Global Biodiversity Information Facility

to the northern Cairns area, so the Cairns Botanical Garden.

And actually, I was looking through, there's an amazing website called GBIF, which is the Global Biodiversity Index, where you can see where specific species have come up.

And actually, a few years ago, it had been identified in the rainforest, the Daintree Rainforest, which is like a super tropical rainforest.

And this is over 150 years later.

moment.

And if we were to look at overall global biodiversity data coverage, GBIF is the main source of data.

It also comes into Target 21, which is on data as well as informing some of the other targets.

But if we look at countries where they have closed that coverage gap, South Korea and Japan actually do the best, partly because their National Institutes for Ecology were like, we're going to actually make sure that this data becomes available.

About two thirds of all global bird data is from North America.

Over 23% of all global available insect data is from the UK.

And so a global analysis of insects using GBIF data is going to be overemphasizing the impacts of not particularly British fauna.

And that, again, is a real challenge because Yes.

And Malaxis, a far-ranging genus of orchids found across much of the world.

At the University of Lagos, a 2021 project digitally archived all 20,000 specimens in its collection and uploaded them to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility database.

Excuse me.

But specimens collected since the project's completion now sit undigitized in a university building without reliable electricity, let alone climate control, leaving them vulnerable to mold, pests, and perhaps the greatest threat of all, fire.

Maybe it's, it's kind of a good example to speak through.

Um, so one of the biggest biodiversity, uh, kind of holders in the world is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

It holds, I think, um, over five billion occurrence records, uh, that has been accumulated from about the 16th century to today.

Um, and if you kind of look at a map of the occurrence records kind of filling the globe, um, it does look, you know, quite striking in terms of, you know, where, where there isn't an occurrence record is really the question now.

Um, but you need data t- in order to exert governance over that data.

And if you don't know where that data is, which is largely the case for indigenous collections and indigenous data, um, it's very hard to assert governance over it.

So here we are, we're looking at this, um, this Global Biodiversity Information Facility to try and identify where is the indigenous data in those three billion occurrence records, and there was no way of finding it.

We deployed all sorts of tools to try and find where that was, whose it was, and we couldn't come up with anything because partly the metadata fields themselves didn't hold that information.

S- so where we're pulling data from is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which is a mouthful.

[laughs]

GBIF for short.

This is a, it, it's the gold standard global platform for data sharing basically, supported by governments all around the world, including New Zealand.

And a whole range of different data sources feed into GBIF, including iNaturalist, which is really a, a critical point because this means anybody using iNaturalist, and if you haven't heard of that, it's a free app, really easy to use, that will help you figure out what species you're looking at, whether that's a plant or a bird or a f- mushroom-

Yeah

... or a insect.

Nice.

...

so it pulls data from a global data sharing platform called GBIF, which stands for Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a real mouthful.

Um, and a whole lot of different sources feed into that, uh, including council weed data, DOC weed data, um, and one of the major ones is iNaturalist.

Okay.

Uh, hopefully, uh, you get a great uptake, and as you said, you're gonna keep, um, uh, increasing the capability of the, of the tool.

Yes.

And just one final point, Andy, is I mentioned iNaturalist, which automatically feeds into GBIF, the s- the data source that we pull SWAT for.

So if farmers want to, uh, improve the weed distribution map for their region, which will of course make their weed alerts more accurate, then I encourage them to, um, have a go with iNaturalist.

The threat of these weeds is pervasive, so what can this open source digital surveillance system do about it? With SWAT, from today, anyone can set up a highly customized set of alerts online for types of weed and the places they are found.

SWAT will then watch local and international databases, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in particular, for when people find the weeds and then email alerts.

SWAT can tell that that's the first record of that species for the region or the suburb or the country or the island, and we'll send anyone who's got an alert set up with those criteria to say, "Hey, this is the first record for this island or suburb." There's a lot of power in this.

It's an early warning system of new weeds and weed spread.