Work and Information Practices in the Sciences of Biodiversity

This paper provides an introduction to data practices in biodiversity science. This is an area where multiple scientific domains are in constant interaction, and use data from multiple sources in that process. There is a consequent huge proliferation of technical standards in the field. Further, datasets used in the biodiversity sciences often extend over several decades — and thus attention must be paid to changing standards and the development of new storage media. Finally, the classification systems used in many of the contributing sciences are in a constant state of flux as more information is gathered. I describe the main categories of data development and use in the field of biodiversity, paying particular attention to work processes both in the generation and in the analysis of data. 1. The Age of Biodiversity Information Diana Crane [2] claims that in scientific literature “The ‘life’ of a paper is very short, with the exception of a few classics. Papers published five years ago are ‘old’. Papers published more than fifteen years ago are almost useless in many scientific fields”. In this paper, I will examine a field of science in which this is emphatically not the case — the field of biodiversity science. Crane’s model works best in physics, where there is no assumption that information collected in the early nineteenth century will still be of interest to the current generation of field theorists. There is the assumption [6, for example] that new theories will reorder knowledge in the domain effectively and efficiently; and since Kuhn [5] most would accept that a major paradigm change in, say, the understanding of ‘gravity’ renders previous work on incline planes literally incommensurable — not to mention technical improvements making the older work too imprecise. Astronomers trawl back further in time, seeking traces of supernovae in ancient manuscripts — but sporadically; they are just as likely to look at monastery records as at Tycho Brahe’s original data. Biodiversity information is fundamentally historical in three different ways. First, the sciences of biodiversity are trying to build up a picture of life on the planet since its inception up to the present. In the absence of the time and analytic ability to carry out experiments on complex ecological systems over tens to thousands of generations, the only real information about biodiversity comes from the history of life on this planet. Second, key work practices, especially in the field of systematics, require the recording of accurate information about publication place and date for publications extending back to the mid eighteenth century — a scope of interest unimaginable for any other scientific endeavour (and for few other academic endeavours). Third, the sciences of biodiversity more than other sciences depend on being able to triangulate between multiple disparate datasets produced by different agencies for different motives. The history of the dataset itself is a key to understanding the contribution it can make to the history of life. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Very Large Databases, Cairo, Egypt, 2000