COS 131-3
Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON): Mapping species occurrence data with ITIS-enabled search
Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) (http://bison.usgs.ornl.gov) provides access to species occurrence data indicating the presence of terrestrial and aquatic species at a location and time in the United States and its Territories as recorded or collected by a person (or instrument). The species occurrence data that are available through BISON have been contributed by various Federal and State agencies, universities, citizen scientists, and non-profit organizations, either directly to BISON or indirectly through their participation in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) (http://www.gbif.org). Each record in a species occurrence dataset available in BISON will typically consist of at least a scientific name (genus and specific epithet), a date, and one or more geographic references such as a state name, county name, and/or decimal latitude and longitude coordinates. Additional data fields describing a species occurrence event in more detail are also often available. From the graphic user interface, BISON search results may be displayed on an interactive map or downloaded as a .csv text file, .kml Google Earth file, or .zip shapefile bundle.
Results/Conclusions
Created by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and housed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, BISON has also partnered with the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) to provide improved species search capabilities; and with the USGS National Map and others to offer more than 30 data layers for data visualization of BISON's 126+ million records. Recent improvement in BISON's infrastructure now allows ITIS-enabled searches of larger taxonomic groups, including taxonomic synonyms.
To respond to the needs of ecological modelers and BISON data providers with their own Web presences, BISON has also been improving its Web services and API (Application Programming Interface) to facilitate machine-to-machine queries about specific geographic areas, species, data providers, and other filtering criteria. BISON WMS (Web Map Service) end points can be used to render BISON data in a mapping application such as OpenLayers. There are two WMS endpoints in BISON: The Heatmap WMS simply returns the search results as matrixed values represented as colors; the Species WMS endpoint returns a point occurrence map. BISON also has a Solr interface for machine retrieval of species occurrences according to a variety of user-specified parameters.
With its newly integrated taxonomic disambiguation for improved data retrieval, BISON provides a gateway for serving, searching, mapping, and downloading integrated species occurrence records from multiple data sources, and data modeling opportunities and solutions for ecologists and other resource managers.