken to enable easier collation of biodiversity data, using South Africa as a case study.