[Taxacom] How to Handle Sensitive Species Data

[Lee Belbin]

Arthur Chapman and Oliver Grafton have just written a definitive guide to
handling sensitive species data.

The  Guide to Best Practices for Generalising Primary Species-Occurrence
Data is the result of a project generated by the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility (GBIF) following concerns on the way different data
providers were generalising information on species that were regarded as
being sensitive. A Survey was conducted in early 2006 to ascertain what data
providers were currently doing to generalize data and this was followed by
extensive discussions and a workshop of experts to try and come up with some
consistent methods for 1) determining what should be regarded as sensitive
(both taxa and attributes) and 2) for generalizing sensitive data and
documenting how this has been done.

This Guide to Best Practices provides a key for data providers to use in
determining whether a species or attribute should be regarded as sensitive
and its level of sensitivity, and provides guidelines on consistent wording
for use in documentation.  It also provides guidelines on methods for
generalizing data, both spatial and non-spatial.

The guide can be found as Chapter 6 of the GBIF Training Manual 1:
Digitisation of natural History Collections Data at the following link

http://www.gbif.org/GBIF_org/GBIF_Documents/trainingmanual1/

This manual should be mandatory reading: Biology 101!

Lee Belbin
TDWG Secretariat