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1.0 Executive Summary

This review of national databases for land, water, freshwater biodiversity and terrestrial biodiversity was part of a wider Ministry for the Environment project to review different ecological classification systems and databases used for environmental management and reporting.

National databases reviewed covered the following categories:

• climate databases
• ecosystem databases (this includes the Department of Conservation Bioweb Database and Sites of Special Wildlife Interest)
• fauna databases (this includes the national bird banding scheme, OSNZ Atlas of bird distribution, OSNZ monitoring scemes, Te Papa collections and the freshwater fish database)
• flora databases (this includes aquatic plants, the Landcare Research Herbarium, Forest class maps of New Zealand, Landcare Research Invasive Weeds Database, the New Zealand Plant Names Database, DTZ NZ South Island High Country Vegetation Database, National Vegetation Survey Database, Bioweb weeds and threatened plants, NZ Register of Threatended Plants, Vegetation Cover Map of NZ)
• geology databases (this includes databases for active faults, earth deformation, the geological maps of New Zealand landslides and the NZ Geopreservation Inventory)
• land databases (this includes Agribase, the Department of Conservation Land Register, Digital Cadatral Database, Digital Elevation/Terrain Model, L and Cover Database and the NZ Land Resource Inventory)
• soils database (this includes the National Soils Database, NZ Soils Spatial Database and Soils of New Zealand database)
• water databases (this includes the Water Resources Archive, Hydrometric Database, and the National Water Quality Network for invertebrates, lakes and rivers).

Information on each database is presented using a 3 part template that includes a technical and a management evaluation.

The databases in many organisations are in a state of review. This especially applies to the biodiversity databases managed by the Department of Conservation. The Department is currently constructing a new database system (Bioweb) using a common approach for all resources the Department manages. At this stage only parts of their database system are operative.

Many databases are no longer directly funded and so their ongoing maintenance is under threat. This can result in a database being halted or it can result in a decrease in the amount of information going into a database. Over time this latter option will lead to a decline in the utility of a database. In some cases the removal of funding can mean that the future of even the existing data in a database can become uncertain.