New NBS Clearinghouse Data Projects
NBS science centers, cooperative research units, and other program offices have begun a long-term effort to identify and catalog their biological data and information holdings, and to prepare these for electronic accessibility and use by researchers, resource managers, State and local governments, private companies, and the general public. A current pilot program has identified several selected NBS biological data sets and information products that were determined to be especially valuable examples of the type of data and information that can be provided electronically to many customers through the NBII. These will be prepared, documented and served through the NBII Clearinghouse over the next several months. The projects included in this pilot program cover a broad range of topics, as described below.
Expanding Access to Information on Changes in the Flora and Fauna of the U.S.
The NBS Office of Inventory and Monitoring currently provides electronic access to valuable information from the North American Breeding Bird Survey and the Christmas Bird Counts. Through this project, this effort will be expanded to offer several more sources of trend information on birds. Additional information will include unpublished NBS raptor migration summaries, and historical reviews of population changes, as well as expanding the years included from the Christmas Bird Counts back to 1900. The project will also develop and serve metadata descriptions of the extremely valuable data holdings of the Bird Banding Laboratory System files (54 million banding records and almost 3 million recovery records).
The project will also provide electronic access over NBII to estimates of population changes for many other groups, including fisheries, amphibians, marine mammals, butterflies, and sharks, and changes in ratios of exotic to native plant species. Priority will be given to compiling and serving State- level assessments of population trends.
Project Coordinator: Paul Geissler
Phone: 301-497-5780
email: Paul_Geissler@nbs.gov
Documentation of NBS Global Change Research Datasets to be served on the NBII The NBS Global Change Research Program has extensive sets of metadata that describe about 100-150 spatial and non-spatial datasets. The bulk of these metadata are derived from the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management Global Change Research programs and currently reside in two separate directories. This project will serve to consolidate these metadata into a Master Database Directory of NBS Global Change Datasets. The metadata will reflect the FGDC Geospatial Metadata Content Standard and the NBII Non-Spatial Metadata Content Standard. In addition, many other datasets created through the NBS Global Change Research Program will also be documented and added to the Master Database Directory.
These datasets are cross-cutting in scope and of national interest, spanning a large variety of disciplines, including paleoecology, geomorphology, riparian ecology, palynology, and dendrochronology. The National Research Council's report: "Data Forum: A Review of an Implementation Plan for the U.S. Global Change Data and Information System," noted that while data repositories exist for much physical science data, no repository for biological and terrestrial global change research data exists. The NBS global change data, which is primarily biological and terrestrial, ground- based and of local scale, thus complements the broad-scale, atmospheric and space-based data collected by most of the other agencies in the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
Project Coordinator: Linda Pettit-Waldner
Phone: 703-358-1757
email: Linda_Petitwaldner@nbs.gov
Three Special Collections of Biological Information: Expanding Access to Data about NBS Library Collections NBS libraries and information centers contain unique and valuable collections built over many years to meet the needs of scientific researchers. These collections, and the expertise of the library staff, have been and continue to be shared broadly through partnerships with other scientists, libraries, students, and the public. As part of a continuing cooperative venture by NBS librarians, this project will make data about three of these special collections available electronically through the NBII.
The National Wildlife Health Center Library in Madison, Wisconsin has a collection that focuses on the study of wildlife disease and the promotion of wildlife health. Materials on the topics of disease diagnosis, disease outbreaks, animal welfare, and disease control are an integral part of the library's resources. The collection of the Upper Mississippi Science Center Library, located in La Crosse, Wisconsin, focuses on the ecology of large rivers and inland waters, particularly the Upper Mississippi River and its drainage basin. Other areas of interest include the ecology and management of migratory birds, the environmental fate and biological effects of toxic contaminants in freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems, and the development, registration, or approval of chemicals for the management and culture of fishes. The John Van Oosten Library of the Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is recognized as a unique source of information on basin-wide biological and ecological concerns, and its collection is especially strong in the areas of aquatic habitats and resources, particularly fisheries, as well as contaminants and ecology of the Great Lakes.
Project Coordinator: Ann Zimmerman
Phone: 700-378-1210
email: Ann_Zimmerman@nbs.gov
A Multimedia Reference for Vegetation Classification of the Western United States
The NBS and The Nature Conservancy are cooperating to develop a multimedia reference to A Vegetation Classification of the Western United States (Bourgeron and Engelking 1994). This publication represents a 10-year effort by The Nature Conservancy's Western Regional Ecology Program and the western state Heritage Programs to consolidate all of the existing information for a vegetation classification of ten western states (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NM, NV, OR, UT, WA, and WY). Several agencies and organizations, including the NBS Gap Analysis Program, National Park Service Vegetation Mapping Program, U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service Land Acquisition Priority System, Environmental Protection Agency Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program, the U.S. Forest Service, the Upper Great Lakes Biodiversity Committee, and the Ecological Society of America, are using the Conservancy's national-scope classification down to the alliance level. The western states classification extends this national classification to the finer- scale floristic level of plant associations.
The CD-ROM product will provide interactive access to information on over 1,700 plant associations in the west and community characterization abstracts for about 250 of the rarest communities. These abstracts contain information about each community's environmental attributes, dynamic processes, landscape relations, variability, threats, management, and conservation needs, and are compiled with references. In addition to the CD-ROM product, metadata and associated indexes on the information will be served over the Internet on NBII.
Project Coordinator: Ron Osborn
Phone: 970-226-9380
email: Ron_Osborn@nbs.gov
Beginning in the late 1800's and continuing until about 1940, staff of the original Biological Survey in the National Museum of Natural History plotted the distributions of vertebrates from museum records. In this pilot project, coordinated by the NBS Patuxent Environmental Science Center, this manual card file (about 20,000 records) will be converted to digital format, with digital coordinate data from the Geographic Names Information System matched to specimen locality records. The locality database will be available electronically through NBII. Next, records from this Biological Survey locality system will be matched to localities associated with specimen records in the National Museum's specimen databases. This will add geographic coordinates to all matched mammal, bird, reptile, and amphibian specimen records in the National Museum's databases.
Completion of this project will make thousands of extremely valuable historical records of the National Museum's vertebrate specimens available for use in GIS and related applications. The project will also serve as a pilot for similar data geocoding efforts for other museum collections
Project Coordinator: Roy McDiarmid
Phone: 202-357-2780
email: mnhvz056@sivm.si.edu
Ecological Data for Northeastern Ecosystems
The Connecticut River and its surrounding watershed contribute significantly to biological diversity in the Northeastern U.S. The NBS Northeastern/Connecticut River Ecosystem Initiative has compiled information about published and unpublished data sets, geographic information systems (GIS) databases, aerial photos, remote sensing data, museum collections, and other information. Much of this existing data and information has previously been inaccessible to or unusable by many decision makers and resource managers in the region, because of limited distribution, different formats, and other factors.
The NBS is also working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and with other public and private organizations to develop a wide range of new and complementary GIS datasets on the region covering: wetlands, fish distribution, fish habitats, forest cover, neotropical migratory forest bird habitat, in-stream barriers to fish migration, historic and current salmon stocking activities, and water quality.
Through this NBII project, this valuable data and information will be prepared for serving over the Internet. On-line publication will provide government officials, resource managers, and the public with immediate access to information needed for informed decision making and will facilitate proactive resource management in several Northeastern states.
Project Coordinator: Robert Winfree
Phone: 607-753-3379
email: Bob_Winfree@nbs.gov
Internet Access to Aerial Photographs of the Upper Mississippi River Floodplain
Upper Mississippi River resource managers, researchers, citizens, industry, and local government officials will soon have access to color-infrared photographs of the Mississippi River floodplain taken during the summer of 1994. The NBS has begun an effort that will offer easy Internet access to this valuable collection of photographs. This collection represents the only comprehensive baseline color-infrared photography readily accessible to NBS partners. In the wake of the 1993 flood, these photographs are of significant importance for post-flood impact analyses.
The Environmental Management Technical Center, a NBS Science Center located in Onalaska, Wisconsin, will prepare and serve approximately 2,500 high resolution (1:15,000-scale) color-infrared photographs covering 1,300 river miles of the Upper Mississippi River floodplain. Center staff will develop the necessary information about the data, create digital indexes, develop interactive browsing capabilities, and serve this collection of photographs on NBII via the Internet. In cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Management Technical Center manages the largest river-related inventory and monitoring, research, spatial analysis, and information management and sharing program in the United States.
Project Coordinator: Norman Hildrum
Phone: 608-783-7550 X49
email: Norm_Hildrum@nbs.gov
Home page: http://www.emtc.nbs.gov
National Wildlife Health Information Partnership
Development of a national wildlife health information partnership will provide natural resource managers, the scientific community, cooperators and the general public with timely, reliable information about the status and emerging health trends of wildlife populations. The need for rapid access to information is critical, especially given the recent increases in the incidence of infectious disease in both human and wildlife populations. The NBS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, has been involved in the study of wildlife disease for 20 years and is uniquely capable of providing a clearinghouse for health-related wildlife information. NWHC personnel are working with a select group of partners to provide access to various collections of information on wildlife health.
Initially, NWHC will serve its quarterly wildlife mortality reports, selected wildlife disease fact sheets, information on handling specimens, a list of organizations/individuals to contact regarding wildlife health issues and a bibliography of publications by Center staff on wildlife health topics. One of the quarterly reports and some publication information is already available on the Center's WWW home page (http://www.emtc.nbs.gov/nwhchome.html). Endangered species summaries and disease trend information will be added shortly. Metadata on the Center's two major wildlife mortality datafiles will be available by the end of the year, and work has begun on implementation of a wildlife health listserver.
Project Coordinator: Karen Cunningham
Phone: 608-264-5411
email: Karen_Cunningham@nbs.gov
Inventorying and Documenting Existing Spatial Data Sets for the NBII
The NBS Southern Science Center in Lafayette, LA maintains a large and diverse assortment of spatial data sets developed over the past 10 years. Data exist for a wide variety of application areas, including waterfowl populations and distribution patterns, wetland and forested ecosystems, wetlands status and trends for numerous locations in the southeastern U.S., and neotropical migratory bird distribution patterns in the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic coast. The data are much in demand to support GIS and related analyses for many partners and cooperators. In 1994, for example the Center responded to over 100 requests for spatial data and analysis. Through this NBII project, these valuable data sets will be inventoried and documented with metadata. Metadata will be served on NBII and the accompanying data will be made available electronically via anonymous FTP. This will allow the Center to serve its many customers better. Priorities will be established to ensure the data sets that are most in demand will be made available as soon as possible. Project Coordinator: Marcia McNiff Phone: 318-266-8572 email: Marcia_McNiff@nbs.gov
