Data Discovery Mechanisms for Biodiversity Resources in the Asia-Pacific Region

As the importance of biodiversity has been recognized, researchers, governmental officers, and people attracted by biodiversity have collected enormous amounts of biodiversity data for many uses (e.g., research studies, to inform the conservation of a specific area, management decision-making, leisure). These data are also valuable for formulating biodiversity indicators, assessing predictive distribution areas using models, and documenting the current status of endangered species (see Chap. XX). However, data sets of biodiversity are widely dispersed, and most are unavailable to people who are not directly involved in specific projects for which such data were collected because of the lack of a global data-sharing framework. One of the motivations for construction of the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) architecture is to change this situation by creating a global network of data-collecting activities supported by a data-sharing framework accompanied by an information system (Scholes et al. 2008).