Summary
The international Antarctic science community collects an amazing amount of information about wildlife. Traditionally, this information has gone into field notebooks and more recently, software such as Excel®. Information is extracted to support a scientific paper and data files often ended up as landfill. It is now recognised that the data may be more valuable than the original publication in which it was analysed. The value of the data can be maximised if it is stored in an accessible repository, adequately described and indexed. This is one aspect of a new methodology called Knowledge Management; capturing information and placing it in a form so that it can be used effectively for a wide range of applications. Simply having a data repository by itself is of some benefit, but if the scientific community doesn’t know that it exists or cannot readily access the information, it has little value. For scientific data, the whole is frequently much more than the sum of the parts. While a dataset from a single species or season has an intrinsic value, many years of observations of a range of flora and fauna may address many more issues. For example, a comprehensive set of biological and linked environmental observations over space and time will identify potential community responses to climate change or evaluate the potential impact of introductions. The Australian Antarctic Data Centre is developing an Antarctic Biodiversity Database for SCAR’s Regional Sensitivity to Climate Change (RiSCC) program (http://www-aadc.aad.gov.au/biodiversity/). Information such as the observer, species, location, when, where, environmental conditions and related data will be made available via the Web. New observations can be added to the database in bulk or by the Web. These additions are validated before loading to the live database. Subsets of the data can be extracted on the Web based on most of the data parameters. Over the past four years, flora and fauna observations, conservation status and type locality information has been entered into separate databases in the Australian Antarctic Data Centre (see http://www-aadc.aad.gov.au/datasets/). The information in all these databases will be combined into the new Antarctic Biodiversity Database. A demonstration of the the Antarctic Biodiversity Database at the SCAR Biology Symposium will be a critical opportunity to seek feedback from Antarctic biologists on further scientific requirements and functionality. This information will provide significant input to the RiSCC Workshop on the Antarctic Biodiversity Database at the end of the Symposium.