At Reading Frank Bisby, Alistair Culham, Paul Valdes, Neil Caithness, Tim Sutton, Peter Brewer At Cardiff Alec Gray, Andrew Jones, Nick Fiddian, Nick Pittas, Xuebiao Xu At Southampton Richard White, Oliver Bromley At NHM Malcolm Scoble, Paul Williams, Shonil Bhagwat BiodiversityWorld

Some difficult Biodiversity questions Where might a species be expected to occur, under past, present or predicted climatic conditions? How should conservation efforts be concentrated? Is geography a good predictor of relationship between lineages?

1. Bioclimatic Modelling: Predicting species distributions under past, present and future climate scenarios. Garp, Climate Space Model, Bioclim

GARP prediction of climatic suitability

2. Biodiversity Richness & Conservation Evaluation Which areas represent an optimal conservation area network? What compromises can be made in such a selection process?

3. Phylogenetic Analysis & Biogeography: Does a combined analysis of climate and character data enhance the robustness of a phylogenetic analysis?

What are the technical goals of BDWorld? Extensible problem solving environment for global biodiversity analysis Distributed computing Employ GRID technology Resource location Workflow design & validation

Architecture BdwCore

Implementation Metadata Workflow Designer Workflow Manager Taxonomic Verification Resource Wrapper BGI Core Request Response

Workflow Design

Extensibility Drop in replacement of Modelling component

Some relevant resource types: Data sources: –Species 2000 ‘Catalogue of Life’ –Species Information Sources (SISs) Species geography Descriptive data Specimen distribution (AVH, SpeciesAnalyst, RDG, MBG...DIGIR,ABCD etc) –Geographical Boundaries of geographical & political units Climate surfaces (Hadley, Paul Valdes' Palaeoclimate Data) –Genetic sequences (EMBL, local data) Analytic tools: –Biodiversity richness assessment (WorldMap) –Bioclimatic modelling (Garp, CSM, Bioclim) –Phylogenetic analysis (Paup, clustalw, etc)

Current Status Layered architecture defined Standardised wrapper API Replaceable comms layer Some prototype wrappers Metadata repository and workflow management soon.

Some challenges … Finding the resources Interoperability between resources Coping with evolving Grid standards Separating resource logic from user interface

Case study Cajanus cajan Climate Space Model Find species in the catalogue Retrieve species information: –Concepts, Synonyms & Common Names –Geography –Images Retrieve climate information Search for species within specified climate envelope Do the above iteratively if desired

End

STAR T STA GE 1 STA GE 2 STA GE 3 Analytical Toolbox Reference to Abiotic datasets Species 2000 Catalogue of Life Distributed Array of GSD’s Enquiry name(s) Returns list of accepted taxa, synonyms and common names Distributed array of thematic data sources Enquiry: select ‘data’ for ‘taxon set’ Return dataset composed of homologous responses from multiple thematic data sources Presentation and storage of results