It’s a daunting task to synthesize and analyze global knowledge regarding the health of the environment. The United Nations Environment Program’s World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC) in Cambridge, United Kingdom, has a dedicated staff of more than 60 people that work to bring together data on global biodiversity and conservation to guide policy. The primary data product of UNEP-WCMC is the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA).
As the global clearinghouse for map data about protected areas, the UNEP-WCMC is a hub for conservation and environmental assessment research. The high demand for this data has necessitated a web-centric approach to collaboration. Increasingly the organization is standing up online portals for the dissemination of data. They are part of the Conservation Commons effort for sharing information about conservation efforts around the globe, and they are working on a web-based Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool along with several partners.
“We don’t have people going out into the field,” said Derek Gliddon, head of the Informatics Program at UNEP-WCMC. “We’re operating at a higher trophic level, where we take other people’s data or information and aggregate and look at trends on a global basis.”
The aggregation of data is a complex task that occupies a great deal of UNEP-WCMC time and effort. Data quality and accuracy are central to their role as a trusted data source for politically sensitive data. The conservation community and governments submit data about the boundaries of protected areas, and this data undergoes rigorous processing.
“In the utopian world everybody would be collecting data according to global standards and it would be easy to collect data together,” stated Gliddon. “But, in the real world most of the data that’s out there was not collected for global integration. It was collected for local organization or local government purposes using different methodologies and different schema.”
UNEP-WCMC uses FME, donated by Safe Software, to process and normalize their data along with customized geoprocessing rules within ArcGIS. The validation of data in “models, within models, within models” helps resolve a number of issues to make sure the data are as authoritative as possible.
Read my full interview with Derek Gliddon here.
