OOS 13-9
Improving data management, storage, and sharing to promote species recovery
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has developed various data management systems over the years to share data among its offices and with the public. The most recent of these systems is the Environmental Conservation Online System (ECOS). This site provides the public with extensive information about listed species. However, to facilitate transparency in decisionmaking and analysis of the outcomes of recovery efforts, there is a need for the Services to make available electronic and searchable documents related to listing decisions and recovery actions, including biological opinions and accompanying incidental take statements, habitat conservation plans and accompanying incidental take permits, and monitoring reports associated with all active biological opinions and habitat conservation plans. NatureServe’s system for storing, managing, and sharing data about endangered and threatened species can help accomplish these goals.
Results/Conclusions
Over the past 40 years the network of natural heritage programs coordinated by NatureServe has developed the most comprehensive set of databases on the global and state-by-state status, trends, threats, and distribution of species of concern including precise locations of more than 900,000 known occurrences, as well as ecology and life history, management, predicted occurrence, climate change vulnerability, and references. These data are used by every federal agency involved with natural resources management. In the latest version of the network’s data management software, all of this information is migrating (in 2014) to a cloud based architecture, which enormously facilitates the use of the data by others. NatureServe Surveyor is one tool that has been developed to identify species of concern in a project area, similar to the IPaC Initial Project Scoping tool at the FWS ECOS web site. EPA has partnered with NatureServe to incorporate the Surveyor web service into its NEPAssist environmental review and project planning tool. NatureServe’s system and the inventory, monitoring, and data management that underlie it could be better supported and integrated into decisionmaking by federal agencies that use the data to inform listing, recovery, and management actions. A cost saving, multi-agency scenario for consolidating the currently fragmented licensing arrangements for this data would be a federal license to key NatureServe data products delivered via the Geospatial Platform. Individual agencies could also dynamically access NatureServe data products by integrating web and map services into their existing applications, as in the NEPAssist example.