A new standard for restricted access (sensitive) species data

What this was about

Tania Laity presented the work of the TDWG Sensitive Species Extension Task Group (convened by the ALA, GBIF and Gaia Resources), which arose from a 2023 Hobart workshop and is building on Arthur Chapman's work. The group has drafted hierarchical vocabularies of RASD reasons (privacy, sensitive location, harm, biosecurity, species attributes, usage restrictions, First Nations cultural significance) and treatments (coordinate obfuscation, attribute generalisation, date generalisation, withholding and embargo). She showed how treatments attach to records in Darwin Core Archives (as a star-schema extension) and Darwin Core Data Package (via join tables), walked through the treatment fields, and demonstrated a cave case study with a troglobitic spider, fossils and undescribed mites.

Why it matters. Would give data users visibility of restrictions and reasons across providers and aggregators, supporting FAIR handling of restricted data; submission to TDWG was planned by end of year.

In the room

• Task group first met in September 2024; conveners from ALA (Cam Slatyer, Tania Laity, Simon Sharon), GBIF and Gaia Resources; members from government, universities, data providers and aggregators in several countries.
• The group prefers 'restricted access species data' over 'sensitive' because 'sensitive' makes people reluctant to share.
• Reason vocabulary: personal information and privacy; sensitive species location; potential harm to people or property; biosecurity risk; species attributes (e.g. roosting or nesting sites); usage restrictions (legal contracts); First Nations cultural significance.
• Hierarchical treatment vocabulary: coordinate obfuscation (truncation to grid, snapping to polygon centroid, randomising), generalising attributes (taxon level, locality text), generalising dates (month, year, decade), withholding records/attributes/datasets and embargoes.
• A treatment needs a reason; one reason may need several treatments; a record may have several reasons - applied one-to-many like the MeasurementOrFact extension.
• In Darwin Core Archive, treatments are an extension pointing to the core; in Darwin Core Data Package, a treatment class is joined to events or occurrences via join tables (e.g. event-treatment).
• Treatment fields include target field, treatment reason, treatment type, free-text description, start and end dates (for embargoes), treatment organisation and a contentious 'treatment in effect' flag.

Notable moments