CRBio production environment
The Atlas of Living Costa Rica was launched in 2006 aiming at providing integrated, free, and open access to data and information about the Costa Rican biodiversity in order to support science, education, and biodiversity conservation. In 2016, it was rebuild with software components developed by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). The Atlas is managed by the Biodiversity Informatics Research Center (CRBio) and the National Biodiversity Institute (INBio).
Nowadays, the Atlas of Living Costa Rica includes nearly seven million georeferenced species occurrence records, mediated by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which come from more than 900 databases and have been published by research centers in 36 countries. Half of those records are published by Costa Rican institutions. In addition, CRBio is making a special effort to enrich and share more than 5000 species pages, developed by INBio, about Costa Rican vertebrates, arthropods, molluscs, nematodes, plants and fungi.
Four developers are currently working on the portal. The source code is available at the GitHub repository of the Atlas of Living Costa Rica.
The Atlas of Living Costa Rica is implementing the following ALA modules:
Biocache: for searching occurrence records.
Collectory: for managing metadata about institutions and their datasets.
Besides, the portal includes the following homemade modules:
Species pages: it is a module of the Atta biodiversity information system, developed by INBio to manage the biodiversity data generated by the institution.
Communication portal: implemented in the WordPress content management system. Works also as an entry point to the whole system.
Work is in progress regarding the implementation of the Biodiversity Information Explorer (BIE) for managing species pages.
The Atlas of Living Costa Rica is currently running on a dedicated server hosted at ServerPronto which contains three virtual machines:
- ALA modules (biocache and collectory): Ubuntu 14, 12 GB RAM, 300 GB HD.
- Species pages: Ubuntu 15, 6 GB RAM, 600 GB HD.
- Communication portal: Ubuntu 15, 2 GB RAM, 200 GB HD.
- 7 million occurrence records.
- 900 datasets.
- 5 thousand species pages.