INTER-AMERICAN WORKSHOP ON ENVIRONMENTAL DATA ACCESS

WebBee - a platform for a Brazilian network on bees

Antonio Mauro Saraiva(antonio.saraiva@poli.usp.br), Universidade de São Paulo - Escola Politécnica Vera L. Imperatriz Fonseca (vlifonse@ib.usp.br), Universidade de São Paulo - Instituto de Biociências

Abstract:

The project started in 1999 as an instrumentation system for research on flight activity of stingless bees at the BeeLab of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. Initially it involved the development of a data acquisition system for bee hives. It evolved to integrate in a database the data from the hives (air temperature and humidity, bee flux) and data from a weather station, which would be available on the Internet to help share them with other research groups. The main focus was on automatic data acquisition to help get more and better data and to free the researchers from some time consuming and error-prone activities.

It soon became clear that there was much more to be done and that information technologies could play an important role on organizing and sharing information and knowledge that already existed within the research community but were not easily available for a variety of people: other scientists, students of various levels, teachers, beekeepers, agricultural producers, policy makers, etc. The objective was then to develop a web-based information system whose core was a database of bee species information and that included data from their biology, taxonomy, distribution, production, etc., using texts, images and videos. At this point, in 2000, it was supposed to be a system to address the needs and to share the knowledge of a single research group.

It also became clear that the same system could be useful to other research groups on bees, but as the knowledge available at each group was a fragment of the whole, instead of having isolated initiatives and information systems, it would be better to have all the knowledge put together on a web-based network on bees. The objective is to have the various research groups on bees in Brazil providing their data to a portal on bees, assuring credit and intellectual property to the authors and institutions, be it a centralized or a distributed information system.

Nowadays WebBee is operational as a centralized database in an institutionally neutral website (www.webbee.org.br) to which contribute researchers from Universidade de São Paulo, Embrapa-Amazônia Oriental, Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana e Empresa Baiana de Desenvolvimento Agrícola.

It is expected to join regional and global initiatives for biodiversity and environment data sharing, such as SpeciesLink, IABIN by means of standard protocols such as DiGIR. It has hosted the Brazilian Pollinators Initiative and is expected to be part of its technological branch with the support of FAO. For these activities it is foreseen a partnership with CRIA - Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental.

The project was an initiative of Agricultural Automation Laboratory and of BeeLab, from Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, and has received funding from FAPESP and from CNPq.

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