Planet management, GBIF, and the future of biodiversity informatics

Next week I'm in Copenhagen for GBIC, the Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference. The goal of the conference is to:

...convene expertise in the fields of biodiversity informatics, genomics, earth observation, natural history collections, biodiversity research and policy needed to set such collaboration in motion.

The collaboration referred to is the agreement to mobilise data and informatics capability to met the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.

I confess I have mixed feelings about the upcoming meeting. There will be something like 100 people attending the conference, with backgrounds ranging from pure science to intergovernmental policy. It promises to be interesting, but whether a clear vision of the future of biodiversity informatics will emerge is another matter.

GBIC is part of the process of "planet management", a phrase that's been around for a while, but I only came across in the Bowker's essay "Biodiversity Datadiversity"¹:

Bowker, G. C. (2000). Biodiversity Datadiversity. Social Studies of Science, 30(5), 643–683. doi:10.1177/030631200030005001

Bowker's essay is well worth a read, not least for the choice quotes such as:

Each particular discipline associated with biodiversity has its own incompletely articulated series of objects. These objects each enfold an organizational history and subtend a particular temporality or spatiality. They frequently are incompletely articulated with other objects, temporalities and spatialities — often legacy versions, when drawing on non-proximate disciplines. If one wants to produce a consistent, long-term database of biodiversity-relevant information the world over, all this sounds like an unholy mess. At the very least it suggests that global panopticons are not the way to go in biodiversity data. (p. 675, emphasis added)

and

I have not, in general, questioned the mania to name which is rife in the circles whose work I have described. There is no absolutely compelling connection between the observation that many of the world’s species are dying and the attempt to catalogue the world before they do. If your house is on fire, you do not necessarily stop to inventory the contents before diving out the window. However, as Jack Goody (1977) and others have observed, list-keeping is at the heart of our body politic. It is also, by extension, at the heart of our scientific strategies. Right or wrong, it is what we do. (p. 676, emphasis added)

Given that I'm a fan of the notion of a "global panopticon", and spend a lot of time fussing with lists of names, I find Bowker's views refreshing. Meantime, roll on GBIC2012.

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1. Bowker cites Elichirigoity as a source of the term "planet management":

Fernando Elichirigoity (1999), Planet Management: Limits to Growth,
Computer Simulations, and the Emergence of Global Spaces (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press). ISBN 0810115875 (Google Books oP3wVnKpGDkC).

From the limited Google preview, and the review by Edwards, this looks like an interesting book:

Edwards, P. (2000). Book Review:Planet Management: Limits to Growth, Computer Simulation, and the Emergence of Global Spaces Fernando Elichirigoity. Isis, 91(4), 828. doi:10.1086/385020 (PDF here)

Where is the "crowd" in crowdsourcing? Mapping EOL Flickr photos

In any discussion of data gathering or data cleaning the term "crowdsourcing" inevitably comes up. A example where this approach has been successful is the Encyclopedia of Life's Flickr pool, where Flickr users upload images that are harvested by EOL.

Given that many Flickr photos are taken with cameras that have built-in GPS (such as the iPhone, the most common camera on Flickr) we could potentially use the Flickr photos not only as a source of images of living things, but to supplement existing distributional data. For example, Flickr has enough data to fairly accurately construct outlines of countries, cities, and neighbourhoods, see The Shape of Alpha, so what about organismal distribution?

This question is part of a Masters project by Jonathan McLatchie here at Glasgow, comparing distributions of taxa in GBIF with those based on Flickr photos. As part of that project the question arose "where are the Flickr photos being taken?" If most of the photos are being taken in the developed world, then there are at least two problems. The first is the obvious bias against organisms that live elsewhere (i.e., typically many photos won't be taken in those regions where you'd actually like to get more data). Secondly, the presence of zoos, wildlife parks, and botanical gardens means you are likely to get images of organisms well outside their natural range.

Jonathan suggested a "heatmap" of the Flickr photos would help, so to create this I wrote a script to grab metadata for the photos from the Encyclopedia of Life's Flickr pool, extract latitude and longitude, and draw the resulting locations on a map. I aggregated the points into 1°×1° squares, and generated a GBIF-style map of the photos:



Lots of photos from North America, Europe, and Australasia, as one might expect. Coverage of the rest of the globe is somewhat patchy. I guess the key question to ask is extent the "crowd" (Flickr users in this case) is essentially replicating the sampling biases already in projects like GBIF that are aggregating data from museum collections (most of which are in the developed world).

The PHP code to fetch the photo data and create the map is available in github. You'll need a Flickr API key to run the script. The github repository has an SVG version of the map (with a bitmap background). A bitmap copy of the map is available on FigShare http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.92668.

UUIDs

Just for future reference:

@rdmpage To make it more concise, help tracking etc

— figshare (@figshare) June 22, 2012