About NA2RE

NA2RE system premises:

 

  1. Relevance to updated species distribution maps.

    Species distribution maps must contain the most recent data.

  2. Distribution records are not duplicated.

    The species maps results by connecting the original chorological data.

  3. Each national entity must be responsible for their observations.

    National societies must be responsible for administering their chronological databases and publish their observations data.

  4. Geographical Information technologies must support the system.

    Due to the spatio-temporal characteristics of the observational data, and in order to reduce the eventuality of any errors, the system should be supported in geographical information technologies.

  5. Free and open-source complete solution.

    The system should be implemented using only free and open-source solutions.

  6. Standard access to data.

    The system should implement the relevant standards of data sharing and have conformance with the European Parliament INSPIRE Directive (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community).

  7. Easy database actualisation and instant access to updated data.

    Database owners should be capable of easily updating their chronological observation databases.

  8. Dissemination of the SEH species taxonomy and update on all distributed databases.

    The species taxonomy and systematics of the species should be easily modified and actualised by the database owner, under the control of the SEH.

  9. Data Sharing.

    The SEH intends to share with the scientific community the resulting 50Km GRID of the species distribution in an open and interoperable format, with this system not only the access to data is guaranteed but it is also assured that the most recent update is always available.

  10. Species records can be filtered following conservation matters.

    The owners of each database decide which data should not be represented.

HOW NA2RE WORKS

Upon user request for a specific taxa, the Web interface searches all distributed databases for the requested data (Figure 1), select the national systems with records of the requested taxa (Figure 2), and send back the data, integrating the answers in an interactive map (Figure 3 e 4).

Figure 1 Figure 2
Figure 3 Figure 4


This system is implemented using only open source software, for this purpose:


1) PostgreSQL database (with PostGIS extension to support spatial data and operations) stores geo-referenced data servers in each country.

2) GeoServer allows process, edit and share geo-referenced data, and is used as a bridge between the data and the website, to allow seeing the observations that are in the database represented in the site map. It works through ISO19100/OGC standards.

3) Openlayer javascript library is used to display the map on the website, make requests to different servers in each country, to filter and present with colours the different taxa, and to represent the results in map applications.