A major goal of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD 1992) is to conserve biological diversity, world over. In 2002, the Indian Government passed the Biological Diversity Act to meet the obligations under the Convention. Documentation of the biological resources is essential in order to aid in their conservation. The national and regional conservation and management programmes are data starved and are essentially implemented based on precautionary principle for biodiversity conservation. Though the intellectual wealth in biology is abundant in India, it has to be appropriately presented to aid in policy making and popular use by the society. A meaningful approach for a national database would be to collate the data from all organizations responsible for storing biodiversity information onto a common platform to enable wider access.
The paper reviews the global and national efforts in documenting biodiversity and the current focus of Government of India towards biodiversity documentation and conservation. It provides a framework for integrating biological, spatial and genetic information of organisms inhabiting diverse landscapes and ecosystems using advanced tools for querying, analyzing, modelling and visualizing patterns of species distribution for researchers in India and abroad. The converging points between various regulatory frameworks in India concerning biodiversity and habitat conservation, with special reference to the aquatic organisms are discussed. The paper highlights the challenges in the integration of scattered biodiversity data viz., unwillingness to share data, inadequate data quality, inconsistent data formats / classification systems, lack of strategies and resources, etc. and calls for forging knowledge networks, technical collaborations between experts / expert agencies, institutionalization of biodiversity data sharing mechanisms and most significantly, leveraging the advancements in geo-spatial and information technology.