Interactice Species Distribution Reporting, Mapping and Modelling Using the World Wide Web

Abstract The Australian Environmental Resources Information Network (ERIN) is setting up a national facility allowing ready access to key information about the Australian environment. The World Wide Web represents a revolution in our ability to provide access to such information through easy to use hypermedia computer interfaces. This paper describes links which have been set up between WWW and the ERIN database to allow fast, easy access to information on the distribution of plants and animals, information on nature conservation and other protected areas, management information on government programs and projects and information on data sets held by ERIN. Using the WWW CGI interface, a generic script has been written in Perl which accepts form parameters from a Web client, passes them to database reports and other programs which output HTML documents for viewing by the Web client. One such application, an integrated, automated spatial reporting, mapping and modelling system for species distributions is described in detail. Users simply specify a species name or click on a geographic region and the system automatically produces reports, data files, maps and images of bioclimatic models based on the species' recorded distribution. The system interactively accesses the ERIN database for records of species occurrence, then passes these data to mapping and modelling programs. The modelling program GARP (Genetic Algorithm for Rule Set Production) simulates both VIOCLIM analyses and a variety of other forms of habitat modelling. Output from the modelling programs are predicted potential distributions for a species. These can be compared and validated against field observations and used to indicate new areas where a particular species may occur.