Thomas E. Lovejoy is Counselor to the Secretary for Biodiversity and Environmental Affairs, Smithsonian Institution, and Chief Biodiversity Advisor, World Bank.
I'm happy to put on my Smithsonian hat this morning and say a word of welcome for this important workshop on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian, like other institutions of natural history, has an enormous dataset embodied in its natural history collections. The great challenge as we enter the digital age is how we transform all of that hand-written data into something that can be really useful in terms of studying the state of the biology of our planet, either from a scientific point-of-view or from a management, conservation point-of-view.
Two of the big challenges, other than just the enormous need to convert from written form to digital form, relate to the taxonomic data and the geographical data. With respect to the former, there are a number of efforts afoot, including the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) and a larger, more ambitious, but yet to begin effort under the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. This was endorsed by the science ministers of the OECD Nations in June. It will create what is known as the telephone book of life on Earth, and will bring systematic order into the accumulated work and partial confusion of centuries of taxonomic literature and research.
Clearly of equal importance is standardizing geographical information. Certainly in my own field of ornithology, which I dabble in when I'm not doing ecology, people have from time to time produced gazetteers for particular countries, long painful exercises for which the individuals probably didn't get as much credit as they should, but which really greatly enhanced the ability of their fellow scientists to work. So I could not applaud more what you are discussing here. One of the things it will do is to greatly speed up the ability of scientific research to pose certain questions, to assemble relevant data and draw conclusions. Simultaneously it will be turning some of the kinds of things that proceeded in an almost ad hoc fashion in the past into predictive exercises, in which predictions of geographic distributions and more complex predictions can actually be made and then tested in the natural world.
I was particularly reminded as I walked over here this morning of the pioneering ecologist, Charles Elton, who I met in 1965 when he in fact was 65. I met him in an airport at the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil and I couldn't believe that it was the real Charles Elton because the real Charles Elton "surely" was no longer alive. He wrote the first textbook in animal ecology in 1927. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet this very keen scientific mind. Over the ensuing years we became quite good friends and I visited Oxford on a number of occasions, where he had established a Bureau of Animal Population which concentrated most of its efforts on detailed studies, including invertebrates, in a piece of woodland outside of Oxford known as Whytham Woods. What came to my mind today was Charles Elton's lament that the Nature Conservancy of the United Kingdom, which is a government agency in contrast to the non-governmental organization we have here in the United States (but with similar purposes), could not be convinced that Whytham Woods deserved recognition and special status and protection like some other unique areas, because of the accumulated information about this particular location.
There are very few places on the face of this planet where there is continuous long-term biological information that has been collected in any systematic way. That is, of course, why the National Science Foundation established its Long-Term Ecological Research Program some time ago. But certainly anybody, if they stop to think about it, can see that there are unpredictable benefits that come from these long-term research sites with long-term datasets. I think of some of our work in the Amazon Basin, where we are studying the ecology of forest fragments and the changes in biodiversity in fragments and how that relates to fragment size. I never would have thought of some of the questions that we have been able to ask and analyses that we have been able to make, just because we had a dataset. Questions relating to the loss of biomass in forest fragments, which is very relevant to concerns about sequestering carbon in natural systems as we deal with the greenhouse gas problem, or the ability to study the effects of the dry El Nino years in terms of tree mortality. None of those things would have been possible without the long-term, geo-referenced datasets, and none of that would have been possible without those datasets being in digital form.
So, thank you for the chance to share initial thoughts about why I think what you are doing is so incredibly important. And as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility moves forward in the next several years, and more and more of the data associated with the natural history collections of the world become available online, without any question the efforts you are making in the course of this workshop will make those datasets that more useful. Congratulations on the endeavor you are about to undertake here and I look forward, as does everyone at the Smithsonian, to the outcome.
Thank you very much and welcome.