EcoBank: A flexible database platform for sharing ecological data

Abstract

Environmental crisis challenges the human race harder than ever before. Ecologists have produced a massive amount of data to cope with the crisis. Accordingly, many national scale ecological database systems have been developed worldwide to manage and analyse these datasets. However, in Korea, ecological datasets produced by different research institutes for different purposes have not been integrated or serviced due to poorly designed information infrastructure. To address this obstacle, we present EcoBank (www.nie-ecobank.kr), an open, web-based ecological database platform designed to play an important role in ecosystem analysis, not only in Korea, but also worldwide. The architecture of EcoBank comprises core technologies of WebGIS, Application Programming Interface (API), responsive web and open-source software (OSS). Comprehensive ecological datasets from three different sources, including the National Institute of Ecology (NIE) in Korea, related national and international platforms and repositories, enter the three conceptual modules in EcoBank: data management, analysis and service. Diverse potential stakeholders of EcoBank can be classified into three groups: researchers, policy-makers and public users. EcoBank aims to expand its horizons through mutual communication amongst these stakeholders. We opened and launched the EcoBank service in December 2019 and have now begun to broaden its network by linking it to other data platforms and repositories over the globe to find possible solutions to ecological issues in Korea.

Potential Distribution of Amphibians with Different Habitat Characteristics in Response to Climate Change in South Korea

“…Conversely, the highest AUC value was for the H. quelpaertensis model, which results from the rarity or limited locality of this species [ 44 , 46 , 47 ]. The occurrence points of H. quelpaertensis from the 3rd National Ecosystem Survey of Korea used in this study are restricted to Jeju Island [ 28 ]. To compensate the intrinsic prevalence characteristics of the AUC statistic, we used both the AUC and TSS.…”

“…Among those 23 amphibians, we obtained occurrence data from the 3rd Natural Ecosystem Survey ( Figure 3 ) [ 26 ], and a total of 18 amphibian species were identified [ 27 ]. These datasets are available in EcoBank, the first ecological database platform in Korea [ 28 ] ( Appendix A ). However, Hynobius yangi and Dryophytes suweonensis had less than 10 occurrence points and were therefore excluded from our analysis to obtain accurate model predictions of other species’ distributions.…”

“…The amphibian species in South Korea are relatively distinct in their habitat characteristics, and we classified them into three groups ( Table 3 ), as detailed by Kim and Song [ 28 ] and Lee and Park [ 34 ]. The first group (Group 1) were characterized as amphibians that live in low altitude wetlands.…”

Data sharing attitudes and practices of researchers in Korean government research institutes: a survey-based descriptive study

“…In addition, the Ko-rea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS), another research institute under the NST, operates the National Standard Reference Data Center (NSRDC) [10]. Moreover, the National Institute of Ecology (NIE), a leading government research institute affiliated with the Ministry of Environment, has developed a platform for sharing ecological data named EcoBank [11].…”

How Threatened Is Scincella huanrenensis? An Update on Threats and Trends

“…As some of the datapoints are transferred from iNaturalist to GBIF, we excluded all duplicate datapoints before further analyses (Table 1). We also included survey records of the 4th National Ecosystem Survey conducted between years 2014 and 2018 by the National Institute of Ecology in R Korea (accessed through the EcoBank platform; [25]).…”