GBD-Explorer: Extending open source java GIS for exploring ecoregion-based biodiversity data

Biodiversity and ecosystem data are both geo-referenced and “species-referenced”. Ecoregion classification systems are relevant to basic ecological research and have been increasingly used for making policy and management decisions. There are practical needs to integrate taxonomic data with ecoregion data in a GIS to visualize and explore species distribution conveniently. In this study, we represent the species distributed in an ecoregion as a taxonomic tree and extend the classic GIS data model to incorporate operations on taxonomic trees. A prototype called GBD-Explorer was developed on top of the open source JUMP GIS. We use the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) terrestrial ecoregion and WildFinder species databases as an example to demonstrate the rich capabilities implemented in the prototype.