Abstract
Accurate and uptodate information is
needed to make sound conservation and resource management decisions.
This information is required at a variety of levels: taxonomic
(threatened species, species of economic importance), geographic
(species distributions, areas of high endemism, managed areas),
ecological (habitats), political (trade, human impact) and management
(in situ and ex situ conservation measures), among
others. The Threatened Plants Unit (TPU) manages information
at several of these levels as part of the global databases of
the World Conservation Monitoring Centre. It is unique in managing
such a series of overview databases, and its activities complement
and provide a regional and global context tor the conservation
data sets built up by countries to produce the approximately 400
Red Data Books and Red Data Lists that have been published.
TPU currently tracks distribution, conservation,
and taxonomic data on 65 000 taxa (species, subspecies, and
varieties) of higher plants, 24 000 of which are threatened
at world level. Information is kept on the plants' scientific
and common names, their IUCN Red Data Book categories at the world
level, their world-wide distribution and IUCN category at the
country (or major subcountry) level, as well as data sources
for each piece of information. The central nomenclatural file
is linked to 98 000 distribution records, and all parts of
the system are linked to the 16 000record data source
file. Records are kept for 18 000 genera, all families of
higher plants, and all countries and regions of the world. Commonly
used synonyms are also tracked.
Conservation status listing are regularly produced;
generally these are produced for all species in a geographic area
(country, region, or continent) in a taxonomic group (genus, family)
or in a combination of these criteria. Also, thematic outputs
are produced, such as plants covered by any CITES appendix, or
tropical timber species, or plants of oceanic islands etc.
The data is held in a relational database application called BGBASE, also in wide use in botanic gardens around the world. The application is based on Revelation, a variablelength field database management system.
The Rationale and Structure of the TPU
Programme
We are all becoming increasingly aware of the severe
plight of many of the Earth's species and natural habitats. The
electronic and publishing media are full of statements about the
state of the Earth's environment many of these statements
are misleading, contradictory, or lack a factual basis.
As has been rightly pointed out by several speakers
over the past few days, including the keynote addresses of Professors
Prance and Heywood, the problem is a very serious one but
just how serious is it? How can we tell how many threatened species
there are in a country, in a region, for the world? How can we
tell how effective the Protected Areas Network is in protecting
these species? Or how do we determine what the international
trade is in a particular endangered species of plant or animal,
or of a whole genus or family, or of a country? How can the International
Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) achieve its stated goal of
having sustainable tropical timber production by the year 2000?
How do the World Bank, the United Nations, the Overseas Development
Administration (ODA), the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) and other international funding agencies,
set priorities for spending their conservation dollars? What
are the world's most endangered habitats in terms of the species
that comprise them? Where are the centres of diversity for plants
around the world? These and many other questions can be answered,
if only crudely, by maintaining global overview databases on threatened
species, on protected areas, on trade, and on habitats. It is
in the context of these sorts of questions that I wish to talk
to you about the information management activities of the World
Conservation Centre (WCMC), and specifically of its Threatened
Plants Unit (TPU).
This paper attempts to show that the various database
activities discussed in other papers at this Congress are important
not only for the botanic garden in question for its own internal
curatorial activities, but also in a larger, national, regional,
or international context.
The World Conservation Monitoring Centre is a nonprofit
institution housed in Cambridge, UK. It is a joint venture between
three partners the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the
World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the United Nations Environmental
Program (UNEP). WCMC acts as a primary information management
organization and as an information repository for these three
international programmes. These three partners do not control
WCMC's activities, although each is represented on its Board,
but they do provide a portion of the overall operating budget.
WCMC's staff number just over 70, approximately one-half
of whom are graduate or PhD-level biologists, and they are divided
into several working groups or units. It is the activities of
the Threatened Plants Unit that are of most relevance to the topics
under consideration in this Congress, and I will confine most
of my comments to this area of activity.
The Threatened Plants Unit started its life as the
Threatened Plants Committee of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in
the late 1960s. In the 1970s, the activities of this group outgrew
the level of support that Kew could provide, and it became part
of the Conservation Monitoring Centre of IUCN. In the mid 1980s,
WWF and UNEP joined IUCN in supporting what then became the World
Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, although TPU remained
housed at Kew until three years ago when it joined its sister
units in Cambridge.
The original idea was to determine which species
of plants were threatened at the global level, a central task
even today, a quarter of a century later. The original work was
done using cards as this was, of course, before the days of easily
accessible, affordable computing. In the early 1980s, a Wang
minicomputer was purchased to handle the data and wordprocessing
needs of WCMC, and this computing system was used until 1990 when
all plant data was moved to BGBASE, a relational database
designed initially to handle the plant records needs of botanic
gardens around the world. (In fact, the Wang is still in use
to handle the data for several of the other units.)
Data was gathered from published and unpublished
literature, as well as through an extremely important and active
network which grew to over 4000 people and institutions in virtually
every country of the world. This network grew to include many
of the world's botanic gardens, and out of the international coordinating
work done initially within TPU grew a separate entity known as
BGCS and, more recently, BGCI. WCMC and BGCI enjoy close institutional
and informational links, even though we are no longer both at
Kew.
From the earliest days, it was considered essential
to keep an audit trail of where various bits of information came
from, and so data sources were linked on the handwritten
cards and later in the computing systems employed by TPU. In
fact, the resulting file of computerized data sources, now numbering
just over 15 500 records, represents the world's largest
computerized plant conservation bibliography. A list of some
10 000 of these data sources was published two years ago
as a joint venture between WCMC and the Royal Botanic Gardens
Kew. (There are an estimated 20 000 more data sources in
hard copy within TPU's files that have not yet been computerized,
due to lack of staff and time.)
In 1978, TPU published the first Red Data Book for
plants. This book listed an arbitrarily selected 250 species
of conservation concern throughout the world, and set the stage
for the application of the socalled IUCN Red Data Book categories
(or simply the IUCN categories) for plants, as well as for animals.
Since the publication of this first Red Data Book in 1978, some
400 Red Data Books and Lists for plants have been published by
governments and NGOs around the world.
At that point, no one really knew how many threatened plants there were in the world. Today, we still do not have an accurate and complete tally, of course, but the number of plants that we track within TPU has grown from a few hundred in the early 1980s to over 65 500 species today. This represents almost a quarter of all described higher plants.
Interaction between TPU and national and
regional programmes
TPU builds and maintains global overview databases
that support and complement the national and regional databases
now developed or being developed around the world. Overview databases
inherently have less information about a particular entity than
do databases maintained locally; this is both appropriate and
financially necessary our monetary and staffing constraints
do not allow us to maintain exceptionally rich data sets on a
particular species, habitat, protected area, or country, but by
maintaining comparable data on a huge variety of species, habitats,
protected areas, and countries, and by maintaining strong bibliographic
databases we can address the questions raised above.
WCMC supports the free and ready exchange of data,
and our data are freely available to those requesting it and for
whom it will be of value. One way that we make the data available
is through publications. Another is through generating reports
on demand from our databases. Generally requests for these reports
come in one of two ways: "Tell me everything you have on
a particular genus, family, or other taxonomic group", or
"Tell me everything you have about a country or other geographic
area".
Through contractual work we have undertaken for CITES,
the European Union, the International Tropical Timber Organization,
ODA, and other organizations, TPU has information on tropical
timber species, species in international trade, etc., and reports
based on these data sets can also be generated in conjunction
with the other selection criteria mentioned above.
For each of its 65 500 tracked species, subspecies,
and varieties, TPU maintains nomenclatural, taxonomic, conservation,
and distribution data. We do this by maintaining a series of
related database tables as part of a relational database application.
The nomenclatural and taxonomic information kept within the NAMES
and associated files includes the scientific name, upperlevel
taxonomy, common synonyms, and common names. Common names, as
you well know are very difficult in plants in that the same name
is used for many species and the same species may have several
common names in various languages. However, these names are occasionally
more stable than the scientific name, and in many parts of the
world they are used regularly: certainly in the tropical timber-trade
sector and in some of the international trade, they are used in
preference to the scientific name.
Within WCMC we have a Protected Areas Data Unit (PADU)
which has the task of maintaining the World Directory of Protected
Areas for the United Nations. Information is gathered for all
protected areas over 1000 hectares, and this now covers some 33 000
sites. By means of a contract from the British Overseas Development
Administration for the FAO, TPU and PADU undertook an assessment
of the state of plant and animal inventories for protected areas
in the tropics. This study revealed some disturbing statistics
of the 8715 protected areas in the tropics for which WCMC
has information, only 5% are known to have inventories for either
plants or animals. Only 2.5% of them had plant inventories.
These inventories ranged from preliminary and very crude to extensive.
The largest number of plants inventoried for a single site is
2584 species of higher plants from the Yanachaga Chemillen National
Park in Peru. The size of the protected area was correlated with
the number of species found within it, and some interesting conclusions
can be drawn from those data. But the most disturbing information
was the relatively poor job that many protected areas are doing
to conserve individual species. For Indonesia alone, we linked
3900 species of higher plants to 18 sites in that country for
which we had good inventory data; most of the threatened plants
we tracked from Indonesia were lacking from these inventories.
Another telling outcome of this survey is that it will take 4.5
manyears to complete data entry of the 1000 inventories
that we did not link to our species databases.
For distributions, we maintain some 98 000 records
linking plants to countries, major political units within countries,
or offshore islands. All of this information is linked
to the WCMC Geographic Coding System in which we break the world
into 600 geopolitical units. This system formed the precursor
to the Biological Recording Unit (BRU) scheme, which was recently
adopted by the Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG) of the
International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS). WCMC has digitized
the boundaries of these BRUs and will make this information available
in digital format at the upcoming TDWG meetings in Mexico. These
units are geopolitically based, as this is where conservation
legislation is applicable. But, obviously a higherresolution
view of plant distribution is also wanted, one based on habitat
or vegetation types. WCMC has been active with TDWG since its
inception in gathering, analyzing, and producing standard coding
systems for difficult concepts such as habitats. While habitat
classification may be relatively easy to agree within a relatively
small country, finding or producing a system that will work around
the globe is much more challenging. The Habitats Data Unit within
WCMC has embraced fully the technologies and capabilities afforded
by geographic information systems (GISs). We have invested heavily
in this technology, and increasingly the information we hold in
our structured databases, such as BGBASE, is being linked
to these spatial data sets managed through GISs.
WCMC has produced two of a threevolume data
set on the state of the tropical rain forests of the world; the
third volume, on Latin America, is now under way. These volumes
present statistical and mapped data for all tropical rain forests
within a country and allow for countrybycountry comparisons,
as well as for overlaying vegetation types on top of climatic,
demographic change, protected areas, and other data sets. Other
large data sets held in GIS format include a complete map for
Antarctica, wetlands of the world, coral reefs, etc. As a pilot
project with the Natural History Museum London and the Herbarium
in Florence, WCMC has been involved in mapping the rare species
of Italy.
GIS data sets are inherently large and require fast
and stillexpensive equipment to run the software. As an
example of the size of the data holdings within WCMC, we currently
have online storage capabilities of approximately 6.5 gigabytes,
or 6.5 billion characters. This very large number can be better
understood by realizing that if this 6.5 gigabytes represented
only letters and numbers, and if these letters and numbers were
printed out on pages such as the schedule for this Congress, they
would occupy 1.5 million pages.
The rapidly falling prices of faster and faster microcomputers
will allow us to exchange and manipulate data in ways that we
can barely dream of today. Certainly a small botanic garden may
well feel that the data sets I am discussing here are totally
beyond their reach of interest, but I do not believe that this
is so. When I think back on the advances made in hardware and
software in the twenty one years that I have been actively involved
in biological computing, I am dumbstruck by what we now take for
granted; the pace of development in information technology is
not likely to diminish in the years ahead; if anything, the pace
is increasing.
This has implications for each botanic garden that
is planning, designing, or populating a database. First, you
must realize that you are not working alone and that your problems
or need for information may well have been addressed by some other
institution in your own or a different country. BGCI's The
Recorder is an excellent forum for exchanging information
on what computer systems have been developed and how they may
be obtained. But, there is great deal of useful information that
does not make it into The Recorder. For instance, computerized
mapping of living collections has been done several times now,
computerized labelling has been done, image storage has been done,
online data capture through handheld computers and
geopositioning units has been done, and so on. This is not to
say that better ways of accomplishing these tasks should not be
pursued and adopted when available, but it is a reminder that
many of the problems you face have already been addressed somewhere
or other.
Remember too that any well designed computing system
in a botanic garden will have uses far beyond being strictly a
tool for internal curation and management. The information that
you track, especially on endangered species, is potentially of
tremendous value and worth to the conservation of that species.
If you are the only garden growing a certain rare or threatened
species, then your obligation to excellence in plant records is
even greater. To assist gardens in exchanging data with each
other, and with international bodies such as TPU, BGCI, etc.,
the International Transfer Format for Botanic Garden Records
(ITF) was published several years ago and was the first international
standard to be adopted by the TDWG of IUBS as mentioned above.
The ITF certainly has shortcomings, and part of one of the Congress
workshops is devoted to improving this standard by producing a
second version of it. And, to date, the ITF has not been widely
used for intergarden transfer of data. But this will undoubtedly
change in the near future, as gardens become more sophisticated
in their database capabilities and in the demands that they place
on their database systems.
Also, the existence of a worldwide communications
protocol and link, called the Internet, is an exciting advance
that will surely change the way gardens acquire, manipulate, and
exchange data. By the end of this year the World Conservation
Monitoring Centre will join the Internet, giving us access to
over 7 million computing systems around the world. We will do
this in order to acquire data that we need to continue our global
mission more efficiently, but we will also make our substantial
data holdings available in electronic format to other organizations
on the Internet. We recently did some tests of the Internet prior
to laying the cables in our new building and found that a roundtrip
message to Australia and back took 0.6 seconds. We did online
searches of TROPICOS, the system used in the Missouri Botanical
Garden in St. Louis, and got responses in less than a second.
Having such capabilities available is going to radically alter
the way we think about data and our own databases. You could,
for instance, gather uptodate global conservation
status and world distribution data for any one of the 65 500
species that we track within TPU in a matter of seconds, or you
could do an online search of our bibliographic databases
on plant conservation, or pull down a copy of our vegetation or
other thematic maps for any part of the world in which you have
an interest.
These are exciting ideas, not all of which are practical
today, but all of which will be in the very near future. The
international databases have a moral obligation to ensure that
data is repatriated as effectively and as rapidly as possible,
and we do this through our activities with the United Nations.
But individual gardens, too, have an obligation to keep the best
records possible, and to keep them in formats that can be easily
transferred and interpreted, preferably by adopting the various
international standards in place or being devised. Together,
the botanic gardens of the world and the international databases,
such as those maintained by TPU, form a powerful partnership to
better effect plant conservation globally.
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