To address their underrepresentation in GBIF and all other resources, this project will fill taxonomic and geographic data gaps in Asia by mobilizing immense volumes of camera-trap records for cryptic forest species in the region.
The project team has previously completed a pilot to curate occurrences in more than 400 camera-trap studies from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore published between 1999 and 2015. This dataset only represents a subset of Asian countries but still produced 273,791 independent observations of 211 vertebrate species at 131 sites. Each record contains the species, time of the study, coordinates of the study, and other details about the study effort and methods.
This project will expand the geographic coverage to include Japan, South Korea, China, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam and will also include more recent studies from 2015 to 2021. These additions are expected to triple the number of occurrences from the pilot, resulting in more than 500,000 observations of 300+ vertebrate species in more than 200 sites.
Project progress
The project's implementation action was focused on extraction data from published gray literature, particularly in the South and Southeast Asia.
At final reporting the project had used a total of 435 literature relevant to camera trapping studies in between 1999-2022 to extract species occurrence. The geographical coverage was 14 countries including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bhutan, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Nepal, Japan, South Korea and eastern part of India. The temporal coverage in between 1999 to 2022. The project extracted a total of 10,322 occurrences of 548 species from 301 sites, with the data consisting of 276,805 individual camera trapping that belong to 123 families of vertebrates, including mammals, aves and reptiles. The project’s published dataset is available here.
As part of the project the team conducted two workshops. The first workshop “GBIF BIFA Asian vertebrates workshop 2022”, was held in Sep-Oct 2022 and related to data synthesis work performed by the team. The second was a “Biodiversity data mobilization workshop” held in February 2023 to advocate the significance of open access data platform to others.
Post project the project team envisage continuing efforts to update camera trap-based studies and data mobilization. In addition, to encourage other institutions in Nepal to share data to GBIF.
