Generalising Sensitive Species Data

By: Lee Belbin

Arthur Chapman and Oliver Grafton have just written a definitive guide to handling sensitive species data.

The  Guide to Best Practices for Generalising Primary Species-Occurrence Data is the result of a project generated by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) following concerns on the way different data providers were generalising information on species that were regarded as being sensitive. A Survey was conducted in early 2006 to ascertain what data providers were currently doing to generalize data and this was followed by extensive discussions and a workshop of experts to try and come up with some consistent methods for 1) determining what should be regarded as sensitive (both taxa and attributes) and 2) for generalizing sensitive data and documenting how this has been done.

This Guide to Best Practices provides a key for data providers to use in determining whether a species or attribute should be regarded as sensitive and its level of sensitivity, and provides guidelines on consistent wording for use in documentation.  It also provides guidelines on methods for generalizing data, both spatial and non-spatial.

The guide can be found as Chapter 6 of the GBIF Training Manual 1: Digitisation of natural History Collections Data at the following link

http://www.gbif.org/GBIF_org/GBIF_Documents/trainingmanual1/

This manual should be mandatory reading in Biology 101!

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