Introducing the SANParks Biodiversity Information Management System
South African National Parks (SANParks) has a new Biodiversity Information Management System that was funded by the JRS Biodiversity System and developed by the Freshwater Research Centre and Kartoza (Pty) Ltd. It builds on the functionality of the Freshwater Biodiversity Information System (FBIS). The SANParks BIMS enables the input of different sources of occurrence information for National Parks and Marine Protected Areas.
Existing park checklists, lists from publications and monitoring information can all be put into the system to contribute to the creation of species checklists. The system also accesses data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.
Users can sign up to the system and download occurrence data and checklists for National Parks and Marine Protected Areas. It is important to note however that outputs from the system need to be interpreted by users of the system. Some data is not accurate. In other cases, subspecies and species are referred to for the same taxon or same intended common name.
The BIMS provides an opportunity for inputting all relevant data once and updating this over time to be able to draw down lists and query data temporally, spatially and by different attributes such as occurrence and conservation status.
When funding becomes available, it is intended that climate data will be added to the system in in a similar way to the climate data tab for sites on FBIS.
Further reading: Spear, D., van Wilgen, N.J., Rebelo, A.G. and Botha, J.M., 2023. Collating biodiversity occurrence data for conservation. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 11, p.1037282.
