A biodiversity cartography portal for nature conservationists, scientists, and naturalists
Tania Walisch, Guy Colling, John van Breda
Abstract
The Luxembourg Museum of Natural History is the national node for biodiversity data. The Museum uses Recorder 6 (http://www.recordersoftware.org/), extended with a collection and thesaurus module, to manage and collate its data. A number of local associations and scientific collaborators also use local instances of Recorder 6 and contribute species observation data of plants, animals and fungi as well as biotope observations data to the node database at the Museum. A cache database is generated for web publication at regular intervals and holds non-confidential simplified records linked to biodiversity portals including Biological Collections Access Service for Europe (BioCASE) and Global Biodiversity Information facility (GBIF) for the international scientific community. These use an internationally recognised data schema (ABCDEFG, Access to Biological Collection Database Extended for Geosciences) for the querying of bio- and geoscientific databases.
Full details of the records held by the Museum, for example the exact spatial references, are of particular interest to those engaged in nature conservation, environmental impact studies, and scientific work at a local scale. In the past 10 years, the Museum has received an increasing number of requests from non-governmental organisations, consultancies, and public bodies active in the domain of nature conservation for downloads of detailed data.
In 2009, a team at the Museum worked to build a geographical biodiversity web portal in collaboration with the Ministry of the Environment and the Administration of Topography of Luxembourg, and with the support of the government’s eLuxembourg initiative. The application is Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant and uses open source software tools for the front end application, for securing web services for providers, and for content management.
The geographic portal is targeted at professional users who get controlled access to the data via secure logins. The application makes use of external map web services like the topography or orthophotography maps from the Administration of Topography. Users can select to display map layers including background topographic maps or polygon maps, for example Natura 2000 zones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natura_2000). Quick search facilities allow the user to show all occurrences of a taxon or a biotope on the map or in a named place. Grid and point localisations of occurrences are shown in their original geometries. Advanced search facilities involve multiple filtering by geographical object, taxonomic level, legal protection or threat status of a taxon or a biotope, survey name, determiner, date, and the precision of the spatial references. Geographical selection of data can be done by choosing an existing polygon on the map, uploading a polygon (*.shp) file (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHP_file), or drawing a polygon on the map. Filter results are shown on the map and in a data grid below the map which displays a user configurable set of attributes for each occurrence. The report can be downloaded in pdf, csv (comma separated values), or rtf (rich text) file formats and the distribution map can be saved as a pdf. The portal is still under development and will be publicly accessible in winter 2009-2010.
Full details of the records held by the Museum, for example the exact spatial references, are of particular interest to those engaged in nature conservation, environmental impact studies, and scientific work at a local scale. In the past 10 years, the Museum has received an increasing number of requests from non-governmental organisations, consultancies, and public bodies active in the domain of nature conservation for downloads of detailed data.
In 2009, a team at the Museum worked to build a geographical biodiversity web portal in collaboration with the Ministry of the Environment and the Administration of Topography of Luxembourg, and with the support of the government’s eLuxembourg initiative. The application is Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant and uses open source software tools for the front end application, for securing web services for providers, and for content management.
The geographic portal is targeted at professional users who get controlled access to the data via secure logins. The application makes use of external map web services like the topography or orthophotography maps from the Administration of Topography. Users can select to display map layers including background topographic maps or polygon maps, for example Natura 2000 zones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natura_2000). Quick search facilities allow the user to show all occurrences of a taxon or a biotope on the map or in a named place. Grid and point localisations of occurrences are shown in their original geometries. Advanced search facilities involve multiple filtering by geographical object, taxonomic level, legal protection or threat status of a taxon or a biotope, survey name, determiner, date, and the precision of the spatial references. Geographical selection of data can be done by choosing an existing polygon on the map, uploading a polygon (*.shp) file (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHP_file), or drawing a polygon on the map. Filter results are shown on the map and in a data grid below the map which displays a user configurable set of attributes for each occurrence. The report can be downloaded in pdf, csv (comma separated values), or rtf (rich text) file formats and the distribution map can be saved as a pdf. The portal is still under development and will be publicly accessible in winter 2009-2010.