The abundant biodiversity in Taiwan always attracts numerous domestic enthusiasts and overseas biologists to visit Taiwan and to record Taiwan’s biodiversity by means of texts, pictures or videos. However, it is a great pity that most of the survey data is kept by individuals, groups or websites separately without an integration, which does not allow users to take a full look at the biodiversity in Taiwan.

In order to efficiently integrate all the survey data mentioned above, the Endemic Species Research Institute is working on the project of “Biodiversity Geographic Information System”. The project is to be constructed as a sharing platform using Internet Geographic System; through the Internet platform, users are able to connect to other databases. Meanwhile, with the technologies of Data Warehouse and WEB 2.0, the data can be circulated and shared. In addition, the personalized survey data management software offers users the customized management function; moreover, the website provides functions such as links of statistic data and distribution chart of survey data as well as the survey table sharing. Even more, a contribution quantification function is created for users to increase their willingness to contribute survey data.

This project can be divided into four major systems, which aim at offering users the more convenient query interface, data management and survey tools and enhancing users’ willingness to provide more and more valuable survey data so that every citizen could easily be a biological surveyor.

The establishment of Taiwan Biodiversity Network is for the domestic people to query species information and share survey data. During the period of establishing the platform, different browsing habits users might have are considered. Thus, the system is developed by means of across-browser to support the mainstream browsers including Internet Explorer of Microsoft, Firefox of Mozilla, Safari of Mac and Chrome of Google.

Taiwan Biodiversity Network

The platform mainly provides three functions.

1.	Query Species：
	"Taiwan Biodiversity Network" provides various query methods, such as key word query, geographical range query, conditional filtering query and map query. Through these query functions, users can quickly acquire the needed data. Moreover, besides the number of the query results the query results also include the class and family information. Users can clearly understand the information of the species matching the searching condition through the simple legends.
2.	Uploading Data：
	"Taiwan Biodiversity Network" is focused on data collection. This system has provided three methods to collect data, including On-Line filling, uploading survey pictures and huge data collection with Microsoft Excel software. On-Line filling allows surveyors to fill the data to the interface. Moreover, considering the future extension, it allows the administrator to fix and design the filling interface through the manager interface. The uploading picture function enables the public to upload the pictures of plants and animals they took, and the professionals can check the correctness of the data. As to the Microsoft Excel uploading function, it is particularly developed for users who own huge quantities of data. Through Excel, the huge data can be imported to the system in batch to reduce the same data duplicated input. The Interface of On-Line Filling System
3.	User Information：
	Taiwan Biodiversity Network has offered the registered users some services according to the information users have provided, including user profile, survey data, survey album, tracks and statistic data. The purpose is to allow each user to see how their own data is the utilized in the system and to arouse users’ interests to offer data.

WebGIS structure is used to integrate the data display. In this system, the result will be displayed with different sizes of cells according to the species’ uniqueness and conservative level. As a result, the rarer the species is displayed in bigger cell. Furthermore, with GIS function, users can overlap the creature data with other layers, such as rainfall layer, temperature layer or so to more effectively improve the prediction of species distribution and convenience of research.

Display Species Distribution Information by Overlapping Different Layers