INTER-AMERICAN WORKSHOP ON ENVIRONMENTAL DATA ACCESS

Arthur Chapman

Mr Arthur Chapman spent over 20 years working in a number of capacities for the Australian Government, mainly in data management, information analysis, environmental modelling, development of environmental decision support systems and information presentation. Working for the Australian Academy of Sciences, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) he prepared the Australian Plant Name Index - a four volume publication and on-line database listing over 60,000 Australian plant names - as well as being involved in the production of a number of volumes of the Flora of Australia.

From 1990 -2002 Mr Chapman worked for the Environmental Resources Information Network (ERIN) in Australia which was responsible for developing some of the world's first on-line environmental data management and analysis tools, including a web-based species' modelling system made available less than six months after the World Wide Web became a reality. He was part of teams at ERIN that won the Computer World Smithsonian Award in 1993, and two Australian Government Technology Productivity Gold Awards in 1994 and 2001 for innovative Web developments and was Awarded the Centeneray of the Australian public Service Award in 2002 for Sustained Excellence.

Mr Chapman has advised on data management and environmental modelling in a range of institutions and agencies around the world, including in Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, the United States, Canada, Indonesia, a number of Mekong Delta countries, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and England.

For the past year, Mr Chapman has been working at CRIA in Brazil, assisting development of innovative and practical on-line environmental data cleaning tools, as well as improving environmental data, methodologies and tools available in South America for environmental modelling, reserve selection, data management and visualisation.

Over the past thirty years, he has been a member of a number of International organizations and committees, including the OECD Megascience Forum Working Group on Bioinformatics (the precurser of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility - GBIF), the G7 Environment and Natural Resources Management (ENRM) Experts Working Group, the Technical Experts' Group on Clearing House Mechanisms under the Secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG), International Organisation for Plant Information (IOPI), and is presently a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Biota/FAPESP program in São Paulo, Brazil.

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