What lives in that stream?

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Scientific records of at least 104,000 samples of New Zealand’s freshwater fish, invertebrates, algae and other aquatic plants are now available at the click of a mouse.

NIWA has devised a web-based data access system to help people find out about the plants and animals living in lakes, rivers and streams, and to map their location. The system has been supported with funding from the Department of Conservation Terrestrial & Freshwater Biodiversity Information System programme.

Amongst the possible uses of the Freshwater Biodata Information System (FBIS):

  • A developer wants to take water from one of several streams in an area. FBIS might show that rare native fish live in one stream but not another.
  • An iwi is concerned that invasive plants could clog up a lake. FBIS can map where information is known about pest plants in the streams which feed into the lake as well as the lake itself, show the proximity of “clean” waterways to infested ones, and track the spread of pest plants over time.
  • A regional council is considering an application for resource consent to take water from a river. FBIS can help identify what aquatic plants and animals are recorded as living downstream and may be affected. In some cases, it might show that little or no up-to-date information is available and research is required before consent is granted.
  • A researcher is planning a study which involves sampling animals or plants from freshwater environments. Information from FBIS will be helpful in determining what sampling has already been done.

FBIS produces detailed, high-resolution maps for any part of the country and will show any combination of information specified by the user. “FBIS uses smart technology to tackle that dilemma of modern life: information overload,” says Dr Don Robertson of NIWA.

“One problem we face is that numerous scientific data are held in unlinked databases, spreadsheets and other filing systems by crown research institutes, universities, regional councils, museums and other research providers. There’s a huge amount of valuable information out there but often we don’t know what there is or where to find it. It’s a real challenge to bring it together in a user-friendly way and make it available for new analyses or to address new research questions that would otherwise be impossible.

“Up till now, NIWA has been maintaining the country’s freshwater fish database – one of the Nationally Significant Databases supported by the Foundation for Research Science and Technology. It also has had several other in-house databases for invertebrates and aquatic plants.

“Those data have been transferred to FBIS – and integrated to enable easy searching for a wide range of data from freshwater environments all over New Zealand The system is set up so data from other organisations can be added if they wish,” says Dr Robertson. “FBIS will be a secure and reliable repository of New Zealand’s freshwater biodata”.

The address is fbis.niwa.co.nz

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