Species at risk: Data and knowledge management within the WILDSPACE Decision Support System

As part of its commitment to conserve biodiversity, the Canadian government passed legislation in 2003 for the protection and recovery of wildlife and plant populations at risk of extinction in Canada. There is currently no single system to store, retrieve and interpret information on species and their critical habitats in support of this legislation (i.e. the Species at Risk Act). In order to meet the information requirements for the Species at Risk Act (SARA), it is highly desirable to develop network designs, infrastructures and applications that link distributed data sources into an integrated system that manages data and provides decision support. The system architecture described here will be built on the versatile WILDSPACE Decision Support System (hereafter referred to as ‘WILDSPACE DSS’) and will be web-based consisting of distributed servers (database servers, web servers and map servers) providing different kinds of information including species and habitat data, geo-spatial data, metadata, web services and decision support analyses. Its design takes into consideration the needs of different user groups (Intranet, Extranet and Internet) and data security. The complexity of Species at Risk data requires considerable ‘‘best practice’’ database design efforts that strike an optimum balance among storage, maintenance, and application performance. The WILDSPACE DSS provides an effective platform for the delivery of information and services to Species at Risk practitioners for better decision-making through its data mining and modeling functionality.