Availability: Biodiversity

To what extent is information on endangered species and ecosystems available as open data?

Definitions

Definitions and Identification

Information about endangered species and ecosystems should be comprehensive and easily accessible to support integrated approaches to climate and biodiversity. Red lists should include a wide range of taxa, beyond the more commonly studied terrestrial vertebrates and vascular plants. A complementary green list, focused on recovering species, should be available to help identify successful practices and understand patterns of change. To support collaborative data collection work across actors, the data repository should have a mechanism to support contributions from additional actors. Data should follow the Darwin Core Standard or other common standard, and be nationally validated through government participation, publishing, or some other means.

Among other functions, it should be possible to use red lists to easily and accurately assess the current state of the country's species and how it has changed over time, to identify vulnerable species and ecosystems, and to compare data about species' population and distribution across national borders.

In some countries, national red lists may be maintained by governments; in others such lists may be led and managed by conservation groups or other civil society organizations. The latter may reflect the long history of collaboration across communities and borders with regard to species data, making conservation groups well-positioned to facilitate such a list. In other cases, it may reflect newer biodiversity data sources. In either case, it's important to assess whether the data is validated such that the government can use it for public good as well. This could be achieved in various ways. For example:

• A national ministry of nature and environment could be partnering on the red list effort—collaborating on the generation of data, providing funding or other support, etc.
• An environmental protection agency might publish the data on their site.

Research Guidance

Starting points

• Sources:
  • The IUCN's list of national red lists can serve as a starting place, to be checked against the relevant national ministry or agency.
  • National reports to the Convention on Biological Diversity may include relevant information, depending on the country.
• Search:
  • Websites of ministries of the environment.
  • Websites of civil society organizations focused on conservation, biodiversity, climate change, environment, nature.
• Consult:
  • Officials in your national or local environmental or conservation office.
  • Scholars or researchers at civil society organizations who research conservation and biodiversity in your country.
  • Officers at civil society organizations who work on implementing conservation or biodiversity projects within communities.
  • Journalists who report on conservation, biodiversity, climate change.

What to look for?

To complete the assessment for this question you will need to access and explore the available data. This may involve running queries on datasets to check the variety of fields included.

Look for evidence that can answer the following questions:

• How comprehensive is the red list? Does it include only terrestrial vertebrates or vascular plants? Does it include invertebrates such as insects? Aquatic animals and plants? Non-vascular plants and fungi?
• If data on threatened species and ecosystems is generated and managed by non-governmental actors, does the government participate in validating the data or otherwise recognize it as nationally validated? For example, is a relevant government agency a collaboration partner, is the data accessible through government sites, etc.
• Does the data use an accepted standard such as the Darwin Core Standard?
• Is there a "green" list that details recoveries of species or ecosystems? Is there a de facto green list through information about how the status of species or ecosystems has changed over time?
• If you wanted to contribute data, is there a clear means for you to do so?

National and sub-national considerations

In some countries, data about endangered species may be generated and published at the sub-national level, carried out by or for specific states or regions.

Focus on national government first, and then assess whether:

• National datasets also include data from sub-national or local government units;
• Equivalent data exists for a selection of sub-national or local government units, but is not nationally aggregated;

To assess countries where data about endangered species is organized sub-nationally, researchers should select the strongest example of sub-national practice, and then indicate whether this is an outlier or an example of widespread practice.

Question sub-components

Show/hide supporting questions

Existence

• Is this data available online in any form?
  • Data is not available online.

    Supporting questions: Are there other offline ways to access this data in the country? (e.g., attending an office to inspect it).

  • Data is available, but not as a result of government action.

    Supporting questions: If government is not providing access to data, how is this data available? Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

  • Data is available from government, or because of government actions.

    Supporting questions: Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

Elements

• Kinds of data:

• Data includes mammals. (No, Partially, Yes) Score this as 'Partially' if you only see a relatively small number of examples.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If biodiversity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where mammals data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data includes birds. (No, Partially, Yes) Score this as 'Partially' if you only see a relatively small number of examples.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If biodiversity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where birds data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data includes reptiles. (No, Partially, Yes) Score this as 'Partially' if you only see a relatively small number of examples.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If biodiversity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where reptiles data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data includes amphibians. (No, Partially, Yes) Score this as 'Partially' if you only see a relatively small number of examples.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If biodiversity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where amphibians data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data includes fish. (No, Partially, Yes) Score this as 'Partially' if you only see a relatively small number of examples.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If biodiversity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where fish data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data includes invertebrates. (No, Partially, Yes) Score this as 'Partially' if you only see a relatively small number of examples.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If biodiversity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where invertebrates data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data includes fungi and lichen. (No, Partially, Yes) Score this as 'Partially' if you only see a relatively small number of examples.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If biodiversity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where fingi and lichen data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data includes non-vascular plants. (No, Partially, Yes) Score this as 'Partially' if you only see a relatively small number of examples.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If biodiversity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where non-vascular plants data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data includes vascular plants. (No, Partially, Yes) Score this as 'Partially' if you only see a relatively small number of examples.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If biodiversity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where vascular plants data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data includes a "green" list, or detailed information on species or ecosystems recovering from danger, threat, or vulnerability. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly explain and provide URLs to this data.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data fields and quality:

• The data is published according to one or more relevant data standards. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Which standards are in use?

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data is nationally validated by the government. (No, Partially, Yes) For example, if the data originates in a collaboration involving non-governmental actors, the government may nationally validate it through governmental participation or publishing.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain and provide relevant URLs.

  If Yes: Please provide relevant URLs.

• A mechanism allows additional actors to contribute to the data repository. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly explain and provide relevant URLs.

• Limitations of the data are clearly stated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly explain and provide relevant URLs.

• Data openness, timing, and structure:

• Dataset is available free of charge. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data is openly licensed. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If No: If there are explicit restrictions placed on re-use of the dataset, briefly describe those here.

  If Partially or Yes: If the data is provided with an explicit open license, please provide the name of the license, or a link to it here.

• Data is available in all the country’s official or national languages. If the country has no official or national languages, data is available in the major languages of the country. (No, Partially, Yes) Assess this against the list of official, national, or in-use languages you provided as part of your response to the governance indicator that asks, "To what extent do relevant laws, regulations, policies, and guidance require that data collection and publication processes be available in the country’s official or national languages?"

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe the language coverage available.

• There are accessible and open official tools available to help users explore data. (No, Partially , Yes) Answer 'Partially' if tools make it possible to get at extracts of data without having to download a full dataset. Answer 'Yes' if there is an interactive tool that displays user-filtered extracts of the data to answer simple questions without downloading data at all.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide URL.

  If Partially : What are the main barriers to accessibility and usability?

• Data is timely and updated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: When was the most recent update to this dataset?

• Historical data is available that allows users to track change over time. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  If Partially or Yes: For what time period(s) (e.g., start and end dates) is data available?

• Data is provided in machine-readable format(s) (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where this machine-readable data can be found. (Additional URLs can be included in the justification and supporting evidence)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a comma separated list of the formats available? (E.g. csv, json)

  If Partially: What prevents you from assessing this data as fully machine-readable?

• The machine-readable dataset is available as a whole (No, Partially, Yes) Answer no if it's only possible to access individual records; Answer partially if it's possible to export extracts of the data; Answer yes if there are bulk downloads or APIs providing access to the whole dataset without financial, technical or legal barriers.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where bulk download access is available or described.

  If Partially or Yes: If bulk access is provided through an API, please provide a link to where the API is described.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Negative scoring:

• The availability of this data has been affected by government response to COVID-19. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe how COVID-19 affected the availability of this data.

Extent

• How comprehensive is the data assessed for this question?
  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, but there are many other localities without available data, or with data of a lesser quality.

    Supporting questions: Which locality does this data cover?

  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, and is a representative example of the kind of data that can be found for most but not all localities.

    Supporting questions: Which localities does this data cover?

  • The data assessed provides national coverage.

Indicator Justification

Biodiversity, or the variety and interconnectedness of life, intertwines with the climate crisis: Species and ecosystems play key roles in regulating the climate. Consequently, habitat loss and ecosystem degradation compromise the ability of the planet to repair anthropogenic and other damage. The IPBES 2019 Global Assessment found that “Biodiversity—the diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems—is declining faster than at any time in human history” (10). At the same time, climate change is the third leading driver of biodiversity loss (IPBES 2019). And, as the WWF Living Planet Index recently explained, climate change is projected to become “as, or more, important than the other drivers” (2020:12). Despite this critical importance of biodiversity to climate and planet, governments failed to achieve any of the Aichi 2020 Targets for Biodiversity (Convention on Biological Diversity 2020).

The research community widely agrees that significant data shortfalls hinder our understanding of biodiversity and our ability to take action on biodiversity loss. Hortal et al. (2015) identify gaps with regard to the identity and distribution of species as critical, for such information serves as the foundation for understanding larger patterns and processes (537). They note, too, that when data is available, it tends to be heavily biased toward terrestrial vertebrates and vascular plants (535). Similarly, the IPBES, as part of a larger overview of knowledge gaps, in the category of “data, inventories, and monitoring on nature and the drivers of change” identified gaps in four key data inventories: the World Database on Protected Areas, the World Database of Key Biodiversity Areas™, red lists of threatened species and ecosystems, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (2019: 55).

The global red list of endangered species that the International Union of Nature (IUCN) publishes has been used around the world to understand biodiversity and prioritize conservation goals. However, meaningful action at national and sub-national levels often requires significantly more local information; and while biodiversity data resources continue to grow, many are not created in conjunction with national ministries of environment, making them difficult to use. In analyzing a user needs assessment of more than 60 parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity with regard to using spatial data for conservation and sustainable development purposes, the UN Biodiversity Lab noted that “This ‘data gap’ takes a toll on national efforts to protect and restore nature and related ecosystem services. Regardless of how much data is generated at the global scale, countries need a mechanism to assess its relevancy to their country, supplement it with local data, prioritize areas essential for protection and restoration, and engage with diverse stakeholders to demonstrate the importance of nature to society.” (2018, concept note 2) The IUCN itself calls for standardized national and regional red lists to complement their global list and facilitate international conservation treaties and legislation. This indicator thus investigates whether national-level information on endangered species and ecosystems is available as open data.