Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON): The national unified resource for discovery, linkage and re-use of organismal occurrence data

Background/Question/Methods

A rising tide of biodiversity data is underway.  Field sensor networks, satellite and airborne imaging platforms, handheld field observation units, and museum digitization efforts are all producing massive stores of data describing the species that comprise the biological heritage of the United States.  Unfortunately, much of this information is stored in proprietary formats, isolated on remote computers, or sequestered on storage media, and for these or other reasons is generally inaccessible to external users.  The rise of ubiquitous network computing infrastructure and the application of common interoperable data models are beginning to break down information silos and promote synthesis studies.

In an effort to improve on our current capacity to aggregate, normalize and visualize the massive accumulation of species occurrence data, the newly-formed Core Science Analytics & Synthesis Program of the US Geological Survey (USGS) is developing the Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) project, as an integrated and permanent resource for biological occurrence data from the United States.

Results/Conclusions

BISON leverages USGS assets such as the full mirror and US Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the USGS National Map, and the accumulated human and infrastructure resources of the Survey’s long-term investment in research and data management and delivery in biological and geospatial data. The BISON prototype currently contains more than 80 million occurrence records of species found in the United States and integrates dozens of environmental layers for visualization and spatial analysis purposes, including the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) soils database and NASA imagery. A web front end provides spatial and taxonomic query capability. For example, users can define a geospatial polygon and retrieve all occurrences of species within it, refine the returned search results and then see how they relate to numerous environmental variables. Additional species occurrence data sources are being recruited, with emphasis on a) federal data sources and b) an invasive species theme. BISON’s service layer is under development through a partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and resides on their massive computing infrastructure which includes the Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) and the Cray Jaguar Petascale supercomputer, the third fastest on earth, and currently being upgraded to “Titan” which should regain the top spot. The BISON project being build on this powerful infrastructure enables broad access to standardized biological data and serves as a resource for enabling ecological data discovery, analysis, and synthesis.