by Mark Balman, Birdlife

1. Mapping birds, biodiversity and
business: the role of GIS in
conservation
Mark Balman - GIS Support Analyst
BirdLife International

2. Who are BirdLife International
What we do
How do we use GIS

4. BirdLife Partners operate in over one hundred
countries and territories worldwide
More than 4,000 staff working for conservation
Over 2,500,000 members worldwide
10,000,000 worldwide supporters
Over 2 million children involved annually
Over 1,000,000 hectares owned or managed

5. BirdLife Partners collaborate on regional work
programmes in every continent.
BirdLife's aims are to:
Prevent the extinction of any bird species
Maintain and where possible improve the conservation status of all bird species
Conserve and where appropriate improve and enlarge sites and habitats
important for birds
Help, through birds, to conserve biodiversity and to improve the quality of
people's lives
Integrate bird conservation into sustaining people's livelihoods

6. Why Conserve Birds?
Birds are part of biodiversity of immense value
Societies value birds for economic, cultural, ethical and spiritual reasons
The birdwatching industry is a growing economic force
Birds are excellent indicators of the state of the environment.

7. Black and Yellow Broadbill

8. Knowledge Management
Enormous quantities of high quality, up-to-date, synthesised
data are needed to prioritise species, sites and habitats correctly.
Managing data, information and knowledge within BirdLife is a
task in itself and GIS plays an ever increasing and important role.

9. A brief history of GIS at BirdLife
Pre 2000, Atlas GIS, MapInfo
2000 – 2005, MapInfo
2006 – present, ArcGIS, Google Earth,Postresql, Geoserver +
others..

11. A brief background of geospatial data at BirdLife
Endemic Bird Areas - 218 regions identified using species point
localities and then delineated into polygons
Important Bird Areas – programme began in the mid 80s, have
now identified over 10,000 sites
Species range maps – In 2000, 1,200 maps digitised, now have
maps for 10,064 species

16. Other data collected
All site based information collected within a bespoke web based
database – World Biodiversity Database. Mysql based (limited
spatial capabilities)
All species information now switched to the Species Information
Service (SIS)
Species occurrence data stored within an Access database and a
file geodatabase

19. External data we use
Global landcover data - GLC 2000, Joint Research Centre (1km),
Globcover 2009, ESA (300m)
GTOPO, Globe, ETOPO, SRTM elevation data (1km, 90m)
World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA)
Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) occurrence data

20. Processing information
ArcGIS models and scripts aid in creating analyses and
maintenance e.g.
Simple modelling of species range within habitats at specific
elevations likely to become more complex
Subset data into various products (species range maps) or
national level IBA datasets

21. Dissemination of data
Data has various uses ranging from internal analyses for
cartographic output for inclusion into reports
Species range maps now served dynamically to each species
factsheet on the Datazone section of the BirdLife website

26. Species maps are also available to the wider public via registration
on the BirdLife website
Since November 2011, we have had over 600 requests for species
range maps (mostly from students and academics but some from
commercial enterprises such as GIS consultancies, petrochemical
and mineral extraction companies)
Species maps are also provided to the EuroGEOSS project via web
services (WMS, WFS)

29. Current / Future projects
Handbook Birds of the World (splitting taxa to ~13,000spp)
Develop two web based mapping portals for Marine IBAs
Soaring Birds
Birds In Europe 3 collaboration with European Topic Centre on Biological
Diversity (European Environment Agency)

30. Thank you for your attention..