International Collaboration Enables Greater Access to Biodiversity Information

Species-level data and occurrence maps now reach a wider spectrum of users thanks to standardized data and improved system interoperability

A new technical collaboration to promote efficient sharing of biodiversity data for science and society has been announced by two leading global initiatives.

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is now able to ‘harvest’ information from content partners using data standards compatible with, and derived from, those used by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

The collaboration aims to enable institutions to use a single publication process to make their data accessible through both platforms, simultaneously reaching a wide spectrum of users from scientists and decision-makers to students and the general public.

Both groups have hailed the development as a breakthrough in the effort to provide incentives for the sharing of data, by enabling interoperability between systems instead of developing different standards for different platforms.

The technical solution was initiated in the run-up to the release of EOL’s new version, launched earlier last month, and will be further developed in the future. In collaboration with informatics developers at GBIF, EOL created a new specification for describing data archives building upon the Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), a standard used to publish data on species occurrences and taxonomies through the GBIF network.

The Darwin Core Archive standard builds upon more than a decade of work through the Biodiversity Informatics Standards (TDWG) community.

The new EOL ‘transfer schema’ was developed to meet EOL’s need for a standard capable of expressing the complex associations between entities required for its 750,000 species pages, while avoiding duplication with the GBIF publishing workflow.

The development aims to allow GBIF ‘Nodes’, for example (the coordinating units for country and institutional Participants), to make species-level information accessible to EOL at the same time as they publish their occurrence data to the GBIF infrastructure. This process has been successfully tested through the harvesting of species data from the Costa Rican GBIF node, Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio), to appear in EOL while the associated occurrence data appears in GBIF.

The new version of EOL also includes recently-updated maps on each species page via the Map tab found on each EOL taxon page (see MAPS for an example), displaying the locations of species occurrences published to the GBIF infrastructure and accessible through the GBIF Data Portal. This interface between the two portals was developed in collaboration with Vizzuality, a web application development and design company based in Madrid.

EOL’s Executive Director, Erick Mata, commented, “I am delighted that our collaboration with GBIF is entering a new phase with the launch of EoLv2. Both organizations strive to make scientific data on species available to users around the world, and our established partnership helps significantly to streamline the dissemination and integration of this data to provide even greater global access to knowledge about life on Earth.”

GBIF’s Executive Secretary, Nicholas King, added: “This is an excellent example of the continuing payback from a decade of investment and collaboration by GBIF’s Participant countries and organizations, including EOL.

“It is great that the informatics expertise and resulting global standards brokered by GBIF are being picked up and developed by EOL for the particular needs of its content partners and users.

“Through this kind of collaboration, the GBIF and EOL investments can be leveraged across a wide range of initiatives, to create what we all want and need - a set of compatible standards enabling full interoperability, and the creation of an environment favouring free and open access to biodiversity data, for the benefit of all.”

Read the official Communique here.