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 - viii
8/30/2004
from the technical journal literature and species identification resources from field guide
publishers. Perhaps a more intractable long term issue is how to address the differences in
the application of copyrights to raw data among participating countries (e.g., U.S. law does
not currently protect published raw tabular data against reproduction, whereas Canada and
Mexico provide substantial protections.) Property rights for databases will become even
more complex as additional participants with conflicting copyright approaches, including the
European Union and China, connect to the North American initiatives.
In the long run, effective cooperation on invasive species information systems probably
requires that major participants adopt and expanded concept of the public domain, since the
major problems of propagation and control of invasives can only be achieved by a
commonality of purpose among scientists and managers working under a variety of cultures
and laws. GBIF may provide leadership and working examples under the call for a
“Biodiversity Commons” and the CBD charge to repatriate information to all contributing
countries.
Effective solutions will also involve incentives for participation by individual scientists, land
managers, librarians, curators, and interested citizens. An invasive species network is only
as effective as the willingness of those who produce the information to participate, and for
most of those, the major incentives are not financial. Some will participate because it is
mandated by their organizations, or because it aids them in their immediate jobs. Many
others may be more attracted by professional and public recognition, as in traditional journal
publishing. Any well designed network must freely acknowledge its contributors. As it
develops, it should probably also incorporate services, including peer-review, where
appropriate, to validate and certify important contributions, and begin to document use and
value of providers intellectual contributions to the international user community.
A Global Outlook
GISIN is one part of a collaborative network of governmental initiatives to address invasive
species threats in an international arena. It was inspired by, and incorporates many good
ideas from international efforts to share biodiversity information dating to the Convention on
Biodiversity and beyond. While invasives are a high priority subset of general biodiversity
questions because of their economic importance and roles as causal agents of landscape
degradation and extinction, the protocols and architecture of an invasive species network
addressing several thousand species should be broadly applicable to a biodiversity
information network addressing several million.
Important and closely related efforts include the IABIN invasive species pilot project, which
endeavors to catalog invasive species expertise, projects, and information resources in the
Americas, NABIN, which has taken a lead on coordinating occurrence information from
museums and using it to model the geographic spread of key species, GISP, whose
conferences and working papers have raised awareness and sparked information sharing
among a worldwide partnership of agencies, museums, NGOs, and professional
organizations, and a variety of individual and bilateral information sharing exercises in the
Americas, Europe, southern Africa, East Asia, and the Pacific. The recommendations of this
workshop endeavor to identify key core elements of the global activity, and to highlight them
for early adoption in countries currently represented in GISIN.
 |
 |
 |