The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) Ecological Services’ Division of Data Integration has been developing ECOSphere, our enterprise cloud system. ECOSphere is replacing our Environmental Conservation Online System (ECOS), which has been the services’ portal to provide access to USFWS data concerning threatened and endangered species, conservation of habitat and species, refuges, and migratory birds. ECOSphere offers a central point to gather and store information from varying Federal, State, and local partners to administer a national network of lands and waters for the conservation, management, and, where appropriate, restoration of the fish, wildlife, and plant resources and their habitats within the United States. At the heart of ECOSphere is the Species Workflow, which will be a live repository for storing species and ecosystems information. We will discuss our modernization efforts for ECOSphere and Species Workflow which includes visualizing and creating understanding related to taxonomic and regulatory hierarchies, species biogeography, species’ status, and trends in a way that was not possible in ECOS. We will describe our planned Connecting the Dots tool that will link species’ needs to threats or activities that impact and conservation measures that influence these needs. In addition, we will share our vision for utilizing Artificial Intelligence to help facilitate the modernization and improved functionality of ECOSphere’s Species Workflow.
Join the people who protect and manage our natural areas.