The map of life project: Big data and new global-scale tools for biogeography and biodiversity

Background/Question/Methods

Given that patterns of biodiversity today, and over deeper time, show important relationships to climate, how will changing climate over the next century affect biodiversity?  How will climate change interact with land use, and the biological homogenization of the planet via invasive species?  What are the rates and magnitude of species distributional change and can those rates be forecast into the future with any certainty?  These are among the great scientific questions of our day, with vital implications for human welfare.  But addressing these types of global questions requires unprecedented access to data, as well as better mechanisms for rapidly processing and interpreting those data through better leveraging of modern technologies.   Reassembling data and information regarding species distributions and building the platform and tools to re-integrate those data require a set of skills that bridge between conceptual ecological frameworks and models and cyberinfrastructure approaches to handle datasets increasing from hundred of millions of records to billions, all with differing levels of measurement uncertainty and from a variety of different sources.  

Results/Conclusions

 Map of Life is a platform that extends biogeography and biodiveristy into a Big Data framework.  Our platform is built using a cloud-based instance of postgreSQL and postGIS along with a fast tiling and mapping solution, and front end caching solution that is performant even for large queries.  Data quality issues are paramount in Map of Life and I discuss efforts to assess geospatial and taxonomic issues and how those research outputs are then folded back into the Map of Life platform.  Existing tools provide means to explore available data products for individual species, to integrate those products via a simple overlay to create a new summary product, and to query the products to acquire a list of species within 50km of a selected point on the map.  These products are all made available via application program interfaces, moving Map of Life from simple application to an unparalleled platform and service for biodiversity resources.  I close by discussing next steps and novel products that Map of Life will be producing.