scholarly journals Biodiversity Information for Development: Building a global community of practice to mobilize and use biodiversity data

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mélianie Raymond ◽  
Andrew Rodrigues ◽  
Laura Anne Russell
Keyword(s):  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Capacity Development ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Project Teams ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
South East Europe ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Biodiversity Information for Development, or BID, is a programme funded by the European Union and led by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), aiming to increase the amount of biodiversity information available for use in scientific research and policymaking. In its first phase, BID provided funding to 61 projects in the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific between 2015-2019, with a strong focus on developing capacity to mobilize, manage and use biodiversity data within the project teams and their institutions, and through the establishment and strengthening of national nodes. The capacity development approach centred on establishing a community of practice to bring in the expertise in the broader GBIF network to support the project teams in meeting their goals. This involved designing curricula for two workshops in the areas of data mobilization and data use for decision making; developing activities and materials to strengthen a base of mentors and trainers; establishing technical helpdesk support; and matchmaking to provide mentoring support to the funded projects. The community of practice, through mentoring and reuse of the workshop materials, has been expanded to support the capacity development needs in other programmes, reaching other regions, including Asia, South-East Europe and Eurasia. During this presentation, we will review the main findings of the BID impact study and guiding examples from within the BID programme to identify the key successes and lessons learned relating to capacity development. As this approach has wider application to the biodiversity community, we invite discussion how we can build on the experience through the BID programme to further develop our community of practice, narrowing knowledge gaps between various groups of biodiversity professionals.

scholarly journals E-learning in GBIF Capacity Activities

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katia Cezón García ◽  
Cristina Villaverde ◽  
Carmen Lujano ◽  
Laura Russell
Keyword(s):  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Management Skills ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Training Tool ◽  
South East Europe ◽  
Learning Platform ◽  
E Learning ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Biodiversity Information

E-learning is a training method increasingly used as it enhances opportunities for participation, allows active tracking of courses and enables wider flexibility for timetables and organization. The implementation of an e-learning platform managed by GBIF Spain was aimed at exploring other ways of creating capacity, reaching a broader audience and multiplying the impact of a well-consolidated training facility. The first platform, used by the Spanish node in 2012, was the open source tool ATutor, which was migrated to Chamilo in 2017 and is available at http://elearning.gbif.es. Since then, these platforms have hosted courses focused on biodiversity data mobilization and data use, addressing both users and data publishers. GBIF.es offers the platform to other organizations in the community so the entire GBIF network can benefit from this service, taking advantage of the already invested resources. Additionally, the GBIF Secretariat uses the platform for developing training activities in the Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) and Biodiversity Information for Asia (BIFA) programmes reaching participants in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, and has implemented the Biodiversity Data Mobilization course for use in other programmes such as Biodiversity Data Management Skills for Students (BioDATA) and Biodiversity Information Management and Reporting (BIMR), reaching communities in Eurasia and South-East Europe respectively. GBIF Argentina has also used it to offer a course on biodiversity data quality and publication. In this session, we will overview the GBIF.es e-learning platform, highlight some successful use cases of the virtual training tool and show how it helped GBIF Spain reach a broader community. We will also present plans for future expansion.

scholarly journals The Living Atlases Community of Practice

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Elise Lecoq ◽  
Anne-Sophie Archambeau ◽  
Rui Figueira ◽  
David Martin ◽  
Sophie Pamerlon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Consolidation Process ◽  
Early Adopters ◽  
Community History ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Technical Advisory Committee ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Biodiversity Information

The power and configurability of the the Atlas of Living Australia tools have enabled more and more institutions and participants of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility adapt and install biodiversity platforms. For six years, we have demonstrated that the community around this platform was needed and ready for its adoption. During the symposium organized for the SPNHC+TDWG 2018, we started a discussion that has led us to the creation of a more structured and sustainable community of practice. We want to create a community that follows the structure of open-source technical projects such as Linux or Apache foundation. After the GBIF Governing Board (GB25), the Kilkenny accord was agreed among 8 country or institution partners and early adopters of ALA platform to outline the scope of the new Living Atlases community. Thanks to this accord, we have begun to set up a new structure based on the Community of Practice (CoP) model. In summary, the governance will be held by a Management committee and a Technical advisory committee. Adding to these, the Living Atlases community will have two coordinators with technical and administrative duties. This presentation will briefly summarise the community history leading up to the agreement of the Kilkenny accord and provide information and context of the key points contained. Then, we will present and launch the new Living Atlases Community of Practice . Through this presentation, we aim to collect lessons learned and good practices from other CoP in topics like governance, communications, sustainability, among others to incorporate them in the consolidation process of the Living Atlases community.

scholarly journals Rapid Creation of a Data Product for the World's Specimens of Horseshoe Bats and Relatives, a Known Reservoir for Coronaviruses

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Krimmel ◽  
Austin Mast ◽  
Deborah Paul ◽  
Robert Bruhn ◽  
Nelson Rios ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Reproducible Research ◽  
State University ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Data Product ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Horseshoe Bats

Genomic evidence suggests that the causative virus of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) was introduced to humans from horseshoe bats (family Rhinolophidae) (Andersen et al. 2020) and that species in this family as well as in the closely related Hipposideridae and Rhinonycteridae families are reservoirs of several SARS-like coronaviruses (Gouilh et al. 2011). Specimens collected over the past 400 years and curated by natural history collections around the world provide an essential reference as we work to understand the distributions, life histories, and evolutionary relationships of these bats and their viruses. While the importance of biodiversity specimens to emerging infectious disease research is clear, empowering disease researchers with specimen data is a relatively new goal for the collections community (DiEuliis et al. 2016). Recognizing this, a team from Florida State University is collaborating with partners at GEOLocate, Bionomia, University of Florida, the American Museum of Natural History, and Arizona State University to produce a deduplicated, georeferenced, vetted, and versioned data product of the world's specimens of horseshoe bats and relatives for researchers studying COVID-19. The project will serve as a model for future rapid data product deployments about biodiversity specimens. The project underscores the value of biodiversity data aggregators iDigBio and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which are sources for 58,617 and 79,862 records, respectively, as of July 2020, of horseshoe bat and relative specimens held by over one hundred natural history collections. Although much of the specimen-based biodiversity data served by iDigBio and GBIF is high quality, it can be considered raw data and therefore often requires additional wrangling, standardizing, and enhancement to be fit for specific applications. The project will create efficiencies for the coronavirus research community by producing an enhanced, research-ready data product, which will be versioned and published through Zenodo, an open-access repository (see doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3974999). In this talk, we highlight lessons learned from the initial phases of the project, including deduplicating specimen records, standardizing country information, and enhancing taxonomic information. We also report on our progress to date, related to enhancing information about agents (e.g., collectors or determiners) associated with these specimens, and to georeferencing specimen localities. We seek also to explore how much we can use the added agent information (i.e., ORCID iDs and Wikidata Q identifiers) to inform our georeferencing efforts and to support crediting those collecting and doing identifications. The project will georeference approximately one third of our specimen records, based on those lacking geospatial coordinates but containing textual locality descriptions. We furthermore provide an overview of our holistic approach to enhancing specimen records, which we hope will maximize the value of the bat specimens at the center of what has been recently termed the "extended specimen network" (Lendemer et al. 2020). The centrality of the physical specimen in the network reinforces the importance of archived materials for reproducible research. Recognizing this, we view the collections providing data to iDigBio and GBIF as essential partners, as we expect that they will be responsible for the long-term management of enhanced data associated with the physical specimens they curate. We hope that this project can provide a model for better facilitating the reintegration of enhanced data back into local specimen data management systems.

scholarly journals DiSSCo, iDigBio and the Future of Global Collaboration

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Nelson ◽  
Deborah L Paul
Keyword(s):  
Working Group ◽  
Application Programming Interface ◽  
The United States ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Data Generation ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Data Accessibility ◽  
The Us ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) is the United States’ (US) national resource and coordinating center for biodiversity specimen digitization and mobilization. It was established in 2011 through the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program, an initiative that grew from a working group of museum-based and other biocollections professionals working in concert with NSF to make collections' specimen data accessible for science, education, and public consumption. The working group, Network Integrated Biocollections Alliance (NIBA), released two reports (Beach et al. 2010, American Institute of Biological Sciences 2013) that provided the foundation for iDigBio and ADBC. iDigBio is restricted in focus to the ingestion of data generated by public, non-federal museum and academic collections. Its focus is on specimen-based (as opposed to observational) occurrence records. iDigBio currently serves about 118 million transcribed specimen-based records and 29 million specimen-based media records from approximately 1600 datasets. These digital objects have been contributed by about 700 collections representing nearly 400 institutions and is the most comprehensive biodiversity data aggregator in the US. Currently, iDigBio, DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections), GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) are collaborating on a global framework to harmonize technologies towards standardizing and synchronizing ingestion strategies, data models and standards, cyberinfrastructure, APIs (application programming interface), specimen record identifiers, etc. in service to a developing consolidated global data product that can provide a common source for the world’s digital biodiversity data. The collaboration strives to harness and combine the unique strengths of its partners in ways that ensure the individual needs of each partner’s constituencies are met, design pathways for accommodating existing and emerging aggregators, simultaneously strengthen and enhance access to the world’s biodiversity data, and underscore the scope and importance of worldwide biodiversity informatics activities. Collaborators will share technology strategies and outputs, align conceptual understandings, and establish and draw from an international knowledge base. These collaborators, along with Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), will join iDigBio and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as they host Biodiversity 2020 in Washington, DC. Biodiversity 2020 will combine an international celebration of the worldwide progress made in biodiversity data accessibility in the 21st century with a biodiversity data conference that extends the life of Biodiversity Next. It will provide a venue for the GBIF governing board meeting, TDWG annual meeting, and the annual iDigBio Summit as well as three days of plenary and concurrent sessions focused on the present and future of biodiversity data generation, mobilization, and use.

scholarly journals Completeness of Digital Accessible Knowledge of the Plants of Ghana

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Asase ◽  
A. Townsend Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Geographic Distance ◽  
Northern Ghana ◽  
Biodiversity Informatics ◽  
Primary Research ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Herbarium Data ◽  
Research Grade ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Providing comprehensive, informative, primary, research-grade biodiversity information represents an important focus of biodiversity informatics initiatives. Recent efforts within Ghana have digitized >90% of primary biodiversity data records associated with specimen sheets in Ghanaian herbaria; additional herbarium data are available from other institutions via biodiversity informatics initiatives such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. However, data on the plants of Ghana have not as yet been integrated and assessed to establish how complete site inventories are, so that appropriate levels of confidence can be applied. In this study, we assessed inventory completeness and identified gaps in current Digital Accessible Knowledge (DAK) of the plants of Ghana, to prioritize areas for future surveys and inventories. We evaluated the completeness of inventories at ½° spatial resolution using statistics that summarize inventory completeness, and characterized gaps in coverage in terms of geographic distance and climatic difference from well-documented sites across the country. The southwestern and southeastern parts of the country held many well-known grid cells; the largest spatial gaps were found in central and northern parts of the country. Climatic difference showed contrasting patterns, with a dramatic gap in coverage in central-northern Ghana. This study provides a detailed case study of how to prioritize for new botanical surveys and inventories based on existing DAK.

scholarly journals Unlocking the Entomological Collection of the Natural History Museum of Maputo, Mozambique

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Domingos Sandramo ◽  
Enrico Nicosia ◽  
Silvio Cianciullo ◽  
Bernardo Muatinte ◽  
Almeida Guissamulo
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Development Programme ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Data Portal ◽  
Global Biodiversity ◽  
Biodiversity Information

The collections of the Natural History Museum of Maputo have a crucial role in the safeguarding of Mozambique's biodiversity, representing an important repository of data and materials regarding the natural heritage of the country. In this paper, a dataset is described, based on the Museum’s Entomological Collection recording 409 species belonging to seven orders and 48 families. Each specimen’s available data, such as geographical coordinates and taxonomic information, have been digitised to build the dataset. The specimens included in the dataset were obtained between 1914–2018 by collectors and researchers from the Natural History Museum of Maputo (once known as “Museu Alváro de Castro”) in all the country’s provinces, with the exception of Cabo Delgado Province. This paper adds data to the Biodiversity Network of Mozambique and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, within the objectives of the SECOSUD II Project and the Biodiversity Information for Development Programme. The aforementioned insect dataset is available on the GBIF Engine data portal (https://doi.org/10.15468/j8ikhb). Data were also shared on the Mozambican national portal of biodiversity data BioNoMo (https://bionomo.openscidata.org), developed by SECOSUD II Project.

scholarly journals Harvestmen occurrence database (Arachnida, Opiliones) of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Brazil

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valéria da Silva ◽  
Manoel Aguiar-Neto ◽  
Dan Teixeira ◽  
Cleverson Santos ◽  
Marcos de Sousa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Consultation ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
Northern Brazil ◽  
Global Biodiversity ◽  
The Government ◽  
Biodiversity Information ◽  
Brazilian Biodiversity

We present a dataset with information from the Opiliones collection of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Northern Brazil. This collection currently has 6,400 specimens distributed in 13 families, 30 genera and 32 species and holotypes of four species: Imeri ajuba Coronato-Ribeiro, Pinto-da-Rocha & Rheims, 2013, Phareicranaus patauateua Pinto-da-Rocha & Bonaldo, 2011, Protimesius trocaraincola Pinto-da-Rocha, 1997 and Sickesia tremembe Pinto-da-Rocha & Carvalho, 2009. The material of the collection is exclusive from Brazil, mostly from the Amazon Region. The dataset is now available for public consultation on the Sistema de Informação sobre a Biodiversidade Brasileira (SiBBr) (https://ipt.sibbr.gov.br/goeldi/resource?r=museuparaenseemiliogoeldi-collection-aracnologiaopiliones). SiBBr is the Brazilian Biodiversity Information System, an initiative of the government and the Brazilian node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which aims to consolidate and make primary biodiversity data available on a platform (Dias et al. 2017). Harvestmen or Opiliones constitute the third largest arachnid order, with approximately 6,500 described species. Brazil is the holder of the greatest diversity in the world, with more than 1,000 described species, 95% (960 species) of which are endemic to the country. Of these, 32 species were identified and deposited in the collection of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi.

scholarly journals The Living Atlases community in action: the GBIF Benin data portal

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e25488
Author(s):  
Anne-Sophie Archambeau ◽  
Fabien Cavière ◽  
Kourouma Koura ◽  
Marie-Elise Lecoq ◽  
Sophie Pamerlon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
African Country ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Capacity Enhancement ◽  
Support Programme ◽  
Data Portal ◽  
Global Biodiversity ◽  
The University ◽  
Biodiversity Information ◽  
Occurrence Records

Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) (https://www.ala.org.au/) is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) node of Australia. They developed an open and free platform for sharing and exploring biodiversity data. All the modules are publicly available for reuse and customization on their GitHub account (https://github.com/AtlasOfLivingAustralia). GBIF Benin, hosted at the University of Abomey-Calavi, has published more than 338 000 occurrence records from 87 datasets and 2 checklists. Through the GBIF Capacity Enhancement Support Programme (https://www.gbif.org/programme/82219/capacity-enhancement-support-programme), GBIF Benin, with the help of GBIF France, is in the process of deploying the Beninese data portal using the GBIF France back-end architecture. GBIF Benin is the first African country to implement this module of the ALA infrastructure. In this presentation, we will show you an overview of the registry and the occurrence search engine using the Beninese data portal. We will begin with the administration interface and how to manage metadata, then we will continue with the user interface of the registry and how you can find Beninese occurrences through the hub.

scholarly journals The Antarctic Biodiversity Portal, an Online Ecosystem for Linking, Integrating and Disseminating Antarctic Biodiversity Information

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi-Ming Gan ◽  
Maxime Sweetlove ◽  
Anton Van de Putte
Keyword(s):  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Antarctic Species ◽  
Reference Guide ◽  
Occurrence Data ◽  
Event Based ◽  
The Antarctic ◽  
Global Initiatives ◽  
Sampling Event ◽  
Biodiversity Information

The Antarctic Biodiversity portal (biodiversity.aq) is a gateway to a wide variety of Antarctic biodiversity information and tools. Launched in 2005 as the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) - Marine Biodiversity Information Network (SCAR-MarBIN, scarmarbin.be) and the Register of Antarctic Marine Species (RAMS, marinespecies.org/rams/), the system has grown in scope from purely marine to include terrestrial information. Biodiversity.aq is a SCAR product, currently supported by Belspo (Belgian Science Policy) as one of the Belgian contributions to the European Lifewatch-European Research Infrastructure Consortium (Lifewatch-ERIC). The goal of Lifewatch is to provide access to: distributed observatories/sensor networks; interoperable databases, existing (data-)networks, using accepted standards; high performance computing (HPC) and grid power, including the use of the state-of-the-art of cloud and big data paradigm technologies; software and tools for visualization, analysis and modeling. Here we provide an overview of the most recent advances in the biodiversity.aq online ecosystem, a number of use cases as well as an overview of future directions. Some of the most notable components are: The Register of Antarctic Species (RAS, ras.biodiversity.aq) is a component of the Lifewatch Taxonomic Backbone and provides an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine and terrestrial species in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. It serves as a reference guide for users to interpret taxonomic literature, as valid names and other names in use are both provided. Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT, ipt.biodiversity.aq) allows disseminating Antarctic biodiversity data into global initiatives such as the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS, obis.org) as Antarctic node of OBIS (Ant-OBIS, also formerly known as SCAR-MarBIN) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, gbif.org) as Antarctic Biodiversity Information Facility (AntaBIF). Data that can be made available include metadata, species checklists, species occurrence data and more recently, sampling event-based data. Data from these international portals can be accessed through data.biodiversity.aq. The Register of Antarctic Species (RAS, ras.biodiversity.aq) is a component of the Lifewatch Taxonomic Backbone and provides an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine and terrestrial species in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. It serves as a reference guide for users to interpret taxonomic literature, as valid names and other names in use are both provided. Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT, ipt.biodiversity.aq) allows disseminating Antarctic biodiversity data into global initiatives such as the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS, obis.org) as Antarctic node of OBIS (Ant-OBIS, also formerly known as SCAR-MarBIN) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, gbif.org) as Antarctic Biodiversity Information Facility (AntaBIF). Data that can be made available include metadata, species checklists, species occurrence data and more recently, sampling event-based data. Data from these international portals can be accessed through data.biodiversity.aq. Through SCAR, Biodiversity.aq builds on an international network of expert that provide expert knowledge on taxonomy, species distribution,and ecology. It provides a strong and tested platform for sharing, integrating, discovering and analysing Antarctic biodiversity information originating from a variety of sources into a distributed system.

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