Potential for regional councils to use GBIF to access and share species occurrence data for biodiversity and biosecurity management.

Using an Envirolink Advice Grant, ORC Senior Scientist Dr Scott Jarvie on behalf of Te Uru Kahika (Regional and Unitary Councils Aotearoa) approached Dr Aaron Wilton from Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research to investigate the feasibility of GBIF to mobilise species occurrence data to inform biodiversity and biosecurity management.

Across Aotearoa New Zealand, councils were found to collect extensive biodiversity and biosecurity species occurrence data. Exemplar datasets were provided by regional council staff to assess for compatibility with GBIF and the requisite data standards. All the data sets were found to be compatible with the data standards utilised by GBIF and would be appropriate to be published to GBIF.

A survey of regional council staff identified several frequently encountered difficulties for these staff associated with species occurrence data. These included issues associated with the discovery and accessing of existing data, and reformatting and integrating data sets, through to sharing data sets with other parties. Nearly all these difficulties could be addressed by integrating GBIF with regional council information systems or processes.

The key recommendation from the report was that regional councils should adopt GBIF as a primary means of preparing, sharing, and accessing publically available species occurrence data.

The full report is available here: Potential for regional councils to use GBIF to access and share species occurrence data