A comprehensive review on biodiversity information portals

Biodiversity information and precise knowledge are critical for its conservation and management for sustainable development. With the advancement of information technology, various efforts have been made by the scientific and internet community to digitize the biodiversity information and put it on an open-source platform equipped with structured information, compiled knowledge, mapping, and spatial analysis tools. These portals assist researchers and conservation managers in a variety of ways, including providing open access bio-resource-related data and analysis tools, which has accelerated biodiversity and conservation research and management practices in recent years. The dissemination of knowledge about various aspect of these portals will expedite the current scenario. This paper is intended to highlight the various aspects of these portals. In this paper, globally recognized portals with rich biodiversity information, global coverage, and powerful spatial analysis tools are reviewed to characterize their vocabulary differences, strengths, and limitations. In addition to the global database, some country-specific initiatives that use biodiversity data in a geospatial context are included. It is observed that many portals have been solely developed for the purpose of creating an open access digital database of bio-resources, with the geographical aspect being ignored. Some of the global and regional initiatives such as Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), etc. have attempted to fill this void by developing a variety of tools and integrating biodiversity data with geographic locations and other location-based parameters. Despite significant efforts, some issues remain unaddressed, viz., digitization of georeferenced information from natural history from across the world, the inclusion of more advanced web-GIS based tools for spatial analysis, development of agreed data standard, and so on, which could be the primary set of actions for future portals. The effort to address these issues is underway, and we anticipate that these will be resolved in the near future.