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Health Heatmap of India is an open data platform built for bringing together data from diverse sources and facilitating visualization, analysis, and insight building from such data. In this paper, we describe the context and need for such an open data platform and describe the technical aspects of building it. The beta site of the portal is available at https://healthheatmapindia.org.

Contemporary losses of biodiversity, sometimes referred to as the sixth mass extinction, continue to mount (1, 2). A recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) estimates that one million of approximately 10 million species that exist now are threatened with extinction along with the ecosystems they inhabit (3). Yet, in the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) world, investments in conservation are likely to decline further. To arrest biodiversity losses, much of the recent debate advocates two traditional approaches: Put more land under wilderness (4, 5), and mitigate drivers of change through improved governance and policies (2). India and other nations need new frameworks that integrate science with policies to enhance human well-being, restore and conserve nature, and build capacity. Image credit: Sandesh Kadur (photographer). However, in the populous tropics, where most biodiversity resides, conservation of our ecosystems will remain elusive until there is a clear demonstration of the relevance of biodiversity to people’s well-being, most of whom live below the poverty line. Although nature-based solutions for addressing our most pressing challenges such as climate change, water scarcity, agricultural intensification, and health are well known (3), the link between biodiversity and human well-being has remained elusive. A major constraint, at least in the tropics, has been the lack of investment in biodiversity science that can build human resources and demonstrate the potential of biodiversity in 1) tackling climate change, natural disasters, stagnating agricultural productivity, water shortages, polluted air, and newly emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19, 2) increasing human well-being, and 3) fostering future socioeconomic development. Here, we outline a National Mission on Biodiversity and Human Well-being for India that calls for a considerable increase in investment for this new framework for integrating biodiversity science with human well-being. This will demonstrate the linkages … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: kamal.bawa{at}gmail.com. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Health Heatmap of India is an open data platform built for bringing together data from diverse sources and facilitating visualization, analysis, and insight building from such data. In this paper, we describe the context and need for such an open data platform and describe the technical aspects of building it. The beta site of the portal is available at http://healthheatmapindia.org

The India Biodiversity Portal (IBP) was initiated a decade ago, aiming to aggregate data on all species within India. The portal has been running a citizen science module for the past 8 years, aggregating observation data from the general public. The portal runs many flagship citizen science campaigns, such as the Neighborhood Trees Campaign, National Moth Week, Spotting Alien Invasive species, Mapping Indian Snails and Slugs and Frogwatch. We have learnt valuable lessons in harnessing participation in citizen science, implementing functionality and in integrating technological advancements into the platform codebase. Following up on these, we are implementing new features that will streamline development, entice users and further spur participation. We discuss some of the proposed changes and our justification, including the impacts we expect in generating better citizen science data. A key lesson arising out of our campaigns in remote regions of India, where internet penetration is relatively new, is that most users are connected to the web exclusively through a mobile device. Most do not have access to a personal computer or an email account. Yet they are internet savvy and use mobile applications to accomplish complex tasks such as banking activities, often logging in and being authenticated exclusively through a mobile number. We are implementing short-messaging-service (SMS) or one-time password-based login mechanisms, for login even without an email account for authentication. Although many initiatives have been investing in platform-specific mobile apps to cater to a growing mobile user community, maintaining and updating multiple mobile apps alongside enhancements to the web version is a resource-intensive task that most platforms cannot afford. Inconsistency in functions and usability across different versions of the same platform may lead to gaps in data collection. To address this challenge and streamline development, we have begun updating the portal codebase to enable Progressive Web Apps, which will replace conventional mobile applications while also serving as Single Page Applications that provide a unified experience across device platforms and alleviating the need for updating mobile apps separately. For existing contributors on the portal, comparisons of their contributions against other users are a motivating factor to contribute further. Leaderboards and reputation systems are proven methods to promote activity and provide recognition to participants. Such leaderboards also incentivise newer participants to emulate leaders and climb the boards. We are building a reputation system that not only recognizes quantity but also the quality of the user’s contribution. In addition, we are working on integrating intelligent push notification technology that will constantly engage users by keeping them abreast of activity related to content reflecting their interest on the portal. These features are expected to engage contributors and keep them motivated towards further data contributions. Finally, the most rewarding outcome from contributing citizen science data is in visualizing its impact. The most obvious are improvements in species distribution maps that are generated for each species page on the portal. Users are greatly motivated by contributing data that may enhance known distributions and may constitute range extensions for a species. Distribution maps on the portal are being revamped so that information is presented to the user in real-time through visualisations that are are both attractive and easy to interpret. These will provide users with gratification and help spur participation further. IBP is also instituting the ability to automate the classification of its data to identify publication-grade data. Through a combination of user’s reputation and other data quality criteria, the data on IBP will be automatically graded, allowing such data to be pushed to Global Biodiversity Information Facility on a periodic basis as a Darwin Core Archive, contributing to global biodiversity data.

In our times of challenged relationships between nature and culture, it is essential that biodiversity conservation in biodiversity-rich areas of the world is ceded priority with recognised urgency. The Convention on Biological Diversity's (CBD) Aichi Target 19 states that "By 2020, knowledge, the science base and technologies relating to biodiversity, its values, functioning, status and trends, and the consequences of its loss, are improved, widely shared and transferred, and applied." One of the significant impediments mentioned in achieving the goals of CBD is lack of scientific information, which is substantiated by studies that highlight various gaps such as taxonomic, thematic, spatial and temporal biases in the global knowledge on biodiversity. Behind such global approaches to knowledge and its production, there is a need to establish a biodiversity knowledge commons at the global, regional and national scales.Biodiversity informatics is tightly integrated with both fundamental biological sciences and the most recent advances in information technology, which gives it a unique blended quality of an academic discipline and technological practice. This has generated much enthusiasm, where rapid technological progress in biodiversity informatics is witnessed along with large scale threats to biodiversity. Such enthusiastic efforts for biodiversity informatics data and tools, as Peterson et al. (2010) argues, need to be integrated with other overall conceptual frameworks, particularly within ecology and evolutionary biology. In the context of the Global South, it is important to place the practice and knowledge of biodiversity informatics within the framework of sustainable development, biodiversity conservation, traditional knowledge and development aspirations.The emphasis on growth, in the current global economic paradigm, has meant undue stress on natural resources. State institutions in the Global South, responsible for natural resource and biodiversity conservation, are often found to be silent if not supportive of the dominant development policies. Civil society groups and grass-roots level organisations have taken the lead in documenting biodiversity at relevant scales, to argue for conservation. It is imperative that citizen science has a growing role to play in environmental assessments (Chandler et al. 2016), mediated through biodiversity informatics. By participating in knowledge production and overcoming the barriers of scientific legitimacy by collaborating with experts in scientific institutions, civil society science groups play a role in changing the power relations by developing the means to generate independent knowledge (Jalbert 2016), contributing towards a global knowledge commons.Limiting factors such as a data sharing culture, coping with quickly evolving technologies and capabilities, inhibit communities in the Global South from participating in building a global biodiversity knowledge commons. The historically skewed accumulation of knowledge on biodiversity of the Global South in northern institutions facilitates their influence of contemporary global policies and allocation of resources. Apart from a few exceptions, such as Biodiversity Information for Development, JRS Foundation’s African efforts and Critical Ecosytem Partnership Fund’s investments in biodiversity hotspots, one does not see any encouraging shifts in this cyclic trend, which will not be effective in addressing the biases in global biodiversity knowledge. As much as the development of the discipline and practice of biodiversity informatics at different scales is important, it is equally necessary to address such structural aspects that affect the constitution of the global biodiversity knowledge commons and its relevance to the communities in the Global South.

Highly populated tropical countries face tremendous pressures in reconciling the needs for improved economic security and the protection of declining biodiversity. India is no exception and its biodiversity is under severe pressure due to complex interactions among land use change, other human economic activities, and climate change. Preservation and restoration of biodiversity is perhaps the cheapest and least risky way to mitigate the impacts of threats such as climate change, diminishing food and nutritional security, declining economy, absence of affordable healthcare, rising zoonotic diseases and lack of capacity to address these issues. Here we describe a framework for biodiversity conservation – the National Mission on Biodiversity and Human Well-Being (NMBHWB) for India – which integrates biodiversity, ecosystem services, climate change, agriculture, health, bio-economy and capacity building in the realm of biodiversity science. We provide an overview of the seven Programs of the Mission which make it interdisciplinary, integrative, and comprehensive in its approach. The Mission explicitly links research with policy-making and implementation for effective management of biodiversity with sustainable development. With its emphasis on convergence and synergies among various goals, themes and project sites, the Mission will further develop new models for stakeholder consultations and co-production of knowledge. We posit that the NMBHWB will enable India to realize the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Targets while advancing India's commitments to the Paris Agreement on climate change and other international environmental conventions and treaties.

Conventionally, species traits concepts have been conceived from an ecological perspective after grouping them as functional traits, response traits or effect traits: attributes of individual organisms that express phenotypes in response to the environment and its effects on the organism. From an informatics perspective, traits may be conceived to encompass a broader vocabulary that can capture any species attribute including, but not limited to those concerning its morphology, taxonomy, functional role, habitat, ecological interactions, trophic strategies, genetics, evolution, conservation status, anthropological uses, ecosystem services etc. The evolution of such a vocabulary and its standardisation across disciplines and taxa is a challenge, but one that needs imminent attention as the field develops. Furthermore, traits can have values that vary within and across individuals and species. The ability to associate traits with levels of a taxonomic hierarchy, aggregate species traits from individual records, flexibility to attribute categorical text, numeric, temporal and spatial values; associate them with ontologies; and conform to standards, can evolve traits as a flexible framework to structure descriptive, numeric and tabular data on species. Such a framework for structuring descriptive species data will, allow better discoverability and navigation of the information and has potential for developing further applications such as polyclave identification keys and analytical aids for big data. The open source Biodiversity Informatics Platform that powers three international initiatives across Asia and Africa has been evolving as an effective platform to aggregate and build open access databases for varied biodiversity data types. It has ability to handle varied data types such as descriptive data, occurrences, maps and documents. The platform has recently added a traits infrastructure that is participatory and can aggregate traits from curated databases as well as by crowdsourcing from observation and collection data. It is flexible in building vocabularies to structure descriptive species information and media, evolving into a framework which allows flexible yet efficient navigation of species information in an information system. Here, we discuss this model, its application within the applied initiatives, its potential use in classifying multimedia data for species characterization in a complex context and in facilitating trait analysis. We also cover potential applications of the trait framework for developing into a comprehensive and effective infrastructure for aggregating and structuring species information.

In response to a request from the Royal Government of Bhutan, the World Bank commissioned a study on the sustainable development of hydropower in Bhutan. The study identified loss and decline of aquatic biodiversity as one of the major potential environmental impacts of hydropower development in Bhutan. Access to information on aquatic biodiversity is of utmost importance in planning and designing of new hydropower projects in Bhutan. This data is essential for planners to avoid, minimize and effectively mitigate potential adverse impacts on aquatic biodiversity. However, access to this information is not easy. With the objective of making aquatic biodiversity data accessible, key stakeholders within Bhutan have taken the initiative to create and maintain a national data repository for aquatic biodiversity within the country. An inventory and gap analysis of aquatic biodiversity data in Bhutan was done to summarize the available data and information on aquatic biodiversity, stakeholder meetings were held to obtain feedback for the repository and a plan of action has been formulated for creating the repository. Bhutan already maintains a rich biodiversity information repository - the Bhutan Biodiversity Portal (BBP, http://biodiversity.bt/), under the aegis of the National Biodiversity Centre (NBC), Ministry of Agriculture and Forests, Serbithang, Thimphu. The platform is powered by the open source Biodiversity Informatics Platform that also powers the India Biodiversity Portal (IBP) and a portal on Weed Identification and Knowledge in the Western Indian Ocean (WIKWIO). Additional data fields and functionality were identified to extend the functionality of BBP to cover the needs of the stakeholders. Primarily, interfaces will be built to upload already available datasets on organisms that have been surveyed and identified, as well as newer aquatic biodiversity data that will be generated by surveys and monitoring in future. The portal will facilitate upload of data that captures observed characteristics, e.g., life stage, body size, reproductive state; environmental variables of the locality of occurrence; and other sampling data such as sampling gear and mode of observation. It will also enhance species knowledge by adding the ability to link existing species pages with international databases such as IUCN and FishBase, as well as fields to store voucher specimen details and ecological status. All tabular data that is added will be synchronised to either standard observation fields, custom observation fields that are relevant to aquatic biodiversity or to species traits. Data that cannot be categorised under any of the above will stored as key value pairs. The data upload module will have metadata marked up to the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) metadata specification and data will be available for exchange using the Darwin Core (DwC) standards. The platform will be enabled with an enhanced search and serve function through easy-to-use query panels. Uploaded data will be aggregated and visualised on the portal along spatial, temporal and taxonomic axes. Furthermore, it will be available for stakeholders to download under Creative Commons licences for further processing and planning. The creation of the repository will be complemented by training the stakeholders in data curation and developing a campaign to build awareness of the portal within the community of stakeholders. The establishment of this repository will provide a guide to conserve aquatic biodiversity, maintain ecosystem functioning, and protect livelihoods and food security dependent upon aquatic biodiversity. It will also contribute to the open source biodiversity informatics platform and be available to all other instances of the portal. This will help in enriching the functions of the open source platform and provide value to conservation of biodiversity in other areas of the world.

Documenting and understanding agrobiodiversity is important for human well-being, agricultural sustainability and food security. This is more significant and urgent in the current context of massive landscape transformation, industrialization of agriculture and climate change. Recognizing the limited data on agricultural biodiversity (ABD), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) constituted a task force on ABD, which published its final report in February 2016 (Arnaud et al. 2016). The report highlighted the need for comprehensive standards for databasing, structuring, exchange and use of information on ABD, which included not only genebank and germplasm databases but also in-situ information of landraces and cultivars held by farmers and cultivators across the world. While there are standards to facilitate germplasm passport information exchange (Multi-Crop Passport Descriptors, MCPD), databases of crop wild relatives, cultivars, landraces and neglected and underutilized crop species, are completely absent. The world over, farmer and cultivator groups have selected and bred crop varieties, especially in tropical areas, which have not entered genebanks and are much more dynamic and constantly evolving. Documenting and databasing such information has challenges in effectively integrating wild relatives, landraces, cultivars, vernacular names, cultivation practices and crop traits into a consistent taxonomic backbone. India has identified 22 agro-biodiversity hotspots, where attempts have been made to document the ABD in a systematic way. The People's Biodiversity Register (PBR) (National Biodiversity Authority, India 2013), conceived in the late 1990s (Gadgil 2000), was an attempt to capture the biodiversity of a village level administrative unit called a Panchayat, with 31 predefined formats covering crop plants to natural biodiversity, extensively documented by community initiatives across India. While the implementation has been patchy, there are a few detailed PBRs in the Eastern Himalayas, the Brahmaputra Valley and Assam, which is an important agro biodiversity hotspot and center for speciation and domestication of rice. Some of these areas have detailed over 180 crop plants along with their scientific name, local name, variety, habitat, local status, and agronomy details. We will discuss the challenges in databasing this extensive community-generated information and referencing it on a taxonomic backbone that will have the ability to capture infraspecific taxonomy levels with additional attributes related to the crop wild relative species, landraces and cultivars, along with local names. It should provide the flexibility of referencing, databasing, editing, synonymizing and splitting names on the taxonomic backbone. It should have the ability to capture other details of cultivars and landraces including location, local status, morphology and cultivation practices, with the ability to share and export the data in structured formats and standards as they evolve.