Holistic understanding of contemporary ecosystems requires integration of data on domesticated, captive and cultivated organisms

Domestic and captive animals and cultivated plants should be recognised as integral components in contemporary ecosystems. They interact with wild organisms through such mechanisms as hybridization, predation, herbivory, competition and disease transmission and, in many cases, define ecosystem properties. Nevertheless, it is widespread practice for data on domestic, captive and cultivated organisms to be excluded from biodiversity repositories, such as natural history collections. Furthermore, there is a lack of integration of data collected about biodiversity in disciplines, such as agriculture, veterinary science, epidemiology and invasion science. Discipline-specific data are often intentionally excluded from integrative databases in order to maintain the “purity” of data on natural processes. Rather than being beneficial, we argue that this practise of data exclusivity greatly limits the utility of discipline-specific data for applications ranging from agricultural pest management to invasion biology, infectious disease prevention and community ecology. This problem can be resolved by data providers using standards to indicate whether the observed organism is of wild or domestic origin and by integrating their data with other biodiversity data (e.g. in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility). Doing so will enable efforts to integrate the full panorama of biodiversity knowledge across related disciplines to tackle pressing societal questions.

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Mobilizing Data from Taxonomic Literature for an Iconic Species (Dinosauria, Theropoda, Tyrannosaurus rex)

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards ◽

10.3897/biss.3.37078 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

Author(s):

Jeremy Miller ◽

Yanell Braumuller ◽

Puneet Kishor ◽

David Shorthouse ◽

Mariya Dimitrova ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽

Museum Exhibits ◽

The Public ◽

The Past ◽

Biodiversity Knowledge ◽

Informatics Infrastructure ◽

The Subject ◽

The Impact ◽

Biodiversity Information ◽

Occurrence Records

A vast amount of biodiversity data is reported in the primary taxonomic literature. In the past, we have demonstrated the use of semantic enhancement to extract data from taxonomic literature and make it available to a network of databases (Miller et al. 2015). For technical reasons, semantic enhancement of taxonomic literature is most efficient when customized according to the format of a particular journal. This journal-based approach captures and disseminates data on whatever taxa happen to be published therein. But if we want to extract all treatments on a particular taxon of interest, these are likely to be spread across multiple journals. Fortunately, the GoldenGATE Imagine document editor (Sautter 2019) is flexible enough to parse most taxonomic literature. Tyrannosaurus rex is an iconic dinosaur with broad public appeal, as well as the subject of more than a century of scholarship. The Naturalis Biodiversity Center recently acquired a specimen that has become a major attraction in the public exhibit space. For most species on earth, the primary taxonomic literature contains nearly everything that is known about it. Every described species on earth is the subject of one or more taxonomic treatments. A taxon-based approach to semantic enhancement can mobilize all this knowledge using the network of databases and resources that comprise the modern biodiversity informatics infrastructure. When a particular species is of special interest, a taxon-based approach to semantic enhancement can be a powerful tool for scholarship and communication. In light of this, we resolved to semantically enhance all taxonomic treatments on T. rex. Our objective was to make these treatments and associated data available for the broad range of stakeholders who might have an interest in this animal, including professional paleontologists, the curious public, and museum exhibits and public communications personnel. Among the routine parsing and data sharing activities in the Plazi workflow (Agosti and Egloff 2009), taxonomic treatments, as well as cited figures, are deposited in the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR), and occurrence records are shared with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Treatment citations were enhanced with hyperlinks to the cited treatment on TreatmentBank, and specimen citations were linked to their entries on public facing collections databases. We used the OpenBiodiv biodiversity knowledge graph (Senderov et al. 2017) to discover other taxa mentioned together with T. rex, and to create a timeline of T. rex research to evaluate the impact of individual researchers and specimen repositories to T. rex research. We contributed treatment links to WikiData, and queried WikiData to discover identifiers to different platforms holding data about T. rex. We used bloodhound-tracker.net to disambiguate human agents, like collectors, identifiers, and authors. We evaluate the adequacy of the fields currently available to extract data from taxonomic treatments, and make recommendations for future standards.

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Storing, Maintaining and Mobilizing Botswana National Museum’s Entomology Digital Collections: The GBIF/BID Approach

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards ◽

10.3897/biss.2.26328 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. e26328

Author(s):

Boikhutso Lerato Rapalai

Keyword(s):

National Museum ◽

Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽

Digital Collections ◽

Natural Heritage ◽

Heritage Sites ◽

Biodiversity Knowledge ◽

Insect Biodiversity ◽

Decision Making Processes ◽

Global Biodiversity ◽

Biodiversity Information

The Botswana National Museum is mandated to protect, preserve and promote Botswana’s cultural and natural heritage for sustainable utilization thereof by collecting, researching, conserving and exhibiting for public education and appreciation. The Entomology Section of the museum is aiming towards becoming the national center for entomology collections as well as contributing to the monitoring and enhancement of natural heritage sites in Botswana. The Botswana National Museum entomology collection was assembled over more than three decades by a succession of collectors, curators and technical officers. Specimens are carefully prepared and preserved, labelled with field data, sorted and safely stored. The collection is preserved as wet (ethanol preserved) or as dry pinned specimens in drawers. This collection is invaluable for reference, research, baseline data and educational purposes. As a way of mobilizing insect biodiversity data and making it available online for conservation efforts and decision making processes, in 2016 the Botswana National Museum collaborated with five other African states to implement the Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) funded African Insect Atlas’ Project (https://www.gbif.org/project/82632/african-insect-atlas). This collaborative project was initiated to move biodiversity knowledge out of select insect collections into the hands of a new generation of global biodiversity researchers interested in direct outcomes. To date, the Botswana National Museum has been instrumental through the efforts of this project in storing, maintaining and mobilizing insect digital collections and making the data available online through the GBIF Platform.

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"Look what they've done to our data!" — How Aggregators Change Data Items in Collection Records

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards ◽

10.3897/biss.2.25906 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. e25906

Author(s):

Robert Mesibov

Keyword(s):

Data Loss ◽

Data Standards ◽

Biodiversity Data ◽

Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽

Specific Data ◽

Global Biodiversity ◽

Biodiversity Information ◽

Counter Data

Aggregators such as the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) have recently been criticised for imposing "backbone taxonomies" on records provided by museums, herbaria and other sources. Taxon names may be changed to suit the backbone, with the result that the taxon rank of the record may change and the originally provided name may no longer be searchable online through the aggregator. Aggregators may also delete data items, either by omitting entire fields or rejecting data items not conforming to aggregator-specific data standards. Modifications are more common than deletions and are particularly worrying in geospatial, date and recorder data fields. It can be difficult to locate originally provided data on aggregator websites, even for individual records, and bulk downloads from aggregators typically mask the changes made. In this presentation I document the loss and modification of biodiversity data items by aggregators and suggest strategies for museums and herbaria to counter data loss and modification.

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European Journal of Taxonomy: a deeper look into a decade of data

European Journal of Taxonomy ◽

10.5852/ejt.2021.782.1597 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 782 ◽

pp. 173-196

Author(s):

Laurence Bénichou ◽

Marcus Guidoti ◽

Isabelle Gérard ◽

Donat Agosti ◽

Tony Robillard ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Original Research ◽

Multiplication Factor ◽

Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽

Biodiversity Knowledge ◽

Geographic Coverage ◽

Average Multiplication ◽

Global Biodiversity ◽

Automated Process ◽

Semantically Enhanced ◽

Biodiversity Information

The European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT) is a decade-old journal dedicated to the taxonomy of living and fossil eukaryotes. Launched in 2011, the EJT published exactly 900 articles (31 778 pages) from 2011 to 2021. The journal has been processed in its entirety by Plazi, liberating the data therein, depositing it into TreatmentBank, Biodiversity Literature Repository and disseminating it to partners, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) using a combination of a highly automated workflow, quality control tools, and human curation. The dissemination of original research along with the ability to use and reuse data as freely as possible is the key to innovation, opening the corpus of known published biodiversity knowledge, and furthering advances in science. This paper aims to discuss the advantages and limitations of retro-conversion and to showcase the potential analyses of the data published in EJT and made findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) by Plazi. Among others, taxonomic and geographic coverage, geographical distribution of authors, citation of previous works and treatments, timespan between the publication and treatments with their cited works are discussed. Manually counted data were compared with the automated process, the latter being analysed and discussed. Creating FAIR data from a publication results in an average multiplication factor of 166 for additional access through the taxonomic treatments, figures and material citations citing the original publication in TreatmentBank, the Biodiversity Literature Repository and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Despite the advances in processing, liberating data remains cumbersome and has its limitations which lead us to conclude that the future of scientific publishing involves semantically enhanced publications.

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Advancing the Catalogue of the World’s Natural History Collections

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards ◽

10.3897/biss.4.59324 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

Author(s):

Donald Hobern ◽

Deborah L Paul ◽

Tim Robertson ◽

Quentin Groom ◽

Barbara Thiers ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽

Multiple Networks ◽

Biodiversity Knowledge ◽

Online Consultation ◽

Natural History Collections ◽

Complex Landscape ◽

Biodiversity Information ◽

Coordination Team ◽

Research Resources

Information about natural history collections helps to map the complex landscape of research resources and assists researchers in locating and contacting the holders of specimens. Collection records contribute to the development of a fully interlinked biodiversity knowledge graph (Page 2016), showcasing the existence and importance of museums and herbaria and supplying context to available data on specimens. These records also potentially open new avenues for fresh use of these collections and for accelerating their full availability online. A number of international (e.g., Index Herbariorum, GRSciColl) regional (e.g. DiSSCo and CETAF) national (e.g., ALA and the Living Atlases, iDigBio US Collections Catalog) and institutional networks (e.g., The Field Museum) separately document subsets of the world's collections, and the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Collection Descriptions Interest Group is actively developing standards to support information sharing on collections. However, these efforts do not yet combine to deliver a comprehensive and connected view of all collections globally. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) received funding as part of the European Commission-funded SYNTHESYS+ 7 project to explore development of a roadmap towards delivering such a view, in part as a contribution towards the establishment of DiSSCo services within a global ecosystem of collection catalogues. Between 17 and 29 April 2020, a coordination team comprising international representatives from multiple networks ran Advancing the Catalogue of the World’s Natural History Collections, a fully online consultation using the GBIF Discourse forum platform to guide discussion around 26 consultation topics identified in an initial Ideas Paper (Hobern et al. 2020). Discussions included support for contributions in Spanish, Chinese and French and were summarised daily throughout the consultation. The consultation confirmed broad agreement around the needs and goals for a comprehensive catalogue of the world’s natural history collections, along with possible strategies to overcome the challenges. This presentation will summarise the results and recommendations.

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An alliance for biodiversity knowledge: Rethinking international collaboration in biodiversity informatics

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards ◽

10.3897/biss.3.37324 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Donald Hobern ◽

Joseph Miller

Keyword(s):

Building Blocks ◽

Coordination Mechanism ◽

Environmental Research ◽

Biodiversity Informatics ◽

Global Alliance ◽

Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽

Sustainable Solutions ◽

Biodiversity Knowledge ◽

Global Biodiversity ◽

Biodiversity Information

There has been major progress over the last two decades in digitising historical knowledge of biodiversity and in making biodiversity data freely and openly accessible. Interlocking efforts bring together international partnerships and networks, national, regional and institutional projects and investments and countless individual contributors, spanning diverse biological and environmental research domains, government agencies and non-governmental organisations, citizen science and commercial enterprise. However, current efforts remain inefficient and inadequate to address the global need for accurate data on the world's species and on changing patterns and trends in biodiversity. Significant challenges include imbalances in regional engagement in biodiversity informatics activity, uneven progress in data mobilisation and sharing, the lack of stable persistent identifiers for data records, redundant and incompatible processes for cleaning and interpreting data and the absence of functional mechanisms for knowledgeable experts to curate and improve data. The first Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC) in 2012 delivered the Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook (GBIO, Hobern et al. 2012), an architectural vision for the major components of a distributed global infrastructure for biodiiversity information, but realigning the work of existing organisations and projects to achieve this vision remains challenging. Recognising the need for greater alignment between efforts at all scales, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) convened the second Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC2) in July 2018 to propose a coordination mechanism for developing shared roadmaps for biodiversity informatics. GBIC2 attendees reached consensus on the need for a global alliance for biodiversity knowledge, learning from examples such as the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and the open software communities under the Apache Software Foundation. These initiatives provide models for multiple stakeholders with decentralised funding and independent governance to combine resources and develop sustainable solutions that address common needs. GBIF was asked to coordinate next steps following GBIC2, including publication of a paper, Connecting data and expertise: a new alliance for biodiversity knowledge (Hobern et al. 2019). The supplementary materials for the paper include PDF brochures explaining the concept in eleven languages. During 2019, GBIF is coordinating further consultations to establish an optimal model for the governance and operations of the alliance and to advance collaboration around some of the major building blocks of the GBIO. Collaboration at this scale, and across all aspects of biodiversity information, is essential for effective delivery of important information products such as the Essential Biodiversity Variables and the planned pan-European natural history collections infrastructure, DiSSCo. This presentation explains the goals for this alliance and updates on progress during 2019 in operationalising the concept.

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Infrastructure and Population of the OpenBiodiv Biodiversity Knowledge Graph

Biodiversity Data Journal ◽

10.3897/bdj.9.e67671 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 ◽

Author(s):

Mariya Dimitrova ◽

Viktor Senderov ◽

Teodor Georgiev ◽

Georgi Zhelezov ◽

Lyubomir Penev

Keyword(s):

Data Storage ◽

Open Data ◽

Knowledge Graph ◽

Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽

Academic Literature ◽

Biodiversity Knowledge ◽

Software Packages ◽

Description Framework ◽

Resource Description ◽

Biodiversity Information

OpenBiodiv is a biodiversity knowledge graph containing a synthetic linked open dataset, OpenBiodiv-LOD, which combines knowledge extracted from academic literature with the taxonomic backbone used by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The linked open data is modelled according to the OpenBiodiv-O ontology integrating semantic resource types from recognised biodiversity and publishing ontologies with OpenBiodiv-O resource types, introduced to capture the semantics of resources not modelled before. We introduce the new release of the OpenBiodiv-LOD attained through information extraction and modelling of additional biodiversity entities. It was achieved by further developments to OpenBiodiv-O, the data storage infrastructure and the workflow and accompanying R software packages used for transformation of academic literature into Resource Description Framework (RDF). We discuss how to utilise the LOD in biodiversity informatics and give examples by providing solutions to several competency questions. We investigate performance issues that arise due to the large amount of inferred statements in the graph and conclude that OWL-full inference is impractical for the project and that unnecessary inference should be avoided.

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