Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, Rocky Mountain CESU

archived

This cooperative agreement would be funded as part of the National Biological Information Infrastructure of the US Geological Survey. The purpose is to further the development of the data component for the national marine theme of NBII (called OBIS-USA). This cooperative effort to build a biogeographic data system to support marine biodiversity research and management includes interaction with various state, federal and international organizations as well as interested research and educational institutions. Tasks include building a relational database for geospatially referenced marine biodiversity data, a web GIS interface for display and analysis of data, and a system to ingest and update the data including mapping of databases to the main relational data base and developing appropriate data and information exchange protocols to keep the database current. The end product will be an operational system that includes as a minimum the following deliverables:YEAR 1a. A stable infrastructure that includes a federation of providers delivering DarwinCore compliant records to an RDBMS system. b. A website that allows users to query the RDBMS system and return both tabular occurrence data and mapping results simultaneously. Map and tabular results are correctly linked so that map operations can update the local record set and vice versa. c. A set of environmental and other contextual GIS data that can be linked through the map application to occurrence data. d. Software applications that allow basic data analysis including calculating species richness, determining environmental conditions for a set of species occurrences, and determining ecologically relevant variables that limit species distributions. e. Implementation of providers or other data delivery mechanisms to allow data integration into the OBIS-USA RDMS. The primary focus for new data is on 3 to 8 key datasets (including NOAA fisheries data CalCOFI, MARMAP & SEAMAP, as well as USGS and EPA Data), including implementation of a collaboration site for data submission and quality assessment.f. Development of a marine biodiversity data model that would allow for interoperability of physical chemical and biological data. YEAR 2 & 3 a. Continue management and expansion of the central data set andb. Develop data analysis and application tools for the data

High