Abstract
With high pressure on biodiversity and ever-growing conflicts with human development, qualified systems for scenario modelling, impact assessment, decision support, etc are urgently needed. Such systems must be able to integrate complex models and information from many sources, and to do so in a flexible and transparent way. To that end, as well as for other complicated and data-intensive biodiversity research purposes, the concept of LifeWatch has emerged. The idea of LifeWatch is to construct an e-infrastructure and virtual laboratories through integrating large data sources, computational capacities, and tools for analysis and modelling in an open, service-oriented architecture. To be efficient and accurate, a continuous inflow of large quantities of data is essential. However, even with new techniques, government-funded monitoring data and research data will not feed the system with up-to-date species information of sufficient scale and resolution. This is an area where skilled amateur observers (citizen scientists) can contribute to a very valuable extent.After a preparatory phase, Swedish LifeWatch (SLW) was initiated in 2011. Swedish LifeWatch has an infrastructure where all components are accessible through open web services. At the SLW Analysis portal, different formats of species and environmental data can be accessed instantly, and integrated, analysed, visualized and downloaded at selected temporal or spatial scales. Swedish LifeWatch currently provides 40 million species observations from nine different databases, all harmonized according to standardized formats and the taxonomic backbone Dyntaxa. Some 35 million of these observations were provided by citizens through the online reporting system named the Species Observation System (SOS) or Artportalen. This paper describes this system, as well as the incentives that make it so successful. The citizen science data in the SOS are accessible, together with data from research and monitoring, in the SLW infrastructure, making the latter a powerful instrument for large-scale data extraction, visualization and analysis.
Highlights
Ecosystems are under enormous pressure worldwide and are experiencing rapid declines in biodiversity (Rockström et al, 2009, Pimm and Raven, 2000)
Any natural resource management programme or decision support body must depend on their underlying system for critical information on patterns and processes of biodiversity, which allows for analysis of biodiversity data from all relevant sources
An array of data repositories are already included in the Swedish LifeWatch (SLW) infrastructure (Fig. 1), covering terrestrial, fresh water and marine habitats, and organisms ranging from microalgae to plants, marine invertebrates to fish, and collembolans to large mammals
Summary
Ecosystems are under enormous pressure worldwide and are experiencing rapid declines in biodiversity (Rockström et al, 2009, Pimm and Raven, 2000) In response to these changes, a large number of national and international conservation and management programmes are being launched to assess ecological integrity and help establishing sustainable ecological conditions. Even if all existing data from biodiversity monitoring and research programs would be accessible to scientists for analysis today, there would still be large gaps in the spatial, temporal and taxonomic coverage across the globe (EU BON 2014) This creates a principal problem that obstructs our holistic understanding of the processes that connect all actors in an ecosystem. Different origin and purpose (i.e. citizen science, research, government monitoring, museum collections) accessible in coherent formats; and (iii) provide tools for exploring, analysing and visualizing biodiversity data The latter two initiatives are done in the context of the Swedish LifeWatch (SLW) project
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