Mapping birds, biodiversity and business: the role of GIS in conservation

Mapping birds, biodiversity and

business: the role of GIS in

conservation

Mark Balman - GIS Support Analyst

BirdLife International

Who are BirdLife International

What we do

How do we use GIS

BirdLife Partners operate in over one hundred countries and territories worldwide

More than 4,000 staff working for conservation Over 2,500,000 members worldwide 10,000,000 worldwide supporters Over 2 million children involved annually Over 1,000,000 hectares owned or managed

BirdLife Partners collaborate on regional work programmes in every continent.

BirdLife's aims are to: Prevent the extinction of any bird species Maintain and where possible improve the conservation status of all bird species Conserve and where appropriate improve and enlarge sites and habitats important for birds Help, through birds, to conserve biodiversity and to improve the quality of people's lives Integrate bird conservation into sustaining people's livelihoods

Why Conserve Birds?

Birds are part of biodiversity of immense value

Societies value birds for economic, cultural, ethical and spiritual reasons

The birdwatching industry is a growing economic force

Birds are excellent indicators of the state of the environment.

Black and Yellow Broadbill

Knowledge Management

Enormous quantities of high quality, up-to-date, synthesised data are needed to prioritise species, sites and habitats correctly.

Managing data, information and knowledge within BirdLife is a task in itself and GIS plays an ever increasing and important role.

A brief history of GIS at BirdLife

Pre 2000, Atlas GIS, MapInfo

2000 – 2005, MapInfo

2006 – present, ArcGIS, Google Earth,Postresql, Geoserver + others..

A brief background of geospatial data at BirdLife

Endemic Bird Areas - 218 regions identified using species point localities and then delineated into polygons

Important Bird Areas – programme began in the mid 80s, have now identified over 10,000 sites

Species range maps – In 2000, 1,200 maps digitised, now have maps for 10,064 species

Other data collected

All site based information collected within a bespoke web based database – World Biodiversity Database. Mysql based (limited spatial capabilities)

All species information now switched to the Species Information Service (SIS)

Species occurrence data stored within an Access database and a file geodatabase

External data we use

Global landcover data - GLC 2000, Joint Research Centre (1km), Globcover 2009, ESA (300m)

GTOPO, Globe, ETOPO, SRTM elevation data (1km, 90m)

World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA)

Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) occurrence data

Processing information

ArcGIS models and scripts aid in creating analyses and maintenance e.g.

Simple modelling of species range within habitats at specific elevations likely to become more complex

Subset data into various products (species range maps) or national level IBA datasets

Dissemination of data

Data has various uses ranging from internal analyses for cartographic output for inclusion into reports

Species range maps now served dynamically to each species factsheet on the Datazone section of the BirdLife website

Species maps are also available to the wider public via registration on the BirdLife website

Since November 2011, we have had over 600 requests for species range maps (mostly from students and academics but some from commercial enterprises such as GIS consultancies, petrochemical and mineral extraction companies)

Species maps are also provided to the EuroGEOSS project via web services (WMS, WFS)

Current / Future projects

Handbook Birds of the World (splitting taxa to ~13,000spp)

Develop two web based mapping portals for Marine IBAs

Soaring Birds

Birds In Europe 3 collaboration with European Topic Centre on Biological Diversity (European Environment Agency)

Thank you for your attention..