Davide Villa, Western Digital's Head of Business Development EMEAI, explores the unsung hero of our world's biodiversity: research data
Beyond the climate, human activity continues to affect the health and well-being of our plant and fragile ecosystems. Biodiversity, or the variety of life on earth, is vital to the functionality of earth and is being lost at a startling rate. Any change to these balanced ecosystems can result in irreversible and devastating changes to habitats.
The World Health Organisation has predicted that the loss in biodiversity may cause food shortages, economic difficulties, and challenges developing pharmaceuticals, among others. The UK has the most drastic wildlife loss of all G7 countries, with 50% of all biodiversity gone since the industrial revolution, according to the Natural History Museum.
Although rarely equated with helping to protect the environment, information and data will be crucial in protecting endangered species and our environment. To measure and understand the bigger picture of the human impact on biodiversity, institutions are compiling vast amounts of data. With this information, they will have the tools to analyse and remediate our impacts and design methods to exist more harmoniously with the natural world. The loss of biodiversity is an impending threat, and data is enabling us to fight back.
How does data help? As with most complex issues, a diverse pool of data is key to understanding biodiversity and the factors which affect it. As a starting point, conservation groups collaborated on a paper, reviewing the data around biodiversity in quite a manual process.
A major contributor to data collection is NASA. Through satellites and other technology, the agency records data about temperature, location, moisture, light reflection, and other factors. These data points give scientists a better understanding of the threat to a given species. The loss of habitat is the main cause of species' extinction and being able to see long-term changes in temperature or water content can help identify stressors on species and their environment.
Recording such a huge number of environmental factors, of course, requires a vast amount of data which poses a problem for NASA and other research organisations who are tasked with managing that information and structuring it into workable sets and patterns. To manage and better understand recordings taken, data on biodiversity is being passed through the bioinformatics workflow to provide solutions to the loss of habitats and, ultimately, biodiversity.
The default solution for this kind of data was traditionally Network Attached Storage (NAS) but now that data is growing so rapidly in the life sciences sector, storing it is evolving beyond what NAS can offer. In this field, object storage is now the primary storage tier, ideal for unstructured data. Object storage can successfully handle data expansion, long-term data preservation and provides optimal random-access performance to data when scientists and researchers need it.
WHAT CAN THIS DATA TELL US? After being hunted to the point of extinction in the 1800s, the osprey, a magnificent bird of prey, had not been recorded breeding in Scotland since 1916. The birds spend the winters in West Africa and return to Europe in the summer to nest, often in Scandinavia. However, ospreys began to reappear and start breeding again in the 1950's in the Loch Garten site in Strathspey, Scotland.
In order to map their migratory movements and the mortality of young birds, the RSPB fits the two eldest chicks with tracking devices connected to satellites. Thanks to these research efforts and extensive protection, there are now over 300 breeding pairs in the UK. Surveying critically endangered animals like osprey and identifying protection priority areas is crucial and would be impossible without analysing large amounts of data.
Alongside the impact on the flora and fauna, a loss of biodiversity can radically alter the life of human populations across the planet. A lack of equilibrium in fragile ecosystems threatens people's livelihoods and housing security. It has the potential to wipe out vital plants and animals that we rely on for everyday goods and medicine. It even poses a threat to global health through the resurgence of infectious agents, causing spikes in illnesses like Lyme disease or West Nile virus. These changes in habitat pose a real danger for people globally, as well as to our most precious and vulnerable necessities.
DATA AND OUR NATURAL WORLD Data empowers impactful research aiming to protect our fragile ecosystems, and sharing this digital information is an important next step in the process to protect the planet. Recognising this, much of the data collected by NASA has already been included in the UN Biodiversity Lab, which seeks to democratise biodiversity data across borders, empower policymakers, and inform stakeholders with access to data. Therefore, the data that is collected and organised are directly supporting progress towards the '17 Sustainable Development Goals' laid out by the UN. Many of these are linked to preserving our biodiversity, their habitats, and the overall health of our planet.
What we can learn from this is that the data sets and storage technologies, such as object storage, underpinning this research are advancing the world in the right direction; allowing us to protect our environment, the plants and animals around us, and to ensure we have the understanding needed to improve the way we live on and interact with our planet.
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