**NBII All-Nodes Meeting**

**Hosted by the NBII Southwest Information Node**

**Albuquerque, NM**

**October 24-28, 2005**

**Tuesday, October 25**

**9:00--9:15: NBII Program Welcome, Introductions, and Agenda Overview**

**Gladys Cotter and John Mosesso, NBII Program Office**

[Gladys Cotter:]{.underline}

Welcome to our fifth NBII All-Nodes Meeting. I'll talk about the
meeting's focus \-- where we've been, and where we're going.

Many of you have been with the NBII from the start and remember when we
got our initial funding. One of the things people told you was "Hurry up
and produce something! We have to show that the NBII has value!" We
wanted success stories we could take to the Hill and other agencies.

A big part of that was building communities from the ground up. Now
we're moving into an operational mode. We've done some things that
worked, we've tried some things that didn't work, and we've learned from
our experiences. We have a user community that's depending on the NBII
for certain information needs.

Now, one of the things people are going to say to you is, "Forget the
low-hanging fruit. We need to be strategic and pick issues and projects
that matter at both national and regional scales." Now we can make the
long-term investment of picking issues we're going to commit to over the
next ten to twenty years, so we start to support the communities we're
serving in an in-depth manner. All of you will be involved in the
dialogue of what those issues are.

We also need to expand our communities. We get together and say, "We're
all about partnerships." We reach out as much as we can to other
communities. One of the issues we hear about frequently is people don't
know about the NBII. We say, "We have all these partners." So one of the
challenges this year is to add new partners. Try to select a couple of
key communities that aren't part of your current network and bring them
into the NBII. In the long term, we're going to be successful if, when
we meet a stranger on the street, they go, "Oh, the NBII --- I use that
all the time." We want to start moving in that direction.

For the future, we want to be fully functional, and now one of the main
things in the federal government is being outcome-oriented and
accountable. Today there will be a presentation about outcomes. In the
past we've focused on outputs of our work, and now what we're being is
asked is, "Well, that's your output, but what is the outcome? What is
the impact on the community of your output from this work?" That's
something we have to focus on.

I view 2007 as the year of the network. We've been focused on our
thematic and regional nodes and how to build capacity in those areas.
Now we also need to start thinking about how we knit this all together
as a network, so if someone goes to the Southern Appalachian Information
Node, they can easily access all the information that's in the Fisheries
and Aquatic Resources Node. Invasive species is a good example, where
all kinds of nodes have invasive species information. Someone should be
able to find that information no matter where it resides on the network.

We also want to look at a proper mix of hot topics and stable content.
Especially when you're working with people on the Hill --- and they are
very responsive to the hot topic of the day --- you'll talk to them and
they'll say, "Oh, I went to the NBII this morning and looked for
information on avian influenza and there was very little there." Well,
that's in part because of the way the NBII is set up. We have projects
and we tell people to stick with their projects and produce an output,
which hopefully translates into an outcome. One of the discussions we
need to have over the next year is, how do we move to a stage where we
also address hot topics? There has to be flexibility in our node
operation so we're addressing hot topics, but we also maintain the
long-term stable content. It's difficult to find the proper balance.

We want to knit together the community and focus on national priorities
as well as regional and thematic priorities so, once again, we have a
national-level commitment and a national-level community that's built up
from the regional and thematic nodes. One of the balancing acts we have
to do there, too, is to deal with the fact that some people we work with
are more focused on national issues, while others are more focused on
regional issues. So how do we ensure the NBII, as a national network,
addresses the local, regional, thematic, and national activities, as
well as feeds into international activities such as the Global
Biodiversity Information Facility?

Once again, we're going to sponsor a series of workshops over the next
year that many of you will be involved in to start tackling some of
those issues related to how we actually transition from the
proof-of-concept nodes we established several years ago into an
operational network that satisfies both local-to-local communities and
broader communities.

One of the challenges given to those of us in the Program Office in
Reston is, how do we incorporate the broader science and conservation
community? That's a challenge you'll hear tomorrow morning when Sue
Haseltine is talking. One of the things she's going to ask the group is,
can you come back to us with a list of priorities that are agreed-upon
by this community? One of the discussions you have to have is to pick
something to work on. Now we want to bring together the broader
community and say, "Can we agree on some priorities for the NBII?"

We also want to challenge everyone in this room to be an NBII
ambassador. If you can bring in five new users to your community, that
goal would be very useful to us. If everyone takes on the goal of
bringing in some new users, then the community will grow much more
rapidly than if we're trying to go to meetings individually and build up
communities.

[John Mossesso:]{.underline}

Yesterday, the usability study Mike and Donna led was a great success.
They had over eighty participants and they ran out of time. They think
there may be an opportunity to improve some of our applications because
of your help, so thank you!

We're going to move on this morning with the keynote speech by Dr. Terry
Yates. We have other special topics that will be addressed by some
distinguished speakers: Julie Prior-Magee will showcase the node in this
area, the Southwest Information Node; at the end of the day, Kate Kase,
Ben Wheeler, and Marcia McNiff, who've been working mightily in recent
months on the PART process, will introduce that to everyone. The day's
final session will be an informal discussion with our Coalition people:
ask Jack Hill, Catriona McDonald, and Bonnie Carroll any questions you
have.

Tomorrow, Sue Haseltine will start off with a discussion of future
challenges and opportunities. Then we'll shift into several GAP
presentations: we've got great information from our recently completed
Southwest GAP project that will be presented. We've also got a new
regional GAP project we want to introduce to you in the Northwest; then
Donna Roy will talk about our new GAPServe Portal, where she's making
available all the GAP information that's been collected over the past
fifteen years. There'll be a discussion of geospatial applications
following that, and then a fun look at the NBII Digital Image Library.

On Thursday, we've got more technical sessions on NBII tools and content
management, and then we're having a field trip to Valles Caldera
National Preserve that should be an interesting introduction to the
Southwest's natural history. On Friday, Mike will present usability
study results, then give us an overview of the integrated Web presence
of the NBII network.

To start off our meeting, we have a very distinguished speaker: Dr.
Terry Yates. Terry is currently Vice President for Research and Economic
Development at the University of New Mexico. He's also Professor of
Biology and Pathology and the Curator of Genomic Resources at the Museum
of Southwest Biology. Terry has over 130 published, refereed papers, and
what seem like seventeen Ph.D.s and nine master's degrees. He's a member
of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the
American Society of Mammalogists; he's also a Trustee of the Southwest
Association of Naturalists and President of the Natural Science
Collections Alliance. Please welcome Terry Yates.

#### **Tuesday, October 25**

#### **9:15-10:00: Keynote Address**

#### **Dr Terry Yates, Vice President for Research and Economic Development, University of New Mexico**

I'd like talk about some of the societal questions being addressed now
using large data sets of biological information. The NBII fits into
this, and what I've been trying to tell people, especially in funding
agencies, is that this is a complex activity, but we're moving toward a
time when it will be possible to ask these kinds of complex questions,
to access multiple different types of databases simultaneously, and to
bring that together in a powerful way to address these questions.

One key we keep coming back to, not only in NBII but in NEON and all of
these sorts of large activities, is forecasting. To have a good
forecasting tool, you've got to have data that have spatial consistency;
we're talking about forecasting on a continental scale, as well as on
regional and local scales. It's got to be repeatable, there's got to be
a good temporal lead time, so you can do something with the predictions.
There's got to be improved spatial time resolution of the current
practice. I think we can do better than "dengue occurs in tropical
areas" and "influenza occurs in the winter season." And we need inputs
that are monitored with the appropriate time scale. All of this has got
to be done in near real time and have access to historical information.

So how should we design systems? The examples I'm going to use today
have to do with human health and disease because when you're dealing
with the Hill and the White House, that tends to trump everything; but
if we can do it with disease, we can do it with invasive species,
agriculture, terrorism ... we can do it for a lot of other things. But
this is just a simplistic model of the use of data to deal with disease
stuff; usually we need information about the environment, we need some
host information, and usually some kind of parasite or bacterial data.
Then it gets more complicated very quickly and when you start needing
major infrastructure to describe and talk about the kinds of diseases;
let's say, that wild rodents can transmit to humans. You see there are a
lot of possibilities and ways of dealing with this kind of stuff just to
predict the potential risk to humans on the landscape of everything from
spotted fever to plague. We're ground zero out here for plague, by the
way. We've had one case in five years, but it's still ground zero for
the United States.

There's a lot of talk about flu right now, and especially with H5N1 flu
--- you know we've just found it in waterfowl in Alaska and people are
getting nervous because it's going to fly south for the winter. The big
problem, of course, with H5N1 is if it infects a human who is already
infected with human flu and goes person-to-person. But the additional
spread of H5N1 into North America is going to be through birds and we
need to know a lot about what birds go where and so forth if we're going
to model this ahead of time so we can get ready and be able to do
something other than just react ... what many of my old friends at the
CDC call a "firehouse mentality," where you wait until something catches
on fire \-- and then you put it out and go back to the firehouse.

But if you look at some of the stuff you can do, everybody is worried
about air travel now, much more so than in 1918. We've got a model set
up for 116 cities---you can consider this 116 NBII nodes scattered
around the country. Then we have a model that deals with transportation
and seasonal contact. You can model that national spread if you could
find on the NBII which species of ducks and geese were going to come
where, at what rate, and do that sort of thing in real time. Then we
might be able to stay ahead of this H5N1 problem.

We've got sentinel physicians, state and territorial epidemiologists,
ornithologists, all of these different data sets and databases, and we
link these together, not seamlessly, with a nice infrastructure, but a
lot of what we call massively paralleled rows of graduate students in
footstocks. We can get a prediction and an observation, and so far this
model---on regular flu, this isn't H5N1---is pretty good. It's not a
perfect fit, but it's coming along for something that is directly
transmitted to humans, and you can't model where everybody moves because
we don't even know where our own students are moving, much less where
others are. So we have to estimate all that, but it can be done.

Vector-borne diseases get more complex, when it's not direct-direct
transmission you have to add in a vector, as well as the environment and
a host and parasite; but it's conceivable you can do this sort of thing.
We laugh about having these ecological and mouse reports on the six
o'clock news; you just put in your zip code and press "go" and you can
find out how active you expect the mosquitos to be in your region. All
possible, but we need to know where you're coming from. If you look at
SARS, hantavirus, Lyme disease, ebola, Marburg, we still don't know
where a lot of these things came from or where they're going. We know
what they do. There's a lot more out there. Our lack of understanding of
basic biological diversity has hampered these models as well, but
certainly we can do something with the data we already have if we can
get it into the right infrastructure and make it accessible to both
specialists and nonspecialists.

We've got a lot of issues when it comes to infectious diseases. When
these pop up, we want to know how long it's been there, where did it
come from, and if it's old, where was it? When we can't answer these
questions, people speculate. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories.
I once asked the Security Council to show me the data that West Nile
virus was intentionally planted in a pond in Central Park in a couple of
ziplock bags full of mosquito larvae, and the answer was, "We know
that's not true, but somebody has taken credit for it." We can do better
than that. A lot of these questions could be answered with the right
data on the right subjects, as you'll see with some of these examples.

As for Lyme disease, where did it come from? It suddenly popped up and
people started getting sick with it back in 1982. Now we pretty much
know why the rise in cases occurred. That's being modeled. It's a very
complex system; it's been around for a long time, and now that deer and
habitat have come back, this is one example where we would have been
better off to have left the agriculture fields in place. It's caused by
this agent, a spirochete, and then it's transmitted through ticks and
mice again and then into humans. But to answer the question of where did
Lyme disease come from, people started accessing museum databases. They
were able to do that through looking at old ticks, and the initial data
suggested that the appearance of Lyme disease preceded its discovery in
the United States by at least a generation. If you look at further
studies, we're even able to go back and get positive spirochete
antibodies from dead museum skins dating back to 1894. So this is an
example of where we just didn't have the data and we didn't know what
was there. Now that we know that \-- and are enabled by knowing this
information by using museum specimens and those kinds of things in
natural history databases \-- we can model where this disease is, and
then in real time by accessing ecological and human public health
records, etc., we can monitor and predict its spread *and* maybe even
mitigate it.

Collections are sites for future diseases. Once you show people the
information sitting there in these databases waiting to be mined and
then apply it to something that has some relevance to them at the
moment, or relevance to the campaign at the moment, you start getting a
different attitude. The databases able to address these kinds of
questions are complementary. While it used to be you'd look at a museum
record and get locality information, generally not even geographics
information, and the collector of the species name maybe and a few
things like that, now just one sample will often include some sort of
tissue sample, which gets translated pretty quickly into DNA, and that
sequence information is in another databank or GenBank or somewhere. So
you end up with a blood sample you can test for all sorts of antibodies,
etc., and that ends up in a CDC database with the standard information
and all sorts of other things. Pretty soon you've got many databases
that need to be linked somehow, with some kind of infrastructure, and be
accessible to being queried for certain kinds of questions.

The kind of stuff being done in the field now in a lot of these studies,
such as DNA extraction, the collection of serum, and evaluation for all
these things, establishes huge amounts of information, and it's all
piling up now in a modern sense into a very specific georeference spot
and, hopefully, a lot of relevant data sets, such as weather and soil
moisture, and sunspot activity, etc. And all those things allow you to
do some very sophisticated models. You can get access to the data now,
but it's still not operable. This is just the one example of how complex
it gets. In fact, we track all of our databases, but we can't do this on
a continental scale. We can't do it because we don't have the
infrastructure to do it.

Since you're in New Mexico, I thought it would be appropriate to mention
something about hantavirus and the southwestern landscape. Many of you
may know that in 1993, when people started dying in New Mexico of some
unknown disease, we didn't have a clue what it was. It was mostly young
people who were long-distance runners. They were very healthy people,
they were dead within hours after getting to the university hospital. We
found out very quickly by combining multiple data sets --- by that time
we were already doing holistic kind of work where we had
epidemiologists, virologists, ecologists and so forth working together.
But it was scary for this to be happening in the United States. We were
unaccustomed to this sort of thing.

We found out quickly that the infective agent was hantavirus. We missed
it initially because it caused a lung problem --- people basically
drowned --- and it created this huge pulmonary problem instead of kidney
problems like all the other hantaviruses in the Old World had. But we
found out quickly, too, that it was new. Initial analysis showed the RNA
sequences of tissue from the different patients were the same, so from
patient to patient it was the same infective agent. Then we looked at
the isolating virus from mice that were collected from around the
patients' households and there was the same sequence in that, so that
was the basic conclusion.

But was this a new species? There had been a military base that closed a
few months before, and we got a lot of calls from people thinking this
had been a government experiment gone bad. Nobody knew where it came
from, whether it had just mutated and suddenly become pathogenic, or if
it had been around for a long time. It was really bad because it caused
mortality in excess of 40 percent of the people who got it. It became
known as Sin Nombre virus, and there are probably some people here who
worry about taxonomy. But virologists have a peculiar way of naming
things: they name them after some location nearby where the epicenter of
the outbreak is, and if that location has a scary name, that's even
better. They originally called it the Four Corners virus, thinking it
was out here in the frontier, but the governor of every Four Corners
state immediately called Washington and complained bitterly that this
was ruining the tourist industry.

So the CDC was called on the carpet and their budget of course was
threatened to be cut. Then they convened a group out here in Albuquerque
--- we met at the Hilton and got a bunch of maps and were looking for
scary places --- and, sure enough, we found one called Muerto Canyon,
the Canyon of Death. It turned out that Muerto Canyon was the most
sacred place in the Navajo nation, so the Navajos were up in arms over
it. Finally the CDC gave up and called it the Sin Nombre, the No Name
virus. I suggested letting it be *hantavirus maniculatus* after the
scientific name of the rodent that carried it, and they politely asked
me to get out of virology, go back to mammology, and let them name their
viruses.

A cute little animal carries this thing that occurs all over the place.
It's hard to believe it would be a vector for such a bad disease, but it
is. Nearly all zoonoses, or all emerging infectious diseases and nearly
all biological weapons for that matter, are derived from wildlife that
adapt to humans. Once you know that and understand what I am about to
tell you, needing something like the NBII becomes a no-brainer.

Since the initial outbreak, most occurrences have been in the Four
Corners region of the Southwest, but there are a lot of non--Four
Corners ones, too. As a matter of fact, they're all over the United
States, all over Canada, and we predict they're in Mexico and South
America, too. Remember, too, if you really want to get worried about
this kind of stuff, that in 1993 there were no pathogenic hantaviruses
known anywhere in the New World; they were all Old World viruses we
didn't have to worry about, of course.

New York, Bayou, and Black Creek Canal are new hantaviruses we've
discovered since then that occur in places where deer mice don't occur.
But the first thing we were able to do was access museum records and
databases and plot where the reservoir of this thing occurred, and then
put out a public health warning to all health departments in those
regions saying, "You may be seeing cases of this disease," not because
we knew it was there, but because we knew the mouse that carries it was
there.

So when you compare the biologics of these things, and all known
hantaviruses and all known reservoirs, you end up with an incredible
macroevolution. That lets us predict what should be where, and so we
didn't know anything about where hantavirus --- they don't fossilize too
well, at least our methods of extracting viral fossils are not too good.
But the mice fossilize just fine---so if you take a group of mice that
came here 20 million years ago from Asia across the Bering Strait land
bridge, then went throughout North America and South America, so we
predicted that there should be hantaviruses in all these places. Sure
enough, that's what it looks like today. Remember in 1993 there were
none of the pathogens in humans. Now all of these are known to be
pathogenic.

We're still finding new ones, so the question becomes, "What if you've
discovered and named a bunch of new stuff? What good is that? Why was
there an outbreak in 1993?" Fortunately we had an LTER site in this
region in 1993; actually, it went back to 1988, and they were collecting
data for other reasons, for other esoteric biological questions that
nobody on Capitol Hill could care about. But they were saving the data
in databases that were accessible. The Sevilleta Wildlife Refuge is
about fifty miles south of here, but it's where all the major biomes
come together in this state, and it has everything from Chihuahuan
desert to Piñon-Juniper woodland to high-plains grasslands, and they had
been monitoring rodent population densities, plant productivity,
arthropods, everything that biologists like to check on all the time, to
see what effect climate was having on all of these. When we asked the
question, "Was there anything different about 1993?" here are those
different habitats and no matter which habitat you were in, the number
of mice, and not just mice but the number of deer mice and their
relatives at this site, went up remarkably in 1993. That doesn't prove
anything, but it struck us as odd, so we immediately thought, well,
everything else is being blamed on El Niño, let's try this!

You need to know something about our climate here. Most of our
precipitation comes in the form of big downpours, in what we call the
summer monsoon season. You get intense rain on short parts of the
landscape. We monitor this with a database that measures cloud-to-ground
lightning strikes so we know on average how many cubic feet of water
happens with those events, so there's a big computer model across the
landscape and then we compare it with plant growth and see what the
effect is. The big joke in New Mexico is that if they say there's a 40
percent chance of rain, here that means there's really 100 percent
chance it's going to rain, but it's only going to rain in 40 percent of
the places. So that doesn't do much for the mouse population. But when
we get an El Niño event, we get mountain snows and water precipitation
at lower elevations in the spring, and that causes a big change in plant
growth and that triggers this mouse phenomenon. So our hypothesis was
that we were probably going to get this sort of trophic cascade, and you
get precipitation input by this increased moisture and that increases
vegetation growth that feeds a bunch of little bugs, etc., and also
helps the rodent population because they eat insects as well as plant
material; as the rodent population increases, that would increase the
number of human pulmonary syndrome cases, and increase risk.

So we set up long-term sites around here and built a few databases, made
these predictions, and lo and behold, nobody got sick --- until a year
later, and then we had another outbreak. So when you really look at the
data, what we found was that the model was essentially correct, but it
needed another lag in the cascade and before there could be a threat to
humans, there had to be a hantavirus outbreak in the rodent populations.
So as the rodent populations go up. They're not infected, you just have
more mice. But then as you got more mice, they had more contact and they
became more infected and human cases went up. That was very promising.
So we've got to have extensive sampling, and we've got to be able to do
this on more than just a regional scale; thus, we get into being able to
do some remote sensing and things like that, and how we can have an
infrastructure that will let us do this on a scale that is meaningful
for the population of the United States, or New Mexico, or the world, or
wherever you're doing it.

So we started to build these kinds of models. And the way we built this
model was we took all the human cases known in this region, GPS'd their
houses, and kept it all top secret and then remote sensing using
satellites, thematic mapper images, and so on, and through a statistical
procedure found which things correlated with the case households that
were different from the control households. So those were the things we
thought might be predictive of this, and then we had the model predict
hundreds and hundreds of places on the ground and said, if this model is
correct, then we should be getting people sick if that's the model; but
we've got to see if the rodents are there that are carrying the disease
and they should be there in higher percentage and more infected at the
higher-risk areas than at the lower-risk areas.

You end up with three thematic mapper bands, plus elevation, and the
observed and inspected ended up being really high. So someone said, "OK,
let's apply this to a large area." This is roughly 250 thousand square
kilometers in the Four Corners region; and if you look at the dates, if
you go out to 1992, the more red, the more risk. We can look at an
individual pixel on this model, which is 33 meters on the side for this
resolution. So we can do an individual house; we can predict risk at an
individual house almost two years in advance using that model. We looked
at this in 1992 and said, "Get ready, things are heating up out there,"
and in 1993, it had burned down some, but remember there's a lag; a year
later people were getting really sick, and then by 1995, there were no
cases. But by 1997 it started heating up and in 1998 we had another
outbreak. We could now get this at an individual house level with about
a 92 percent probability of being correct in terms of risk based on the
rodents that are present. Now people could modify their behavior --- we
put out public health risks and we hope they will --- but they don't
really very long, at least not in this country. But if you can model
this, you should also be able to do it on a continental scale--- you
should be able to do it if there's a terrorist attack or if there's an
invasive species, or whatever.

Good forecasting can also inform ecological studies. We went back and
asked, "Where does this virus hide when nobody's getting sick?" It hides
in what we are calling refugia, and we found the refugia; we know where
they are, and we're now modeling using mathematical models of how they
should spread out of these refugia, but you have to have a lot of
groundtruthing. We have to have a lot of different databases and access
a lot of them in real time to be able to do much of this, and we've got
a long way to go to get our museum databases up to snuff and online, but
somebody's got to buy the infrastructure for that.

One other thing for conservation-oriented folks in the audience. One
thing we wanted to know was, what does biological diversity have to do
with buffering our risk to any of these diseases? Is the natural
ecosystem safer or more dangerous? For years I heard, well, people are
punching deeper into the rainforest and are coming into contact with all
this bad stuff that lives in the rainforest, but we're finding just the
opposite: people are punching into the rainforest okay, but they're
bringing all the bad stuff with them and reducing the diversity. We say
all these things and we get labeled as "green" or "tree huggers," but we
wanted to test this experimentally, so I sent a graduate student to
Panama, with the hypothesis that if you decrease diversity, that should
increase the density of the common and reservoir species at least for
hantavirus, because the common and reservoir species are all those
things I showed you that are in the deer mouse; they're on rodents, and
they love to be around disturbed habitats and around peoples' houses. If
you disturb the habitat to wipe it out, all these species that need more
pristine habitats go away and that opens up the niche for the bad guys
to increase. And, as you saw before, as the numbers increase, the risk
goes up and infection goes up. We think that also means that the
population increase leads to infection rates, and decreased biological
diversity leads to increased risk to humans, for at least this group of
diseases.

So we went to Panama and looked at pristine forest---the only place that
is now is in the national parks---then we looked at the edges, or the
totally human-dominated habitat, a lot of pastures, a lot of rice. If
you look at where the reservoir is, and the alternative host species and
those that don't carry anything, you'll notice that all of these
competent reservoirs for hantavirus are out in these human habitats, all
of these pure things are in the national forest for the most part, and
if you look at the numbers of these things, there are way more species
in natural habitats, but the species they lack are out of these common
reservoirs or if the reservoirs are present, they're present in much
lower numbers because of species they compete with. They never obtained
the density in the pristine habitats that they did in the
human-dominated habitats.

We couldn't leave well-enough alone, so I said, put a bunch of
experimental plots in and let's track all of those and have a whole
bunch of controls and remove every species that's not a competent
reservoir, just get rid of all the competitors and keep doing that until
all we've got left is competent reservoirs and let's see what happens.
There are about two to three species that are competent reservoirs here
because there are multiple hantaviruses in Panama. We wanted to do it in
the edge habitat, as well as around people's houses in the totally
human-dominated habitat, but the Panamanian government had a problem
with us catching mice that we would infect with hantavirus and turning
them loose next to people's houses, so we had to stick with the edges.

When we did that, after four trapping periods, we had significant
differences between the density of competent reservoir species versus
the others, because we didn't fence these, so even though we were
removing the noncompetent reservoirs, others kept dispersing in. But
that's all it took for the other populations to take off; in fact, some
interesting things happened. By sampling period three, the percent of
mice in the experimental populations that "sero-converted" \-- which
means they were infected with the virus \-- was up about 40 percent, so
by the third tracking period, we started getting an increase in the
rodent densities. Not only did the number of mice increase, but the
number of infected mice increased experimentally, and this was repeated
over and over again. Not only were we able to substantiate our
hypothesis, but experimentally in a number of ways, so basically reduced
biodiversity, at least in this country and with this disease, has a
major impact on your risk of catching this disease.

To close, when we're talking about the NBII and other networks and
strategies for how to do this, there's a group called the National
LambdaRail Inc., in this country that is building fiber optics back-up;
it's a combination of universities and private sector, mostly
universities, and NLR has 400 gigabytes of fiber, and it's totally owned
by NLR, and it's not a commercial operation. You can build networks on
top of networks, so if we want to build a secure 10 gig network for NBII
kind of stuff, that can be done on this network. What it does is link
all of those regional networks together, so you get border-to-border
coverage within states, but that's not 10 gigabytes in most states, at
least it's not in mine. But this gives you a superspeed highway, and you
can also keep it secure because most NLR networks don't go into the
Internet; they can, but they don't have to, so you don't have to worry
about getting hacked. You can connect to a lot of nodes and things at a
fraction of the cost.

I wanted to point out, too, that we're talking about the U.S. and the
national, etc., and we want to get the national operation going first,
but we're already concerned about international stuff, linking with GBIF
and so forth. We're working on the Mexico-Central America-South America
piece right now. That's coming.

**Tuesday, October 25**

**10:20--10:40: "Conservation Commons"**

**Tom Moritz,** **Boeschenstein Director, Library Services, American
Museum of Natural History**

I'm going to talk about the Conservation Commons Initiative and
something we're calling the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which is
being rolled out today in San Francisco. I'm going to talk about some
work we've done at the American Museum of Natural History.

There's a reason for us to do these things, and it's not just the
fascinating kinds of scientific research reasons Terry was addressing.
It's really about kids all over the world, and there's an international
dimension to the work we're all doing. We're not always here in the
States. Sometimes we have to be shy about saying that because there
seems to be a "dis-sympathy" for the international dimension of what we
do, but clearly it's an important part of what we do at the NBII and in
the larger conservation group.

This is the basic mission statement of the Conservation Commons: "The
Conservation Commons promotes and enables conscious, effective, and
equitable sharing of knowledge resources to advance conservation."

What's essential is: [conscious, effective, and equitable sharing of
resources.]{.underline} We're talking about that at every scale ---
globally, nationally, regionally, and locally. The conscious part means
we want conservationists to think clearly about the disposition of the
knowledge resources you're developing, whether they're data resources,
images, formal or informal publications, or actually distilled
knowledge. It's important that we stay aware of what these resources are
and how they're going to be disposed and made available. It's not
something biologists have very often had to do in the past, but I think
Terry's point about the infrastructure of the future makes that point
even clearer.

How do we think logically about the synthesis of our resources and,
technically, how can they be integrated? Those are separate and
necessary components and we have to be able to do both: we have to think
logically about how these things can be related, and technically how
they can be brought together in networked environments. And, finally,
equitable sharing --- I'll talk about that a lot. That has to do with
making these resources broadly available in a democratic way to our
entire community.

The Conservation Commons has taken off in the last couple years under
the auspices of IUCM, the World Conservation Union, and GBIF, the Global
Biodiversity Information Facility. We took a resolution to the World
Conservation Congress in Bangkok last year in November, and 79 countries
endorsed the basic principles of the Conservation Commons. The U.S.
abstained.

These are the three basic principles: (1.) we're promoting free and open
access to knowledge resources in biodiversity; (2.) we're promoting the
sense of reciprocity and mutual benefit in this environment; and (3.)
we're clearly stating there are rights and responsibilities for
attribution and maintaining the integrity of original work particularly.
So we're talking about the notion of responsible use of these resources,
in our estimation both attribution and maintaining the integrity of the
original work.

Here is the "Knowledge Life Cycle" and its four key elements they're
projecting as part of the cycle: creation of knowledge, mobilization,
diffusion, and commoditization. The question I'm raising is, is our
conservation knowledge in fact a commodity? That's obviously one of the
lines that's been developing for a number of years. In some instances,
it may be; but in most it's not. There are other ways of governing our
resources than assigning a commodity value and using that as a basis for
the distribution and dissemination of our resources.

So what about this idea of the commons? If you look at the literature
from the years before Garrett Hardin there were a handful of articles
about the commons. In the years since Garrett Hardin, there have been
tens of thousands of articles addressing the commons. Many of us are
taught in school that Hardin has definitely proven that the commons is
not a working model; well, of course, it is. A commons-type model has
been used in hundreds of documented instances of human resource sharing
and common pool resources. L. R. Austin at Indiana University has spent
decades documenting how common pool resource arrangements work, and she
has done deep analysis on what the rules are that govern successful,
sustainable use of commons arrangements. Of course, there are such
arrangements: you think about pasturelands, forestry, fisheries, sharing
water---in many cases worldwide, human societies and cultures have
worked out ways to work common pool resource arrangements sustainably
and successfully. So Hardin's concept is, you can draw a lot of
attention; it's simplistic, and there's a lot of discussion we could
have about this. But I'll make the point that empirically there is
plenty of evidence that commons arrangements work, which is good news
for all of us.

Here's what we're calling for: promotion of the public domain, something
that as government people you're conscious of; and parallel and
complementary development of the sustainable knowledge commons. We see
both as parallel and complementary developments, and we want to
encourage both; in fact, the public domain has been under attack for a
number of years, and also there are greater restrictions and assertion
of proprietary controls and limits on all forms of knowledge resources.

As for a general description of the public domain, I would argue that
biodiversity resources should fall to a large degree within this area
and that we're making an ethical case for sharing biodiversity resources
when they don't fall strictly in the public domain.

So we're talking about a commons as a limited and conditional zone of
fair use, as opposed to the public domain --- that's the essence of it.
What this means is in cases where there might be, for example, people in
the developing world, or in cases of indigenous knowledge, people who
are extremely and justifiably sensitive to misuses of their knowledge
resources, they can make these resources available with conditional
licenses that are available under a range of national and foreign laws.
There are also a good set of licenses drafted within the U.S. under the
creative commons science licensing scheme. These licenses are available
to be used right now. They were rigorously drafted by a group at
Stanford Law School under the leadership of Larry Lessig. Essentially it
is possible to make your resources available, to protect them against
unauthorized commercial uses, but to make them freely available for a
variety of other reasons.

A digital commons has certain properties that make it particularly
attractive. One is that it's non-rivalrous; there's near-zero cost for
additional users. And in the Web environment, it's non-excludable and
universally accessible.

When we're talking about knowledge resources, we're talking about data,
information, knowledge, and of course something we call wisdom or
insight, which is a way we wisely apply these resources to decisions. In
each case, we're talking about data collecting, basic research involving
basic data through information and knowledge; governmental research ---
a lot of the stuff you are involved with; and education. These are
things I'm guessing everyone in this room produces and helps to
generate. When we talk about consciousness about this, we're talking
about consciously considering what the disposition of these resources
that you create will be.

We have definitions of these core resources --- the data, information,
experience and expertise, and knowledge. My view is if you can't define
these things, what are doing talking about them? There's a lot of lip
service paid to knowledge management and many other things; but unless
you can come to some working definitions so you know what you're talking
about, what are you going to do operationally about it? So we at least
propose these as definitions we can use operationally, making decisions
about applications, decisions about design, how we are going to build
systems and networks.

Today in conservation we talk about what Richard Lewonton at Harvard
calls the triple helix: genomics, organismic biology, the environmental
sciences \-- and the consequences of those things. We think about how
can these things be brought together logically, and Terry's presentation
was a brilliant example of how that's starting to work for us.

Generally speaking, data samples are collected and analyzed
independently. They are heterogeneous and unstandardized, exist in
various twilight states of accessibility, and thus are disaggregated
components of an incipient network. So that's what I'm here to talk
about, and in fact as Terry discussed, what are we going to do about
this infrastructure? How is this incipient network actually coming to
be? That's the force of the argument we're trying to make.

Larry Lessig talks about constraints on access to individual
information, but unless we address each major modality of constraint,
that is, the financial and market factors, the law and legal
constraints, architecture and technology, which are the most tractable
of the problems we're dealing with --- I don't think it's the most
serious one --- and finally normative behavior, whether they're
normative for individual scientists or for institutions, universities,
scientific societies, or governments. In each case, we need to change
the way we think about using resources and how we make them available.
So a coherent strategy has got to incorporate all these elements and
address them effectively. We need to address these policies, elements,
and modalities in an effective, coherent way.

So what about conservation literature? We've experienced huge cost
increases in journals. From 1986 to 2002, we've had a 227 percent
increase in serials cost for scientific journals. The increase in that
time for the CPI, the consumer price index, was 64 percent, so there's a
gap. Teddy Roosevelt IV is on our library committee and he said it's not
because the publishers are not profitable. Here's what else appeared:
this is from the Washington Post, 1983: 30 percent profit margin and
\$1.6 billion in revenue. I wouldn't mind having some of that stock
myself. That's an extremely profitable business because they have a
perfect monopoly on scientific information. The take-home message for
anyone in this room who's publishing scientifically is to ask yourself,
"What's the disposition of my scientific work? Am I going to put this
into a journal where it's going to be locked up in a copyrighted way and
made available only as a commodity to a very limited group of people?
Or, do I want this to reach the whole conservation community?"

Jack just said, "Do you want tenure?" and clearly the choice between
publishing in *PloS Biology*, the Public Library of Science *Biology*
open-access journal, and *Nature* is still a question of scientific
societies and institutions giving greater credit to commercially
accessed and available resources. But a shift is occurring.

We block off a huge part of our knowledge in books. In 1930, more than
ten thousand books were published; only 174 of those are still in print
today, yet all of them are protected by copyright under current law, so
that means 9,853 books published in that time are not available. In New
York we have 440 titles published in that period. Most of those things,
we can't digitize legally; but no one wants them from a commercial
standpoint. In fact, 95 percent of the things publishers put out are no
longer commercially available within five years. And yet our copyright
laws lock them up and make them unavailable to us for digital purposes
or re-use or any purpose. This is a *tremendous* problem for many of us,
and there are strategies for addressing that.

An analysis of 2,500,000 citations in *Zoological Record* shows the
major classes of publishers for this material. By far the biggest group
are what we call the associational publishers; they clearly have a
mission to share their knowledge resources, their science, but they're
also often locked into agreements with publishers and also into the
institutional arrangements within their societies, where this commodity
arrangement is essential to their function. So we're looking for new
business models, new ways to do that, and some new models are emerging.

Another example: in 1993, 424 new ant species were described. Only a few
of those were published in open-access mode where people could take and
use the material. The rest were published in copyrighted journals.

In the World Bank Annual Report, they reflexively apply copyright, and
they insist that anyone wanting to use their material has to ask
permission, i.e., there's a barrier to use here because some people
won't know how to do that and won't be able to do that. For those of us
who do know how, there's a transaction cost, there's a factor associated
with it. I'm picking on the World Bank because I like to. But this is
true of most organizations. Most people are reflexively applying these
licenses because we don't think about it, right? And we don't think
about the fact we're imposing a transaction cost on anyone who wants to
use this material.

There are many different ways that visual materials can be used---for
rendering, viewing, playing, copying ... you can move it around, extract
from it, edit it, embed it in other documents --- so thinking not just
about open access, that is, making something available on the Web, what
are you permitting people to do with it? It's a really important thing
to be conscious of. You want to think very clearly about what the
permitted uses are.

Since 1991, the IUCN (the World Conservation Union) has been already
using something like the commons licensing scheme permitting, without
getting permission, anyone to use this as long as you're not going to
use it commercially. Some people have been doing it for a long time.

The Creative Commons has a licensing scheme that already has drafted a
full set of licenses in U.S. law, and there are completed licenses
drafted in the natural law of 21 countries and another full set of
licenses drafted for a variety of other countries. It's an ongoing
active project and these are well-drafted examples of the kinds of
variant licenses I'm talking about. These are available now and can be
used very easily by anyone who chooses to do so.

There are strong ethical arguments from the standpoint of science and
conservation for the availability of science data and the full
disclosure of results through publication; these are cornerstones of
basic research and certainly of conservation as well. The Convention on
Biological Diversity calls for the repatriation of information. The
Society for Conservation Biology Code of Ethics Principle One calls for
the active dissemination of information to promote the understanding of
and appreciation for biodiversity. As for the library tradition itself,
for centuries, we've been protected areas for scientific knowledge. The
public libraries, in fact, are a commons or a zone of fair use for
access to knowledge. That's why the Public Library of Science initiative
has emerged.

I'm pleased to announce that this evening, in San Francisco at the Open
Content Alliance \-- Brewster Kahle's operation in San Francisco \--
we're announcing the roll-out of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Project. This project is a coalition of major natural history
institutions. We've agreed and each of us has signed a memorandum of
cooperation calling for the digitization of the complete holdings of our
libraries collectively. This is a major initiative; this is the American
Museum of Natural History, two Harvard library groups, Missouri
Botanical, the Natural History Museum in London, New York Botanical, Kew
Gardens, and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. So we're calling
for a Google-type project, we've agreed already (we met in May) and have
worked through the initial phase of planning. We're undertaking the
fundraising right now to do this work. So the intention is to make
available the entire holdings of these collections over some period
using industrial strength approaches. In conjunction with this, I'm
going to announce that in the next 10 days, we at the American Museum
are also rolling out an application that will make available all of our
museum publications back to 1889 in an open-access mode freely available
through a DSpace application; DSpace is an open-source digital
repository software. That means more than six thousand publications from
our museum will be freely available for use by the worldwide community.

So there are some really good things happening and a lot more I don't
have time to talk about; but I'm glad for the opportunity to be here,
and I want to thank Gladys and John for being able to come by today.

**Tuesday, October 25**

**10:40--11:00: "Opportunities for Cyberinfrastructure Collaboration and
Partnerships"**

**Dr. William Michener, Long Term Ecological Research Network**

I'll talk about the need for collaboration in cyberinfrastructure, and
then do a little promotion for the types of collaborations we see in
relation to universities, networks, like the Long Term Ecological
Research Network, and things such as NEON, which some of you have
probably heard about. Then I'll discuss design concepts.

First, the need: we've heard in some of the previous talks about the
need to understand infectious disease and so on. I think there's an
overall realization that more and more of the problems we face are
really continental and global in scale. Just a few examples: large
regional droughts, in some cases continental-scale droughts; infectious
diseases; invasive species; and the massive land-use changes occurring
everywhere.

A number of recent publications highlight the tremendous challenges we
face in understanding our environment. What we want to be able to do
with programs like NEON and others is to forecast. This is a nontrivial
exercise. To understand and be able to forecast, for example,
multi-scale patterns of climate variability and its effect on ecosystems
and ecosystem services, requires the integration and acquisition of data
from a whole suite of disciplines. It is nontrivial, it involves
bringing socioeconomic data, ecological data, and atmospheric data and
integrating them in a seamless fashion, with rapid analysis, and then
turning that into forecasts that can be acted upon in a reasonable
amount of time.

In addition to the big biological challenges pointed to in the National
Research Council reports of 2001, I'll point to some of these issues as
ones we're confronted with: forecasting, for example, which organisms
are likely to become health risks as pathogens; to be able to forecast
which systems are at risk from invasive species; and then this whole
issue of public human natural systems and the massive land-use changes
occurring there and how those are also interacting with climate change
as well.

What are some of the opportunities? I use the University of New Mexico
as a surrogate for a whole array of universities. The Museum of Biology
has tremendous collections as well as resources: open cold storage for
storing those tissue samples used to research hantavirus issues and so
on; analytical capabilities; and the Sevilleta Research Station---many
of the roughly 180 field stations and marine laboratories in the U.S.
are associated with research universities. The Sevilleta, in particular,
was highlighted in Terry's talk as the place where the hantavirus issue
was unraveled. Again, all of these resources are necessary to tease
apart some of these complex questions---not only the field crews, but
the storage capacity for the historic specimens, the open cold storage
for tissues, and the tremendous analytical processing capacity as well.

One of the things we've really benefited from here at the University of
New Mexico is the Center for Rapid Environmental Assessment and Terrain
Evaluation (CREATE). It's a relatively new laboratory, and for those of
you who have driven up University Avenue and seen what looks like two
baseballs on top of a building across from the ballpark, these are
antennae, one 1.5 meter L-band and one 4.5 meter X-band antennae that
are used continuously to download not only the MODIS data, but a variety
of NOAA satellite data, streams, and others, and be able to do very
rapid analysis of processing the data that we have from dedicated links.
Sixteen terabytes of online storage can be used to automatically process
these data and provide pretty much real-time analyses.

One of the conclusions I want to leave you with is the importance of
networking and networks, not only the NBII, but the Long Term Ecological
Research Network and others.

LTER is a network now of 26 sites, both terrestrial and marine, that
span the United States; we have two in Antarctica, two in Alaska, one in
Puerto Rico, one in the French Polynesian Islands, and the rest in the
lower 48. These are tremendous resources for data, information, and
expertise. Right now I think LTER is roughly hovering around 15,000
publications that come out of it, over 6,000 data sets that are online
and accessible, and roughly 1,600 students and faculty members and
others that do research at these different sites, so it is a tremendous,
tremendous resource.

I want to highlight one of the existing interactions that has been very
fruitful in the past year, and this through the LTER network office.
It's had a tremendous role in bringing a lot of these metadata resources
at the LTER sites, making them compatible with the biological data
profile and getting those resources up online.

Networks like the Long Term Ecological Research Network program are
important for a number of reasons, including the research networking
that goes on with the members of LTER and other broader communities. One
example is the Organization of Biological Field Stations; we've been
working very closely with that organization for the past three years,
not only to help them get their metadata in a form that can be
discoverable, but also in terms of training. We currently train 20 to 30
individual staff members from field stations on an annual basis in
ecological informatics and try to do that to help bring their expertise
up to par.

We recently helped design a data registry for the Ecological Society of
America and this, again, was a collaboration involving LTER, a whole
suite of scientists involved in a couple of large NSF-related ITR
projects, information technology research projects, and we've had
representatives from the NBII at this meeting as well.

And, finally, a recent cover from [Bioscience]{.underline} was again
following up on a number of collaborations that LTER has had with other
entities; in this case, international, developing its wireless sensor
networks. One article in this journal focused on activities associated
with ways to link different high-speed bandwidth with real-time data
screens from Taiwan. A couple of those data screens look at how some of
these large storm events impact lakes in these different habitat.

Another area where we've seen a lot of advance is software development.
This is one of the key areas where there are significant opportunities
and needs for collaboration. The particular tool that I'm demonstrating
is an analytical assignment-of-workload package. It has evolved
considerably over the last few years; it started as an electrical
engineering package. This is a tool that can be used to meet several
important needs. One is data streaming: to automate the streaming of
data from sensors through processing and making them available on a
scientist's desktop. That is a tremendously complicated effort; there's
no need to reinvent the wheel, so when we develop workflows that work
for particular instances they can be easily transferred to other users.
Just a year ago we demonstrated real-time data acquisition from the
ocean floor, processing acquisition of the data through satellite links,
and then providing the data on scientists' desktops. This was done at
the national conference in D.C. as one of the first demonstrations of
this technology.

In addition, when we start thinking about national programs like NEON,
there's a significant need to replicate analyses and information
management tools and provide those to a whole suite of users; so if you
have somebody assigned to workflow packages, we can in fact do that. We
can package up an analysis for a process and send that out to an array
of users at distributed sites and really facilitate them doing their
job.

Training is an important activity the LTER network has been involved in.
We've had a tremendous group come through and we've done evaluations and
have found out we're in fact meeting the needs of the field stations and
the marine labs, teaching about ecological informatics, as well as
sensor and wireless communications. Again, this is to try to bring up
the technological expertise at the field stations, which are tremendous
national resources.

We've created an open-source Web page, where you can download not only
Kepler but other informatics tools. I think this follows from the
previous talk by Tom: making a lot of these tools available is a
critical need for the community. Microsoft, despite its wealth and
breadth and activities, doesn't develop a lot of the tools and so on
that our community needs. We have to rely on open-source developers to
do that.

So now we switch gears to NEON. NEON is something you may have heard of,
it is being designed as a national platform, which shows domains
throughout the United States. The platform is being designed to answer
three overarching questions, all of which relate back to the NRC Grand
Challenges report: land use and climate; the effects on our nation's
water; and, finally, to biodiversity, infectious diseases, and invasive
species. It's designed as an automated network, with distributed
sensors, that allow us to observe previously unobservable phenomena.

With the capacity we envision for NEON, we're talking about significant
cyber and infrastructural challenges. We're talking about an end-to-end
solution, where we can integrate not only sensory data from NEON, but
sensory data coming in from other sources, as well as a whole array of
other different data types \-- processing those, curating them, and
making them available broadly. And then, because of the distributive
nature of NEON, we need collaboration tools, new collaboration
environments to facilitate the scientist working in Alaska or the
scientist working in Florida or other places.

One of the types of technologies we're going to need for NEON, as well
as other environmental observatories and other programs we're
developing, is a much more effective way of transmitting data and tools,
making them available and useful to scientists, educators, and others.
In addition to a whole array of tools, we're going to need much better
searching mechanisms to arrive at those. This is just one of the
tremendous opportunities for partnerships.

We know we need to continue to work on data and metadata standardization
activities. We all see the need for continued efforts for vocabulary
development, particularly ontologies to facilitate the automated
processing and analysis of data. Emerging technologies are going to be
critical, not only for sensor-cyber infrastructure, but to continue to
develop analytical workflow.

Flatter environments are going to be increasingly important, as we start
attacking regional and continental scale questions. Finally, data
repositories and facilities are going to be needed. I think this is one
of our key needs now, not only for all the data we have presently that
are undercurated or unattended, but also for the data we're going to be
collecting over the next decade from these environmental observatories.
I think the NBII, in conjunction with other groups represented here, can
play a significant role.

The only way we're going meet the real challenges we face is by
leveraging, and I think it's going to make all of us think and act
outside of the box. In many ways we not only need to be responsive to
our communities, but we also need to be proactive. We need to be not
only focused on meeting our data needs, but we need to be nimble to take
advantage of new opportunities and new partnerships of new science and
new education.

**Tuesday, October 25**

11:00--11:30: "A Collections Theme: Natural History Collections in an
Informatics Age"

Dr. James Woolley, Department of Entomology, Texas A&M University

I'm going to pick up many of the themes other speakers have talked about
this morning, but I'm going to do so from the perspective of natural
history collections and, particularly, from the perspective of a
taxonomist, which is how I've made my living for the last twenty-five
years. I was trained to do taxonomy in a way that's not very different
from the way Darwin was trained to do barnacle taxonomy. But all that's
changed in the last 20 or 30 years. The field has exploded. The digital
imaging tools we have now, the access to computers and databases, and
analytical techniques are radically transforming the way every step of
systematics and taxonomy takes place.

These digital technologies are changing all the rules. I think we're
beginning to see a future now in which taxonomy collections ---
literature, expertise, digital libraries, virtual monographs --- all of
these things can become part of a single distributed virtual research
tool and education resource. That's the perspective I'm going to
develop.

There's a vision now emerging of a new taxonomy. It's going to be
Web-based --- the Web provides a single, global point of access. It's
going to be distributed; Web-based doesn't mean integrated in a single
location. For example, there are already over 350 Web sites devoted to
Lepidoptera --- butterflies and moths --- on the Web.

It needs to be authoritative. We need a single, electronic catalog of
life on Earth. Obviously, the Web is accessible to multiple audiences
all over the world. It's relevant to many societal concerns, such as
natural resource management, invasive species, agriculture, and
medicine. Taxonomic publications shouldn't be end points; they are
"version control" devices. All of this needs to be virtual. The whole
paradigm for taxonomic publication is going to change in the next five
years. It's already changing.

I have to say the NSF programs are helping to drive this renaissance in
taxonomy. Programs like Assembling the Tree of Life (AToL), which Terry
helped put together; PBI, the Planetary Biodiversity Inventory; PEET,
Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy --- these are projects
on unprecedented taxonomic scales. They're creating new challenges. One
way of looking at this is that NSF is funding projects for which the
analytical and informatics technology does not exist to solve the
problem; but I think that's deliberate, and I think that NSF is trying
to drive the enterprise forward by doing this.

There are some 1,500 natural history collections in the United States we
know of so far, and we know there are many more out there. There are
multiple collections in every state. This is an enormous resource; this
is two hundred years of investment and billions of dollars --- these are
treasure troves of knowledge of the biological diversity of our country
that go back to the Lewis and Clark expedition. The Lewis and Clark
specimens are in the Natural Academy in Philadelphia, I believe. Terry
did a wonderful job of explaining how pulling information on this sort
of continental scale can give us very powerful predictive modeling tools
for public health applications. The same arguments can be made for
agriculture, for agricultural pests and invasive species, and so forth.

What these collections are now, of course, is "incipient elements in a
disaggregated incipient network." Why do we need all these collections?
Sometimes you'll hear the suggestion that if we could just pull together
the big collections, that would give us all we need to know, however you
define a "big" collection \-- over ten million or twenty million
specimens or whatever. An example is a graph of the mammals of Oklahoma
showing the number of specimens contained in natural history
collections, including USNM, Kansas, Oklahoma State, and the Oklahoma
Museum of Natural History. The interesting thing is that you don't get a
complete picture of the mammals of Oklahoma unless you put all these
collections together. You have to aggregate them --- that's where the
power is, that's where the information is. However, they're scattered,
they exist largely in isolation from each other, they're underfunded,
their buildings may be falling down --- we have severe infrastructure
problems in many collections, and almost every one is understaffed and
facing budget cuts. They're often not curated to the level they should
be. Identifications are often wrong, particularly in invertebrate groups
like I work on---it's the sort of thing we don't like to talk about too
much, but a very high percentage of the material out there needs to be
authoritatively identified.

Collections tend to be their institutions' poor stepchildren. With the
exception of university administrators like Terry, there aren't any
other vice presidents for research at major research institutions across
the country that have collections as a number one priority. People are
typically more interested genomic institutes or particle accelerators or
football stadiums or whatever. Collections are deep in isolation, and
this has been the problem. Unfortunately it's characteristic of our
community that we tend to do this handwringing at every opportunity and
feel like nobody loves us, we're the poor relations, etc.; but let's
face it: each one of those collections forms part of the greatest
database, or potential database, on the biological diversity in the
world. But we don't even know how many collections are out there, how
many institutions have collections, who's in charge of them, etc.
There's a lot of groundwork that needs to be done just to pull together
the basic information on what the extent of the resource is in natural
history collections in this country. As I mentioned, there are all sort
of physical plant needs, personnel needs, etc., that urgently need to be
addressed in the next few years.

I'm going to shift gears from this sort of handwringing and talk about
the report that came out of the National Science Foundation: this
generated a lot of excitement at NSF about the time I got there. It's
the so-called Atkins Report on the potential for cyberinfrastructure.
The overarching finding is that a new age has dawned in scientific and
engineering research, and this is pushed by continuing progress in
computing, information, and communication technology, and it's pulled by
the expanding complexity, scope, and scale of today's challenges. That's
the sort of pull I was talking about when I mentioned the programs that
NSF is funding in systematic biology, for example \-- Assembling the
Tree of Life and Planetary Biodiversity Inventories.

The capacity of this technology has crossed thresholds that now make
possible a comprehensive "cyberinfrastructure" in which we can build new
types of scientific and engineering knowledge environments and
organizations. This is going to transform the way we do research.
Cyberinfrastructure can be used to build more ubiquitous and
comprehensive digital environments. These are going to be interactive
and functionally complete for research communities in terms of people,
data, information tools, and instruments, and they're going to operate
at unprecedented levels of computational speed, storage, and data
transfer capacity. This is all happening. These are going to include
grids of computational centers, some with computing power second to
none; comprehensive libraries of digital objects including programs and
literature; multidisciplinary, well-curated, federated collections of
scientific data, with thousands of online instruments and sensor arrays;
and convenient software toolkits for resource, discovery, modeling, and
data visualization.

The emphasis is on physically distributed teams of people that are going
to be able to use these capabilities. Now many contemporary projects in
science and engineering require these large federations of distributed
computational and informatics resources, harvested legacy data, etc.
There are many virtual science communities, including NEON, the National
Science Virtual Library, the Grid Physics Network, and more. There has
been a series of workshops sponsored by NSF in recent years to explore
these ideas in the systematics, taxonomy, and natural history
collections communities. These represented primarily people from the
natural history collections community, different sorts of disciplinary
societies --- the entomologists, the herpetologists, etc. --- as well as
some IT and informatics people. The vision that came out of this is of a
single biodiversity observatory or systematic biology, which has come to
be known as Linné, or Legacy Infrastructure Network for Natural
Environments. This would be a virtual resource platform, which would
remove the taxonomic impediments we have and allow researchers to see
across historical and geological time, continents and seas, species and
clades, and ontogenetic paths and ecosystems.

These are the Big Questions:

-   What are Earth's species and how do they vary,

-   How are species distributed in geographical and ecological space,

-   What is the history of life on Earth and how are species
    interrelated,

-   How has biological diversity changed through space and time, and

-   What is the history and character of transformations?

Most of us have been working on one little part of this puzzle
throughout our careers. But something like a virtual research platform
will enable people to tackle these questions in a comprehensive way, on
a scale that's never before been possible.

So each natural history collection or taxonomic research facility is
potentially a node in a natural cyberlaboratory. Each would contribute
its own strengths to this network, and the resources of each node would
be available to all of the nodes and, of course, those resources can
take a myriad of forms. In order to do this, what needs to be done? We
need to modernize collection facilities; we need to improve systematic
laboratories with modern instruments; we need to establish specialized
technological nodes; and we need to connect these laboratories, tools,
and collections electronically.

I'm going to quickly move through what some of these developments may
be: high bandwidth image and data capture and transfer; online
identification tools; and tools for georeferencing, data analysis, and
visualization. Digital imaging methods are moving extremely quickly,
things like three-dimensional computer tomography, and so forth,
providing exciting new tools, and all this information is in digital
form. We need to enhance the taxonomic workforce, and new generations of
students need to be educated to utilize these technologies. The NSF PEET
program is a good start, but it's only a start.

Collection facilities need to be modernized. Many collections are in
desperate need of renovation and environmental controls and things like
archival tissue storage. I mentioned the problem with the need to update
and verify specimens.

Teams of taxonomists would be linked with each other *and* with research
resources. These are going to provide new tools for education and
outreach. Something like this could transform the study of organismal
biology, because as you all know, this makes the information available
to researchers at small institutions, schools, and developing countries.

Some people say this is just too much --- they can't get their head
around it. But virtually all the necessary technology to do this is
either already out there --- you've all been working on much of it ---
or will be in the next few years. So I sat down one morning and tried to
pull together a list of key activities and very quickly I filled several
screens, and there are a very large number of activities already under
way. I'm going to mention a few, things like MaNIS and HerpNET and
FishNet and ORNIS are already linking collections and making data
available on a continental scale.

I'm not going to stand up here and tell you about the NBII --- I'm here
to learn, and I must say that I'm tremendously excited about what I've
seen. You're all way down the road with infrastructure and networking on
a national and continental scale. We look forward to working with you;
you're providing the networking and informatics structure needed to move
something like this effort forward.

GBIF is at the intersection of science, policy, and applications
worldwide, they have 47 member countries, and the basic principles of
GBIF are perfectly familiar to everyone in the audience. The emphasis is
on working together, and GBIF can provide the critical components of the
cyber framework for Linné, and in exchange, Linné's cyberlaboratory can
provide data to GBIF.

There are a couple of other activities in Europe you may not be familiar
with. Synthesys is a consortium of some 20 different natural history
museums and botanic gardens in Europe. It's a Framework 6 project that
started in 2004. The first part of the effort is to pull together
information on earth and life science collections, facilities, and
taxonomic expertise across Europe. The second part is networking
activities, with the emphasis on complementary data standards,
collections standards, databases, new collections methods, and new
collections methodology.

Then there's the European Network for Biodiversity Information. This is
a new project; it's a European contribution to GBIF that has some 69
different partners in 26 countries in Europe, including all the major
natural history collections and systematics institutes.

Chronos is an effort primarily with the U.S. earth science community to
put together dynamic, interactive, and time-calibrated networks of
databases and visualization tools for sedimentary geology and
paleobiology.

We've already talked at some length about NEON. Linné will provide
critical baseline information for ecological research on a continental
scale, and in turn NEON will provide resources for acquiring new data,
voucher specimens, and improvement of collections infrastructure at
selected locations.

Last, but certainly not least, the Natural Science Collections Alliance
provides an ideal communications forum and network to collections
nationwide. This provides a critical, national presence in Washington
D.C., and it does provide a mechanism for tactical response if
particular collections are threatened. It's essential!

So my point of view is that the foundations are in place. The challenge
is not to reinvent any of these wheels, but to identify what wheels are
already out there, and to get them to work together --- to integrate
them into an operational system. To do this will require that we
establish a common vision and research agenda, and that we work as a
community worldwide. That's not something we're very used to doing, and
this group is much more used to doing it than many others in the
collections community. This integrated, "Big Science" approach really
requires a change in our scientific culture.

I don't know if any of you know Sandy Knapp, a botanist at the Natural
History Museum in London. She was telling me that her father is a
particle physicist and she was talking with him about this shift to a
"Big Science" paradigm that seems to be happening in systematic biology.
Of course that's already happened in particle physics --- they're used
to working in these big, distributed teams --- but they went through
terrible problems with this shift to a new way of doing business. They
had problems with career recognition and rewards, all the things we've
heard this morning --- all this lies ahead of us and we need to solve
these problems.

So this will cost billions of dollars, it's going to require
congressional action, it's going to require state action, it's going to
require a unified user community, it will take many years, and it won't
be easy.

**Tuesday, October 25**

**4:30--5:00, "Anecdotes to Outcomes"**

**Kate Kase and Gladys Cotter,** **NBII Program Office**

[Kate Kase:]{.underline}

Earlier today, Gladys talked about the NBII in the past, present, and
future tenses, and I think of it both as a maturing --- it's sort of a
growing-up process we're involved in --- as well as an evolution. I went
back and forth when I was deciding what to say today about whether I
wanted to couch this in evolutionary terms or in maturity terms, and I
decided to mix metaphors and use both.

I'm going to call phase one, the period from 1993 to 1998, the NBII's
infancy. That's what Gladys was talking about when she said we were
focusing on the low-hanging fruit, things that could show demonstrable
progress in a short period of time. Part of that time was even before
that, when our primary focus was on standards and shaping the vision of
the NBII. NBII progress at that time was communicated word of mouth,
with the exception of a few reports that were very important; but it was
primarily through word of mouth.

As we started to shape the introduction of nodes, we saw them beginning
to emerge from the primal ooze --- this is the evolutionary part of it
--- and the focus again was on that rapid evolution; it was on designing
projects that would be completed in a short time and have something to
show for the money spent. That takes us right up to now, 2005; the
progress has been able to be communicated through word of mouth and,
because we've done things and had successes, we have a story to tell. So
we've had anecdotal evidence, which you've been hearing all day today,
and you heard at last year's meeting and the year before; and we also
have had lots of stories communicated through many, many vendors, but
the evidence of our success has been primarily anecdotal.

Now we move into phase three, NBII's adolescence --- where we are right
now, at the dawn of fiscal year 2006. As we move forward, what Gladys
was talking about earlier today, what we're going to talk about more
together interactively, and what we're going to hear later in the week,
is the recurring theme that we need to mature in such a way that as our
nodes and projects and activities grow independently stronger, they also
grow together. We need to focus on national priorities to form a solid,
interconnected network, which we certainly have been doing; but we need
to do it in a more determinative fashion and the focus in the future has
to be directed to stakeholder priorities with measurable outcomes. So
now progress will be communicated through word of mouth, anecdotal
evidence, *and* quantifiable measures.

How many of you have children? How many of you have teenagers? How many
of you remember being a teenager? OK, how many of you *are* teenagers?
Part of growing up, as we've all experienced, maybe coaching our own
children, is to become accountable for our actions. Of course, we've
always been accountable at various levels, and we're in the process of
becoming even more accountable, as is the entire federal government,
through a series of activities that are going on, and I'll tell you
about a few of those. So, in the analogy I'm using, that's maybe
something like, "Well, you have to do something to get your allowance,"
or heaven forbid, "You might even have to do it *well* to get your
allowance." If you paint the garage and it's not full of streaks, then
you can use the car. And it's sometimes hard to know if you're doing the
right thing --- you know, your friends' parents are out of town, and you
want to have a little party --- what's the problem? Or even worse than
that, or a more difficult dilemma than that that we've probably all
faced, is sometimes it's hard to choose the right thing, even when you
know what the right thing is. The good news is your friend's having a
party, the bad news is it's on your grandmother's 87^th^ birthday and
she wants everybody there.

So, we have to make a lot of choices, and what does this mean in our
life? It means we'll be asking, and hopefully answering some of these
kinds of questions as we progress this week, and that will shape some of
the activities we undertake in the next year and beyond. And it means
that our activities will be stakeholder-driven. Now we could argue that
all of our activities have always been stakeholder-driven; but in this
context, we need to aim those activities at priorities that have been
agreed upon, priorities for which there is a consensus at a national
level. So as we begin to move in that direction, we find ourselves
building a true, integrated, interconnected national network.

Growing up has its rewards. In our context, that means we get to stay in
business. It means we get a shot of maintaining a fair share of very
limited federal resources because it gives us a way to reasonably answer
the question, why should we spend public dollars on this activity? And,
most important, we get to participate in something that is really making
a difference on the ground. And that comes from responding to the
information needs of the larger community and from moving in the
direction of national integration, rather than stand-alone projects.

So what's driving this evolution? Well, it's part of growing up and
we're at the stage where this is the next logical step for the NBII to
take. I'll never forget when my own mother called me aside one day and
said, "Kate, we have to have a talk. It's time for you to think about
getting a job. You're going to be thirty-seven next week." I remember
that like it was yesterday, even though it was two years ago.

There are some federally mandated requirements, some activities that we
are undertaking at the federal level that will help shape some of the
direction in which we move. I'm sure most of you are probably familiar
with GPRA, the Government Performance and Results Act. One part of our
response to GPRA was the development of a lot of measures, and those
measures are primarily aimed at outputs: how many NBII nodes are there?
How many gigabytes of data do we have? How many partners do we have in
the network? Something most recently on the horizon for us has been
OMB's Program Assessment Rating Tool, which is also known by its
acronym, PART. We underwent PART, or were "PART'ed," earlier this year,
and there were a couple of people who were instrumental in getting us
through that process --- Ben Wheeler and Marcia McNiff. I'm going to ask
Ben and Marcia to spend a few minutes giving you a little more
information about PART because I'd like to set the context for the
discussion we're going to have this afternoon about outputs versus
outcomes, efficiencies, and what kinds of things we need to do and what
kinds of measures we'll need to get to. So, Ben and Marcia, tell us
about PART ...

[Marcia McNiff:]{.underline}

This is one of those things that's hard to describe without using a word
as its own definition. So one of the things that PART is is an
unfortunate acronym that lends itself to some really bad puns. What is
PART? I think the most frequently asked questions that Ben and I got
when we were working so heavily on the PART were, "What on Earth is
going on in that demo room?" and "Why are you doing it?" Well, the
reason we were doing it is because it's a "part" of the president's
management agenda. And what is the PART? It's an evidence-based
assessment that is made available to the public. That's the "PA" part of
the PART---the program assessment. It's evidence-based because it's in
the format of questions and answers and for every answer we gave, we had
to supply a list of evidence. So how many of you saw Ben carrying around
enormous binders through the halls in Reston? That was the evidence.

The next thing is it was a consistent approach for evaluating programs.
"Evaluating" is the "R" in the PART, and that means that we were rated.
We were rated on a scale of 1 to 100, and of course we hoped we got at
least a passing score, as close as we could to 100. And it was a tool to
encourage continuous improvement. What that means is that it was an
iterative process; we would meet with our examiner from OMB, and we
would go over what we'd reported, and the evidence we'd compiled and put
together, and the answers to the questions, both a list of the evidence
and the evidence itself, and then he would give us his feedback and
input and tell us how to make changes, both in how we were doing our
work and in the evidence and how we were answering the questions as
well. So it was a long process and that's why we were sequestered in the
demo room for so long \-- for what seemed like months on end!

What else does PART do? It evaluates the program performance by looking
at four different areas of the performance of every program. The first
section is program purpose and design, so in other words, what is your
mission statement? Do you have a clear purpose? Do people know where
they're going? Do you have a road map for where you're going with the
program?

The next is strategic planning. That involves where you're going and
what your plans are for getting there. Are they good? Supply the
evidence for that. We were working on the five-year plan concurrently;
so we ended up submitting drafts of the five-year-plan, and then later
submitting the five-year plan along with the evidence.

The third area was program management. The fourth area, and this is the
one that's really critical, is program results and accountability.
You'll notice that even though there are four sections, you might think
that they are all ranked or rated equally in the 100 points that we
could attain, and that maybe each of those would be worth 25 percent,
but that's not how the scoring was done. How it worked was the first
three of them combined were worth 50 percent of your score, and the last
one was worth the rest of the 50 percent of the score. So the program
results and accountability were worth as much as the other three
combined, so that's the one that we really had to perform the best on.
No matter how well we did on the first three---we could have gotten 100
percent on all of those---if we didn't perform well on the last one, the
program results and accountability, it would have ruined our score.
That's the reason why program results and accountability have become
such a big issue is that that was rated so heavily in the PART. And I am
happy to report that we did well on the PART and got very much in the
same ballpark as the other programs within USGS, so we're very happy
about that and we passed. To measure ourselves, they had a list of
performance measures and metrics and Ben has become the "measures man."
So I'm going to turn things over to him to tell you a little about how
we were measured.

[Ben Wheeler:]{.underline}

One big portion of PART was actually coming up with a whole series of
new measures about how your program runs, how well it runs, how much
they like how well it runs. So we first summarized the 70-page PART
guidance manual into one quote about outputs versus outcomes: "Outcome
measures are most informative, because these are the ultimate results of
a program that benefit the public. Programs must try to translate
existing measures that focus on outputs into outcome measures by
focusing on the ultimate goal of the program."

In the past, programs measured essentially outputs: the number of
widgets per year they produced, the growth in the number of widgets,
these kinds of things. But the big question that PART and increasingly
other reporting requirements want to measure is the outcomes. They
really want to make sure that the taxpayer benefits from the program,
not just that you're producing something.

So they have a very clear definition of outputs and outcomes. Outputs
are what you do to achieve a goal or purpose---what kinds of products or
services do you deliver, how many, how well you do it, these kinds of
things. The outcomes are more what taxpayers get from it. What is the
program's goal or purpose? What events or conditions are actually of
direct importance to the public? This is much more difficult to measure.

One of the constant challenges we faced with PART is that they always
gave us examples of outcomes versus outputs, but most of the programs
that had these examples were programs that had a much easier task of
measuring outcomes than a program like ours would. We did develop a
series of measures, though, that we thought would help out with us. Now
Gladys is going to talk about how we're beginning to talk more about
this.

[Gladys Cotter:]{.underline}

I want to say that in Russ's presentation, where there were the soldiers
on the battlefield and they were the first line of defense---well, Kate,
Marcia, and Ben were the first line of defense for us, except they
weren't shooting. They were being shot at. Thanks to them for doing a
great job.

I think there were many days when they hoped they would be committed so
they wouldn't have to do the PART anymore, but I'm here to say that we
all have to get committed to this. It's something that, not only is it a
focus of the federal government right now; but when we really spend some
time thinking about it, it is the right thing to do. We do want to be
outcome-oriented, and I think everyone in this room wants to make a
difference on the ground. By going through this process, we started to
analyze what it will actually take to make a difference on the ground.

We're committed to making the transition from outputs to outcomes; we're
committed to the NBII Program's continued maturity and growth, which
will be based on showing the outcomes and giving evidence of outcomes;
and we're committed to finding new ways for the entire network to serve
as stakeholders. That's something we've heard a lot about today, and the
fact that it's both a science and conservation community and that we
need to be very focused on what our community of users needs, so that we
can be producing outcomes that make a visible difference on the
landscape and to the stakeholders we serve. Now I'll turn it back over
to Kate.

[Kate Kase:]{.underline}

Now's the time for us to have a conversation. Ben mentioned it's tough
to come up with good outcome measures for us. So what I'd like to do now
is begin a conversation, with us here in the room, and maybe after a few
minutes we can move the conversation next door where we can continue the
discussion because I want to have all of us thinking about this concept
of what are our outcomes.

I'm posing some questions: What have been your outcomes, thinking about
the work you've done the last few years? There have been
outcomes---they're just not things we can measure on paper. What has the
node you work for contributed to the network and to the whole science
conservation community? Not just local stakeholders. Do you know who
your stakeholders are and how do you know? How do you know you've got
all the right people at the table? How often and when do you communicate
with them? Who benefits from the projects you propose? And why should
public money be spent on continuing to do what we do? If we can't
reasonably answer these questions, then the answer is it shouldn't. So
what are some of the outcomes you're seeing? Because that will help us
point to what kinds of things we should measure.

*Audience member:* W*e went through this grueling process and came out
with a passing grade. What's the next step? It seems to me we'll be
reviewed again sometime---how are we going to be measured now against
what we gave then?*

Kate: The process is not over. We're probably 75 or 80 percent of the
way through it. We're waiting for feedback from OMB and their report
right now; but we've have some preliminary feedback, so we know we have
a passing grade. But it's not finalized yet. We will be "re-PARTed" in
five years. Had we not gotten a passing score, we would have been
rePARTed next year.

*Audience member:* *One outcome I'll describe this year for us is
managing atlases as part of trying shepherd all onto the one repository.
For the long term, we're providing a tool for people to manage our
projects. We're running five states right now in this program; they're
managing their own data and their water quality control using our
system, so the outcome is there are five new states running with these
distribution survey projects and doing it in a way that saves them time
and money. I always say that is contributing to the community, but I'm
not sure to the network yet. So these are our stakeholders, and they're
benefiting directly by using this system. Who benefits? All the
participants in these projects and all the people who want to use these
data in the long run and we're not as good at measuring that.*

Kate: Thanks. Speaking of individual projects, I don't mean to imply
that we're not already moving in the direction of benefiting the whole
network, and that we're not moving to being really interconnected. I'm
just saying that we need to go even farther in that direction, but as
evidence of that, this year we had more inter-node projects, that is
nodes that cooperated with each other on a certain project, than we have
had in the previous four years combined. I think that's evidence of
moving in the right direction.

*Audience member*: One outcome w*ith the Wildlife Disease and
Information Node, where they would have a surveillance and monitoring
program, would be being able to detect something like avian influenza
before it got too far in the United States.*

Kate: Thank you.

*Audience member*: *I'm with the Bureau of Reclamation. I want to echo
what was said, that OMB responds to money. We promised we would have a
ten to one return on dollars invested. We said a certain amount of water
would be delivered in hydropower, so we stayed very close to the mission
statement for our organization and tried to show in concrete ways how we
were supporting that mission, and that seems to be what they like. I
would say in terms of how many acres of farmland were rescued from
invasive species, that that kind of a measure is what they're looking
at.*

Kate: Thanks. That's what we heard.

*Audience member*: *What about the problem of trying to value, say, your
work encourages saving wetlands, but in the process you limit
developers. One of the cans of worms you open is up is how we value some
of these things in a system that does not have any dollar value for
natural commodities.*

Ben: We've had that same problem. What we had to do was go to our
economists, and they have a way of valuing just about everything. They
have a way to get at, like how much of your personal money would you
spend to save a lake? We found that working with our economists helped
us a great deal in showing that.

*Audience member*: *I think your concept's good, but we found it very
difficult to tie anything that we do to real dollar savings in any way,
or dollar value in any way. And we had lots of ideas, because we have
lots of good programs, and everytime we'd say, "Look what we do in GAP,"
or "Look what we've done in vegetation characterization," they'd say,
"So what?" It's an outcome, it doesn't matter. It matters, but it isn't
what we're looking for. And where they were directing us is focused on
what are you doing that really makes a difference to the Department of
the Interior? To resource managers? To decision makers in the
department? Is that not true?*

Kate: What we'd really like to measure to make everyone happy is how
many invasive species did *not* cross the borders of the United States?
How many species did *not* get listed? But we can't measure those things
because they didn't happen.

*Audience member*: *This is one of the big problems with the PART
process, that it's geared for business and economics, and trying to
address this with science is a problem. I think that the effort has been
made, and the group has done a fantastic job of working with OMB, but
boy, it is a problem. Go through and look at all the questions that the
PART asks, and you'll see that it's really geared to business rather
than science.*

*Audience member*: *I just heard what I would consider to be your
primary stakeholders by this gentlemen, the most primary one being
resource managers, and I wonder why you don't include that on your list
of stakeholders already; it would seem obvious that those are the people
you're trying to please with this program.*

Kate: Resource managers are most certainly our primary stakeholders,
yes, absolutely, for all of biological informatics.

*Audience member*: *Thinking about outcomes, it seems like to a large
degree, the outcomes are beyond our control. In other words, we can
produce data, and we can hope that it gets used and that we have a
tangible impact. Currently, those are things that are beyond our scope.
So to hold us accountable for that, and measurable for that, seems a
little bit unfair.*

# Wednesday, October 26

**8:30--9:00:** **"Future Challenges and Opportunities for the National
Biological** **Information Infrastructure"**

**Sue Haseltine,** **U.S. Geological Survey Associate Director for
Biology**

I'd like to talk from the perspective of USGS, the federal home for the
NBII. It's interesting --- I was at one of those neighborhood deals we
all go to every once in a while and one of my neighbors is a
businessman. He starts up venture capital firms. He does all kinds of
interesting things and he's interested in creating public/private
partnerships. So he was asking me about the NBII and some of the other
partnership programs we have within USGS because he's interested in
federal, state, and private entities getting together. So I was
describing this meeting and talking about moving into the future and I
described USGS as the federal home for the NBII. He said, "You're not
the federal home for the NBII. You're the managing partner --- get with
it! This is the business world."

I think that describes where some of our remarks are going to come from
today, because as Gladys and Kate and other people have told you at this
meeting, in terms of being the managing partner for the NBII and
accountable for reporting accomplishments and strategic planning, we
have some challenges ahead. But USGS is proud of being the managing
partner for the NBII, and proud of all the accomplishments we've made to
date for the conservation community. I would assess it by saying we've
done a lot with a very little funding. Our early work was standards and
bringing an awareness to the biological community, both the science
community and the conservation community, of what a tool like the NBII,
information technology, and spatial scales can bring to the conversation
about how we're going to move forward into the future.

But I do think that we're at a critical crossroads for the NBII, and we
need to do some things together over the next few years to make sure we
have the most success that is possible. I frame this --- as you've heard
before at this meeting ---in "then," "now," and "future" categories. I
think we're past the "then" stage with the start-up mode; but now we're
moving into an operational mode for the NBII, and there are going to be
things we are required to do systematically across the system. We're
also in an expanding community mode. I hear all the time in my job from
some parts of the communities that we're a part of and are serving, "You
haven't done anything for my part of the community." Part of that is
weaving in a sort of marketing potential and low-hanging fruit mode in
terms of "Look at this project and what we've brought to this specific
issue." And we've raised expectations. So the question is, "Why aren't
you serving my part of the community?" if that's not happening right
now. And we have to do a little bit of calibration in terms of reality
and consensus building about what the next priorities are.

In the future, we have to work on what a fully functional NBII will look
like and what we will promise to the rest of the biological community.
So, thinking about those a little bit, I wanted to go over a few of the
kinds of things I think are starting to move us toward the fully
functional mode, rather than a project mode. I picked out three things
that you've already heard about because of some of their
characteristics. I'm sure there are lots of other things across the NBII
that could be used too, but I'm just using these as examples.

Doug talked about the brook trout joint venture yesterday, which has
become part of the National Fish Habitat Initiative, which is bringing,
I hope, the whole aquatic resource community together to look at aquatic
resources from the habitat perspective on the landscape and say, "What
can we, the science and management community, do together to improve
conservation outcomes for some of these habitats and species?" It's led
by the Fish and Wildlife Service, IAFWA, and NOAA. But I think our
involvement in this, which we do all over the place, but in particular
this brook trout example, leads us in some of the directions that the
NBII should be going. We're playing on a national scale with a national
initiative, and we're giving out priorities for that community and
developing information with them that meets their priorities at a local,
regional, and national scale. Those are the kinds of frames we need to
put around all our projects. And we need to think about how we can be
hooking things together to make a difference. We're also giving this
community the first broad-scale look, beyond their local boundaries, of
what's happening on the landscape. So we're having an impact and an
outcome in terms of changing management; and that is where the science
and information community needs to work with OMB in terms of outcomes.
How do we change the perception of what's possible and beneficial in
terms of conservation of the species by bringing this information to the
table?

The next one I'd like to talk about comes from the Southwest Node. I
think they've done a lot of good work bringing biological data together
with drought data, weather data, and water data to impact a national
issue. You know the national Healthy Forest Initiative and fire issues
are something we're struggling with in the biological management
community. This brings all kinds of disparate information together to
make an impact for decision makers. It gives them more options. Not only
that, but this kind of integrated information and synthesis will also
provide a platform we can deal with in other issues. We have huge issues
with invasives down here that are related to this information. We have
the whole drought cycle and river management issues that play out in the
Southwest, and so we're building in this project an information base,
and hopefully in the future, synthesis tools that we can bring this
information in different ways to decision makers and issues that are at
the table. We need to think about that multi-tasking issue.

Lastly --- because my background is in migratory birds I had to put a
bird example in here --- I think we're doing good work in the migratory
bird node that's allowing us to take information that migratory bird
people have been collecting forever and arguing over, and looking at it
in different perspectives. It's also allowing us to put this on a
geospatial scale we can hang other habitat data on, which is very
beneficial to the migratory bird community. So we're integrating this
data spatially, and at management scales. That's very important. These
are challenging issues: management scales in migratory birds goes all
the way from the continental to the very local, so I think we're
bringing a different look at an important federal responsibility.

We're also providing information, that just like the Southwest Node, can
be used for many other applications. It seems like in my job recently, I
spend at least a quarter of my time dealing with avian influenza, and it
hasn't even gotten here yet. I think this kind of information, in terms
of the Department of Interior, where we sit, if and when --- most people
say when --- this does arrive in North America, our responsibility is
going to be in terms of migratory birds, in terms of the connection to
agriculture and human health, but also in terms of migratory bird
response to this very virulent strain of avian influenza. This gives us
a tool to very rapidly take a proactive approach to that issue. I
realize we can't predict the future of how the things we're working on
now will be used; but I think we can do a little more synthetic thinking
about how our information and priorities might be used in other
conservation issues.

If you're thinking about value-added, which is the theme for this
meeting, for the NBII, I believe you all need to think about the NBII as
a platform to host many, many conversations with the whole biological
community and our stakeholders. It's a marvelous tool for framing the
discussion. I hear a lot of discussions on the NBII about our
technological challenges and how we're making advances, and I think
that's all vitally important. But I think you need to think of yourself
more as hosting conversations with the whole community that has a
complete data set to frame that discussion, and perhaps synthesis tools
that allow the community to look at different applications than this.

In that regard, we're going to have to make some choices about what we
want to work on and host conversations about. We can't do everything in
this budget climate, and so there are two interrelated types of
activities the whole network needs to think of. The first is what are
the long-term national issues and data that we are going to host on the
NBII network? What are the things that are so important that we need a
clear, consistent information base when we're having conversations in
the biological community. I think the NBII is the place where we can do
that. I think it's a huge challenge to develop consensus on what those
are, but I don't think it's so much of a challenge to develop consensus
on what the first five or six are. Realistically, that's where we need
to start.

But it's equally important for the NBII, as it becomes fully functional,
to have a component that responds to current, emerging issues at the
regional, national, and maybe international scales. We can't spend all
of our time on these long-term national things; that's why we have a
regional component to our system. And the issue of emerging issues and
being flexible and capable of adding things that will resonate in the
science and management communities is key.

Here's a statement of what we're doing: we're blending access from all
these different nodes and ports and all the links we have to all of the
rest of the biological community, to a shared infrastructure using our
regional and theme-based teams; and the key to this is *no duplication
of effort.* Because we don't need to reinvent the wheel --- we have a
huge job ahead of us.

That's the core of where I think the NBII is going to have value-added
and to change the outcomes for biological conservation, and that's what
our OMB examiner wants us to tell him. In ten years, if he comes back,
what long-term national issues are we going to have provided a clearer,
better, more synthesized information base for that has changed the
conversation on how we do biological conservation from the local to the
national level? And what emerging issues have we been instrumental in
helping the community deal with?

In thinking about the future in that regard, we have many challenges as
well as opportunities. I'd like to go over for the rest of this talk,
several of them; but just in a framing way. If you haven't gotten the
message before, we're in a tight budget climate and we're going to
struggle with our outcomes and how we're making a difference to stay
where we are in terms of support. I don't want people to be too
depressed about that because you've always had to struggle to justify
what we do and how important our science and information activities are
to the conservation of biological resources in this nation and in the
world. But we all know that there are many, many stresses on the federal
budget at this time, and we all sit squarely in the discretionary pot.
So we're going to have to be united in our priorities to move forward.

Operationally, you know we've all talked about the maturity network and
how we have to work together, and in the management and leadership
sense, that issue of what outcomes do we want to have an impact on and
are working together to report. But I think we have a lot of
opportunities based on the talent, energy, and capability that I see
with the NBII to be very strategic about this, tell the world what we're
going to do, and move forward and do it and make a difference. What
better enterprise can we ask to work on than that? Because right now, in
the biological community, we need something like the NBII like we never
needed anything before. The conversations are chaotic in the biological
community, and you bring a secure, credible information base to that
discussion.

The good news is that every challenge presents an opportunity and that's
how I'm going to frame the rest of my talk. What do I see as the first
challenge we need to work on in the NBII? This has been a theme this
week, so this is going to reinforce those challenges. We need to gain
consensus in the whole science and conservation community about our
priorities. I've already told you I hear a lot, "What has the NBII done
for my part of the community?" I think that means there's an opportunity
for you all to focus on network-wide priorities and have a larger
conversation with the whole community. Get them behind you by saying,
"You know, we can't do everything, so tell us your needs, help us set
the priorities, and support us in those priorities and we'll all move
forward together." I think that would generate enormous support for the
NBII because you can do that, you can call us in.

We think the conversation you need to have with the larger community is
in terms of priorities for you in affecting what outcomes. We've had
conversations with the whole community before about many of the
different steps in getting to outcomes: Do we need standards, what are
we doing with technology, how do we bring this piece of information or
that piece of information together? And there are many, many steps in
getting to the NBII impacting outcomes. But we need to switch our
conversation and say to them, the first thing we need to do is decide
what priorities and what outcomes, and then we'll figure out the steps
that we need to fill in. You'll get the whole community behind you if
you talk about those priorities and outcomes.

Challenge two: it's related to challenge one in terms of talking to the
whole community. Once we have priorities, we need to identify the parts
of the community best able to represent the biological issues most
critical to the theater, region, or theme you're working in. This gets
to enlarging the conversation, because we're building this from the
bottom up; we've had a volunteer attitude that people won't come to the
table. That's fine, but we need to be much more proactive about
selecting the people who need this information the most and can bring
information to the table and being collaborative with them, so we're
getting the broadest possible participation in whatever priority we're
working on and assuring accurate representation in terms of our
priorities.

Challenge three: outcomes and value-added. We've beat this one to death,
but I can't emphasize to you enough that you need to make the switch
from doing excellent work at individual nodes to what are all the nodes
going to do to work together to make a difference nationally, as well as
regionally and locally. That's essentially the message all federal
agencies, including us, are being given in terms of assessments \--
whether it's PART, or on the Hill, or in our departments. Individual
projects out on the ground are wonderful, but how are you making a
difference to the whole system, whether you're dealing with monitoring
volcanoes or the NBII? That's the message we're getting.

Challenge four: It's incredibly important that we have these long-term
data and information sets that we serve nationally and we keep updated
and a certain portion of our resources are going to have to be dedicated
to that. When we make this commitment, and I don't know what this is
going to be, if we're going to focus on invasive species, what
information are we going to serve about invasive species and keep
updated throughout the network. That's the question I've been asked:
it's great that we have an invasive species theme, but what are our
commitments to that? We need to identify those and work on them. It's
very important as we work on that that we develop synthesis tools to use
that data with emerging issues. That's the other thing I keep being
asked about. As a matter of fact I got a call from the Hill the other
day and they said, "Why isn't there anything about avian influenza on
the Wildlife Disease Node?" There is, but actually there wasn't at that
time. And yet we had been dealing with this for a couple of months as a
hot press issue, and that is a critical issue in terms of not only
providing flexibility in the system to shift resources to do those kinds
of things, but also having a system of communication and consensus
across the network that we are going to shift some resources to doing
that, and whether some of these emerging issues are going to become
long-term things. We really need to think about the scope of what we're
committing, and it needs to be relatively specific, because we need to
be able to say on other things, "We would love to be able to do that,
but at the present time we don't have the resources to do it. We're
committed to this and we're carrying through on it."

This is one of my priorities for the future. I believe the NBII can
serve a useful function for the whole biological community in
monitoring. As those of you who have been involved in the monitoring
issue throughout your careers, as many of us have, there are very few
things in biology we can say that we have trend data on a national or
international scale. There are very few things we can say that we have
trend data on a regional scale, actually. And that is a theme we are
more and more being asked in the national conversation to come to the
table with.

Just a few examples: we finally reached a point in the discussion with
the water resources community that when water, surface water, was being
allocated in this country, agriculture was at the table, people were at
the table, industry was at the table, and we're having a conversation
now about ecology and biology being at the table. But when we're asked
by the water resource managers how much water we need for ecological
applications, we really don't have a very good answer. Part of that is
that we don't have very much monitoring data of biological organism
response in a trend way to changes in surface water delivery. So that's
one of the challenges for the biological monitoring community --- we
have to figure out how to do that. I think the NBII provides a wonderful
site not only to bring people together to have that conversation about
what we need to monitor and where, but also to serve that information
and provide synthesis of that information for the long term.

There are many other challenges. We're having a meeting in a few weeks
to talk about conservation actions on sagebrush systems and sage grass.
We should be thinking about a monitoring system for the sagebrush biome.
People are thinking about it, and I think the NBII has a great role to
play in that. So the biological community is being asked to move in the
direction and I think the NBII could be an important player if one of
your priorities were long-term information on biological systems.

The last challenge --- maybe it's right that it's last because you know,
as we go back to the managing partner concept, perhaps Gladys and I have
been asked this question most often on the Hill --- what does an
operational NBII look like? How will it be configured? Another way to
ask that is to answer the question, "I want the NBII to help do . . .
what?" But some time within the next four to five years, we're going to
need to have an operational plan for the NBII that lays out the nodes,
lays out the information we're dealing with, lays out the resources we
need to support them, and what we're building for the future. It's part
of growing up as a system. We are definitely being asked those questions
now and we need to get ready to answer them. We've been in a prototype
phase but we're being asked to move to operational status. And I think
you all \-- because we are building the system, quite appropriately,
from the bottom up \-- are really in a position to help us answer those
questions, and help us build the operational system of the future.

Following up on that, I summarize my challenge to you as you need to
come together with the whole of the biological community, not just you
all, but the whole biological community: your supporters, your
detractors, your stakeholders, some of the industry that's going to use
your data, whatever --- the spectrum of people. You need, through a
series of workshops or whatever, to answer such questions as these: if
you're really going to be an operational, functioning system, what
should the NBII look like in five years? What is the scope? We can't do
everything with the resources we have, so what are we going to make a
difference on? What are the priorities? In doing that, what is the
"right balance" between honing in on those long-term priorities and
having new issues come to the table? We need to struggle with that
conversation, and within two or three years, we need to have an answer
that the whole community can stand behind.

In that regard, you are the best investments for getting that
conversation going and seeing it through to completion. To think about
what the system is going to be like when it's fully functional, you all,
who have been working in the system and have been producing marvelous
results, need to think about yourself in this broader community. Don't
just get it to the people you've already worked with, but go to the next
person on your list or the worst detractors who know of the kinds of
things you're doing and get them engaged in the conversation. Recruit
new stakeholders by asking them, even if they don't think you're on the
right track, "Well what do you really need from a system like this? How
can we help you with your priorities? What do you need next week, next
year, and three years from now?" We need to recruit new stakeholders
into the process. We're in a building phase and people need to catch the
vision of what it can be when it's fully functional, and you have
wonderful stories to tell. But you need to tell them to a larger
community.

I hope each of you goes back and makes a commitment to bring in at least
five new participants every year to this conversation. Only by doing
that will we ever achieve the vision that we all have for what this
system can do for both science and conservation.

Thank you.