At ReadingFrank Bisby, Alistair Culham, Paul Valdes, Neil Caithness, Tim Sutton, Peter Brewer

At CardiffAlec Gray, Andrew Jones, Nick Fiddian, Nick Pittas, Xuebiao Xu

At SouthamptonRichard White, Oliver Bromley

At NHMMalcolm Scoble, Paul Williams,Shonil Bhagwat

BiodiversityWorld

Some difficult Biodiversity questions

• Where might a species be expected to occur, under past, present or predicted climatic conditions?

• How should conservation efforts be concentrated?

• Is geography a good predictor of relationship between lineages?

1. Bioclimatic Modelling:

• Predicting species distributions under past, present and future climate scenarios.

• Garp, Climate Space Model, Bioclim

GARP prediction of climatic suitability

2. Biodiversity Richness & Conservation Evaluation

• Which areas represent an optimal conservation area network?

• What compromises can be made in such a selection process?

3. Phylogenetic Analysis & Biogeography:

• Does a combined analysis of climate and character data enhance the robustness of a phylogenetic analysis?

What are the technical goals of

BDWorld?

Extensible problem solving environment for global biodiversity analysis

• Distributed computing• Employ GRID technology• Resource location• Workflow design & validation

Architecture

BdwCoreBi o

dld GridG

I)Bio

d Resers

BWors

Implementation

MetadataWorkflowDesigner

WorkflowManagerTaxonomic

Verification

ResourceWrapperBGICoreRequest

Response

Workflow Design

Extensibility

• Drop in replacement of Modelling component

Some relevant resource types:

• Data sources:– Species 2000 ‘Catalogue of Life’– Species Information Sources (SISs)

• Species geography• Descriptive data• Specimen distribution (AVH, SpeciesAnalyst, RDG,

MBG...DIGIR,ABCD etc)

– Geographical• Boundaries of geographical & political units • Climate surfaces (Hadley, Paul Valdes' Palaeoclimate Data)

– Genetic sequences (EMBL, local data)• Analytic tools:– Biodiversity richness assessment (WorldMap)– Bioclimatic modelling (Garp, CSM, Bioclim)– Phylogenetic analysis (Paup, clustalw, etc)

Current Status

• Layered architecture defined• Standardised wrapper API• Replaceable comms layer• Some prototype wrappers• Metadata repository and workflow

management soon.

Some challenges …

• Finding the resources• Interoperability between resources• Coping with evolving Grid standards• Separating resource logic from user

interface

Case study• Cajanus cajan Climate Space Model• Find species in the catalogue• Retrieve species information:– Concepts, Synonyms & Common

Names– Geography– Images

• Retrieve climate information• Search for species within specified

climate envelope• Do the above iteratively if desired

End

START

STAGE 1

STAGE 2

STAGE 3

Analytical Toolbox

Reference to Abiotic datasets

Species 2000

Catalogue of Life

Dis

tribu

ted

A

rray o

f G

SD

’s

Enquiry name(s)

Returns list of accepted taxa, synonyms and common names

Distributed array of

thematic data sources

Enquiry: select ‘data’ for ‘taxon set’

Return dataset composed ofhomologous responses from

multiple thematic data sources

Presentation and storage of results