[Taxacom] Chameleons, GBIF, and the Red List
Richard Pyle
deepreef at bishopmuseum.org
Mon Aug 25 02:35:03 CDT 2014
2014
Hi Stephen,
Let's say there are half a million bogus records in GBIF. That's 1% -- which is MUCH better than most datasets! The truth is, there could be fifty million bogus records, and it would STILL be cleaner than a lot of datasets.
A lot of this discussion is very silly. The answer is easy: If you find the data in GBIF useful, then use it. If not, then don't. As Donat pointed out, the amount of money GBIF uses is little more than a rounding error compared to the global biodiversity research budget; so this nonsense about "money could be better spent" blah, blah, blah, and "GBIF was built by bureaucrats for bureaucrats" blah, blah, blah is just plain looney.
Having said that, I think this thread has been very useful and interesting overall. It's really about clearing up misunderstandings, and thinking through plausible solutions to real-world biodiversity data problems.
Aloha,
Rich
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Taxacom [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf
> Of Stephen Thorpe
> Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 9:11 PM
> To: TAXACOM; Donat Agosti
> Cc: Bob Mesibov; quentin groom
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Chameleons, GBIF, and the Red List
>
> >What is the geographic resolution? What is the taxonomic authority?
> >This then would define data quality much more accurately<
>
> I find it hard to take such fine grained data quality issues seriously, when
> GBIF has records like the bark louse Peripsocus maoricus classified as a virus
> (and attributed to a data provider, NZOR, which doesn't say that!) How many
> more bogus records are there in GBIF? Tens, hundreds, thousands???
>
> Stephen
>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Mon, 25/8/14, Donat Agosti <agosti at amnh.org> wrote:
>
> Subject: RE: [Taxacom] Chameleons, GBIF, and the Red List
> To: "TAXACOM" <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
> Cc: "quentin groom" <quentin at br.fgov.be>, "Bob Mesibov"
> <mesibov at southcom.com.au>, "Stephen Thorpe"
> <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
> Received: Monday, 25 August, 2014, 6:53 PM
>
> There are three points
> that appear again and again and need some thoughts.
>
> Money spent on a useless
> institution
>
> I think it is a
> myth that GBIF is siphoning off a lot of funding for biodiversity (taxonomy). I
> rather argue, if there is no GBIF, a lot of money would not be spoken for the
> biodiversity community at all. GBIF established itself, as a rare kind, from
> with the OECD, a long tedious process that people like Jim Edwards,
> Meredith Lane and Ebbe Nielsen initiated and went through long gruesome
> meetings. It is also partially enabled through the fact that the Convention on
> Biological Diversity asks the parties (countries) to build biodiversity
> observation systems (see eg two recently EU-funded projects EU-BON and
> pro-iBiosphere, the former being requested from the EU to build a the
> European leg of the Global Biodiversity Observation Network the latter got
> funded in competition with all sciences and thus should be regarded as a
> resource that has been successfully created from scratch.
>
> But we
> taxonomists do a very bad job in creating such
> opportunities: This current discussion just confirms it. We complain about
> bad data - data we create and should create.
> At the same time we are not able to provide a reference list of all the
> species in the world. We are not able to provide a response to the need to
> build the bases for global biodiversity monitoring system as bases for
> biodiversity conservation. This goal would define the quality of the data we
> need, and will have to collect.
>
> Even if GBIF would compete for resources:
> Compete against whom? Stephen Thorpe? An institution? GBIF is a global
> institution that has members (States) and thus competes at a global level.
> The global level though are more than 3400 herbaria worldwide, an unknown
> number of natural history museums, an unknown number of grants
> awarded in the area of biodiversity. Is this money that GBIF gets really that
> big, or rather a small fraction? It is rather the latter.
>
> In a sense, the
> discussion we are having regarding the use of GBIF is very similar to the
> discussion on the usefulness of the United Nations. There are plenty of folks
> out there that consider this a waste of money. At the same time, if there is
> no UN, there is no system that allows States to meet, to bring up such
> obviously unrelated issue and discussions at global level such as Regulation
> of Small Firearms to Biodiversity (eg Rio Earth Summit). We are global, we
> cannot deny it even if many of us want to this such as the Climate Change
> deniers, we need global solutions that cannot be found and created at an ad
> hoc basis.
>
> Look at scientific names. Here we do not have a GBIF that we can complain
> about. We have some sort of many one man shows that do not talk to each
> other and thus a critical assessment like the one on occurrences is NOT even
> possible. And this is pretty much reflected in, and the cause of in the
> complaint about taxonomic correctness in GBIF data. We do not try to get
> our acts together, like Ebbe, Meredith and Jim many years ago, to build such
> a system. For example, we do not take BHL as a bases to build a global
> catalogue of life that brings together the names, bibliographies and the
> published record which would allow understanding each taxonomic name
> usage, to link the TNU to the original observation record cited and thus build
> a much more powerful GBIF. With few exceptions (I.e. Pensoft) we rather
> willingly defend publishing in a very obstructive way (PDF, not Open Access)
> that inhibits building such a system because of its prohibitive price tag to
> extract this information later, and even to discover this bit of information.
>
> We really
> need to put this discussion about the value of GBIF into a bigger context,
> and use the same criteria over our entire field of biodiversity information for
> other kind of data.
>
>
> IUCN does a
> better job
>
> IUCN with its
> Red List has a much more direct effect on policy making, especially in
> conservation. Therefore, the data they use should be much more scrutinized
> and in fact all the raw data should be available tochallenge the red listing.
> Can you do this? Why aren't you question their data and results as you do
> with GBIF? Are you happy that you have to be for access to their data sets,
> one by one? Is it legitimation enough that you have a monopoly that nobody
> can challenge?
> Are you happy with a polygon or with observation data? Can you get all the
> data the UNEP/WCMC is using for their analyses? No, you cannot in many
> cases for various reasons, and thus you cannot challenge them in the same
> way.
>
> I think, I prefer GBIF-data
> with all its weaknesses as opposed to analyses I just have to believe
> because of an "inner circle". I can challenge GBIF data, complain about it, and
> hopefully use the lessons learned to create a better system for the future
> that delivers what I want.
>
>
> Data need be cleaned up
>
> Yes, data need be cleaned up,
> BUT the best cleaning of data doesn't help to create the data standards that
> you envision: Properly identified with spatially high and accurate resolution
> data. You only get out what you put in. You can't create a highly precise GPS
> read from most of label data we have. Also, as much as we complain about
> data quality, as much should we stress to get metadata that defines the
> source of the data: Why has it been collected? What is the geographic
> resolution? What is the taxonomic authority? This then would define data
> quality much more accurately.
>
>
> Donat
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Thorpe [mailto:stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz]
>
> Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 11:46 PM
> To: Donat Agosti; Bob Mesibov
> Cc: TAXACOM; quentin groom
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Chameleons, GBIF, and the Red List
>
> Let's take
> a deep breath, stand back, and look at this again, shall we?
> The key points are getting obscured somewhat by ranting.
>
> GBIF harvests data from
> various data providers, many of which are already freely available online. In
> these cases, we have a dilemma: on the one hand, it is convenient to have
> one place to go for data from various providers. But the data providers are
> typically kept more up-to-date than GBIF (which only harvests data
> occasionally). One solution would be for GBIF to simply point to data
> provider sites (so you could look up a taxon on GBIF, and it would tell you
> where to go for data). But, then GBIF would be very simple, and not much
> better than Google! So instead, GBIF offers some sort of "standard data
> output" for the various data providers, and some sort of overall analysis of all
> the data, though the details are a bit "vague", and the overall analysis may
> break down for multiple data providers of varying quality.
> One crucial point is that GBIF in no way "validates/confirms/annotates" data
> from data providers. There is no "quality filter" (or even "quality assessor")
> which can be standardly applied to all data harvested by GBIF.
>
> I guess the obvious question now is "so what"? Well, given the amount of
> funding that GBIF chews up, we really must ask ourselves if it is money well
> spent? Who uses GBIF and why? I have already offered an answer to that
> one (i.e. it is effectively a great big bureaucratic "placebo").
>
> Stephen
>
>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Mon, 25/8/14, Bob Mesibov <mesibov at southcom.com.au>
> wrote:
>
> Subject: Re:
> [Taxacom] Chameleons, GBIF, and the Red List
> To: "Donat Agosti" <agosti at amnh.org>
> Cc: "TAXACOM" <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>, "quentin groom"
> <quentin at br.fgov.be>
> Received: Monday, 25 August, 2014, 9:27 AM
>
> Donat Agosti wrote:
>
> "I feel, the
> discussion
> is too much centered on data
> that has not the information content needed, like studying a Landsat image
> at 30 meter resolution and discussing what tree species is shown"
>
> Excellent
> metaphor! For most
> scientific uses, you need much more data than is provided by any available
> database. Can you get everything you need online? No. Do existing
> aggregators like GBIF offer a helpful starting point? For some people
> and some uses, yes.
>
> But now the
> important question: when you have all the information you need, and
> clean it and enrich it, do you publish it online in a usable form? I don't know
> what Quentin Groom's project was about, nor do I know if he published his
> final data.
>
> In my own case, every
> one of
> my 12123 locality records for Australian Millipedes is freely available in CSV
> format (and in abbreviated form in
> KML) from the 'Millipedes of Australia' website.
> This store is larger and more up to date and contains fewer errors than any
> aggregator store, or even, the combined data providers' stores (because
> certain providers have been slow to add my edits to particular records, or to
> upload them to their own or aggregator stores).
>
> But if people
> like me and Quentin publish data freely to the Web and aggregators don't
> use this improved/extended data, aggregation looks less and less useful.
>
> --
> Dr Robert Mesibov
>
> Honorary Research Associate
> Queen Victoria
> Museum and Art Gallery, and School of Land and Food, University
> of Tasmania Home contact:
>
> PO
> Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia
> 7316
> (03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195
>
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