Tony Rees (scientist)

Anthony J. J. ("Tony") Rees (born 1953) is a British-born software developer, data manager and biologist resident in Australia since 1986, and previously a data manager with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. He is responsible for developing a number of software systems currently used in science data management and biodiversity informatics, including c-squares, Taxamatch, and IRMNG, the Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera. He has also been closely involved with the development of other biodiversity informatics initiatives including the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), AquaMaps, and the iPlant Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (TNRS). Prior to his involvement in data management, he worked as a light and electron microscopist studying freshwater and marine phytoplankton, and microfossils.

Biography

Rees was born in the UK and studied for a degree in plant sciences at the University of Leeds from 1971 to 1974, publishing one paper on the description of a new chrysophyte alga from his undergraduate work. Subsequently, he obtained a Ph.D. from the same university, with a thesis entitled "The phytoplankton of a eutrophic lake: community dynamics and ultrastructural studies". In the 1980s he worked for the Micropalaeontology Unit of the Geology Department at University College London before migrating to Australia where he managed the electron microscope facility for the CSIRO Division of Fisheries Research until that facility's closure in 1996, whereupon he transitioned into the area of marine data management for the same science agency. In that position he combined oceanographic and marine biological data management and developed an interest in the emerging field of biodiversity informatics, also including a role assisting the technical development of the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) being developed by J. Frederick Grassle in the U.S.A. From 2009 to 2014 he managed the Australian node of OBIS, located at CSIRO, and also collaborated with other national and international biodiversity informatics and data sharing initiatives including the Encyclopedia of Life, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the Atlas of Living Australia, the Open Tree of Life project, FishBase, and others. Rees left CSIRO in 2014, since when his Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera project has been hosted on data infrastructure at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) in Belgium, with which he continues an involvement as at 2026.

Development of data management tools

In 2002 Rees devised a grid-based identification system "c-squares" for units of geographic space to which areas of scientific operation by particular research projects in his agency could be allocated; by designing the system to cover any scale from global to local, c-squares was also a good fit for the initial spatial data handling of both the OBIS and the subsequent AquaMaps projects, in addition to its original implementation within CSIRO Fisheries' "MarLIN" metadata system.