What is the SANParks Biodiversity Information Management System (BIMS)?
The South African National Parks (SANParks) BIMS is an online platform enabling the upload, exploration and download of biodiversity occurrence data for national parks and marine protected areas in South Africa. It is only available to registered SANParks staff who are assigned access to relevant data. Sensitive data is only available to a very limited number of individuals who collect and manage these data. Occurrence data is uploaded and made available for point localities, ranger sections, and parks for all taxonomic groups. Additionally, spatial layers, including vegetation type and ecosystem threat level, can be selected as a background display to locality data. Data can then be downloaded for selected areas using a polygonal lasso tool or a selection of ranger sections or park boundaries. The purpose of the SANParks BIMS is to collate and serve relevant data to inform conservation research, management and decision-making for South Africa’s National Parks. One of the primary functions of the system is to output checklists for selected taxonomic groups for selected ranger sections or parks, appending selected additional information, such as conservation status.
Why is the SANParks BIMS important?
The mandate of Scientific Services is to inform biodiversity conservation. To collect data to inform conservation, SANParks invests substantially in staff time, accommodation, travel, subsistence allowance and equipment. Insufficient data management leads to a loss in investment and opportunity to inform conservation management. Therefore, good data management is fundamental to Scientific Services' role and SANParks' success in conserving biodiversity. The SANParks BIMS provides a platform to store data in a standardised format and make this data available for decision-making. Species checklists are an essential tool for conservation management in National Parks and they are fundamental to park management plans. Interventions to monitor and protect taxa cannot be undertaken unless knowledge exists on where those taxa are located. Species checklists are needed to be able to prioritise species for monitoring and management interventions. Species that are endemic, range-restricted, rare, or threatened may need to be prioritised for monitoring to meet conservation objectives, introduced species that have a high potential for becoming invasive may be prioritised for removal and species that are likely to be most vulnerable to climate change need to be identified to plan for the future. The SANParks BIMS will help collate the data required to meet these needs.
Where will the data in the SANParks BIMS come from?
Spatial layers from SANParks and the SANBI (South African National Biodiversity Institute) will be loaded into the system to provide background and boundary layers for display, filtering and selection. The SANParks BIMS will pull biodiversity occurrence data and taxonomic information from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and conservation status information from IUCN Red List and CITES. SANParks staff will upload data from existing checklists, management plans, reports, scientific publications, monitoring, surveys and external researchers.
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