A web-based GIS tool for exploring the world's biodiversity: The Global Biodiversity Information Facility Mapping and Analysis Portal Application (GBIF-MAPA)

Legacy biodiversity data from natural history and survey collections are rapidly becoming available in a common format over the Internet. Over 110 million records are already being served from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). However, our ability to use this information effectively for ecological research, management and conservation lags behind. A solution is a web-based Geographic Information System for enabling visualization and analysis of this rapidly expanding data resource. In this paper we detail a case study system, GBIF Mapping and Analysis Portal Application (MAPA), developed for deployment at distributed database portals. Building such a system requires overcoming a series of technical and research challenges. These challenges include: assuring fast speed of access to the vast amounts of data available through these distributed biodiversity databases; developing open standards based access to suitable environmental data layers for analyzing biodiversity distribution; building suitably flexible and intuitive map interfaces for refining the scope and criteria of an analysis; and building appropriate web-services based analysis tools that are of primary importance to the ecological community and make manifest the value of online biodiversity GBIF data. After discussing how we overcome these challenges, we provide case studies showing two examples of the use of GBIF-MAPA analysis tools.