zacharlie
commented
4 years ago The form request is Provide a list of important species occurring within the proposed biosphere reserve, including common names, wherever possible., however additional information may be required for #54
Spatial data and IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria (which are used by SANBI) are available from the https://www.iucnredlist.org but the license is restricted for commercial activity.
The data is available from http://redlist.sanbi.org/redcat.php but it is not in a data format that may be easily cross referenced.
This is also only for threatened species and does not give an indication of other endemic or important species.
Species of importance data for birding is detailed from the important bird areas web data. The original data links:
- http://www.birdlife.org.za/conservation/important-bird-areas/iba-directory/item/149-sa008-nyl-river-floodplain
- http://www.birdlife.org.za/conservation/important-bird-areas/iba-directory/item/148-sa007-waterberg-system
- http://www.birdlife.org.za/conservation/important-bird-areas/iba-directory/item/150-sa009-northern-turf-thornveld
- http://www.birdlife.org.za/conservation/important-bird-areas/iba-directory/item/164-sa023-pilansberg-national-park
were not available and had to be manually sourced, which resulted in the following pages:
- https://www.birdlife.org.za/iba-directory/nyl-river-floodplain/
- https://www.birdlife.org.za/iba-directory/waterberg-system/
- https://www.birdlife.org.za/iba-directory/northern-turf-thornveld/
- https://www.birdlife.org.za/iba-directory/pilansberg-national-park/
Whilst these pages offer some information on species they do not supply full citations and rely on a "Further Reading" section.
Species of importance must be manually extracted from each page and added into a suitable data format.
Additional information on important species is listed on the UNESCO website https://en.unesco.org/biosphere/africa/waterberg, however this does not seem to give any indication of where that data was sourced.
A copy of the Waterberg District Bioregional Plan Draft 20160201 was sourced in PDF format which contains details on particular species of concern, however the information does not contain specific citation and the document references do not make any explicit mention of species data.
Additional Biome information data is available from NBA2018_Terrestrial_ThreatStatus_ProtectionLevel, however it is not species specific to a specific region within the area of interest and simply contains vegetation/ biome types which usually support a range of species, e.g. Springbokvlakte Thornveld. It does, however, give an indication of endemic biome type.
Species of critical importance may be derived from the NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT: BIODIVERSITY ACT and a 2007 Gazetted list of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED, ENDANGERED, VULNERABLE AND PROTECTED SPECIES is available from www.speciesstatus.sanbi.org/pdf/NEMBAToPslist23Feb.pdf
A complete list of species occurrences was sourced for South Africa from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility data base.
This occurrence data does not provide information on the importance of the species.
The resulting list provides 10390 distinct species values, with 9260 passing some elementary integrity checks and 1130 records indicating invalid values or conventions. No common names are available from this data.
The raw data list is available from species_list.csv
This is a comprehensive list of species observations, and does not directly serve the purposes of this species list but may serve to provide additional analysis and reference functions. As the sources listed above provide little data which is overtly available to support their claims, it may prove to be a useful resource. It has been provisionally committed to the git repository for the sake of posterity, however a refined list of greatly reduced scope will replace it and is currently in development.
The citation data for these GBIF observations is as follows:
Citation: GBIF.org (08 October 2020) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.zyvv6f
License: Unspecified
INCLUDES RECORDS FROM 1,425 DATASETSThe resulting records for the entire search (~28000000), were processed into spatial positions. The full processing outline is available from my personal repository under gbif_simple_sql.md.
It is possible that additional analysis may be performed by cross referencing these data sources or by running spatial analysis on occurrence data for particular species of interest where relevant.
Species data will need to be prioritised and consolidated appropriately. A species list template is available from SANBI, however it does not seem very well suited to the data inputs available and may require a significant amount of additional work to format available data into this format.
Provide a list of important species occurring within the proposed biosphere reserve, including common names, wherever possible
ref biosphere_reserve_nomination_form_2013_en.pdf