Report prepared for the Experts Meeting Towards the Implementation of a Global Invasive Species
Information Network (GISIN), 6-8 April, 2004. Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
I - vi
8/30/2004
Next Steps
Invasive species information is sufficiently critical that numerous organizations, including
multiple levels of government, are addressing the standards vacuum. It is important to the
community that these efforts be consolidated, maybe under GISP, to provide more timely
guidance. At the same time, the workshop sees multiple opportunities to voluntarily
standardize – efforts that may help drive ultimate development of scalable standards and
technologies.
It is important that the perfect not become the enemy of the useful. There are many
gaps in information availability, standards, and technology between present efforts
and a comprehensive distributed invasive species information system, so progress
will necessarily be incremental. The workgroup perceives an order of need for
coordinating activities of hub participants.
1 Resource discovery
2 Data exchange
3 Data services
that reflects the order of technological challenges. Tools to standardize the metadata and
index data so that shared searches can discover other Hub participants’ data will be a
significant accomplishment for the first years or two of the initiative.
New Content Areas
Current efforts within GISIN participants have concentrated on cataloging data resources,
projects, programs, species occurrences, and species identification information, as
described earlier. A number of other kinds of resources (Table 1), are essential to
researching and managing invasions, and several appear ripe for inclusion into GISIN
activities. These include:
• Archives of legacy and gray literature, preferably marked up to increase accessibility.
An example of how this might be done is provided by the American Museum of
Natural History’s museum literature database.
• Descriptions and drawings of invasive species. Of particular value would be an archive
of original taxonomic descriptions of the several thousand species being actively
managed or regulated in the region, since regulators and providers of taxonomic
services need tools to make authoritative identifications before data sharing or policy
decisions can be made with any confidence. It may require memoranda of
understanding and/or royalty arrangements with publishers to provide such services.
• Image libraries. A technical issue to be resolved is how to mark up diagnostic images
with taxonomic, source, and authority information. One attractive possibility is to
embed header metadata info PNG, JPEG, TIFF and related image types, perhaps
following the IPTC standard.
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