The Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) became the second open-access peer-reviewed scholarly title to make use of the hosted portals service provided by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF): an international network and data infrastructure aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.
The Biodiversity Data Journal portal, hosted on the GBIF platform, is to support biodiversity data use and engagement at national, institutional, regional and thematic scales by facilitating access and reuse of data by users with various expertise in data use and management.
Having piloted the GBIF hosted portal solution with arguably the most revolutionary biodiversity journal in its exclusively open-access scholarly portfolio, Pensoft is to soon replicate the effort with at least 35 other journals in the field. This would mean that the publisher will more than double the number of the currently existing GBIF-hosted portals.
As of the time of writing, the BDJ portal provides seamless access and exploration for nearly 300,000 occurrences of biological organisms from all over the world that have been extracted from the journal’s all-time publications. In addition, the portal provides direct access to more than 800 datasets published alongside papers in BDJ, as well as over 1,000 citations of the journal articles associated with those publications.
The release of the BDJ portal should inspire other publishers to follow suit in advancing a more interconnected, open and accessible ecosystem for biodiversity research
Vince Smith
Using the search categories featured in the portal, users can narrow their query by geography, location, taxon, IUCN Global Red List Category, geological context and many others. The dashboard also lets users access multiple statistics about the data, and even explore potentially related records with the help of the clustering feature (e.g. a specimen sequenced by another institution or type material deposited at different institutions). Additionally, the BDJ portal provides basic information about the journal itself and links to the news section from its website.
A video displaying an interactive map with occurrence data on the BDJ portal.
Launched in 2013 with the aim to bring together openly available data and narrative into a peer-reviewed scholarly paper, the Biodiversity Data Journal has remained at the forefront of scholarly publishing in the field of biodiversity research. Over the years, it has been amongst the first to adopt many novelties developed by Pensoft, including the entirely XML-based ARPHA Writing Tool (AWT) that has underpinned the journal’s submission and review process for several years now. Besides the convenience of an entirely online authoring environment, AWT provides multiple integrations with key databases, such as GBIF and BOLD, to allow direct export and import at the authoring stage, thereby further facilitating the publication and dissemination of biodiversity data. More recently, BDJ also piloted the “Nanopublications for Biodiversity” workflow and format as a novel solution to future-proof biodiversity knowledge by sharing “pixels” of machine-actionable scientific statements.
“I am thrilled to see the Biodiversity Data Journal’s (BDJ) hosted portal active, ten years since it became the first journal to submit taxon treatments and Darwin Core occurrence records automatically to GBIF! Since its launch in 2013, BDJ has been unrivalled amongst taxonomy and biodiversity journals in its unique workflows that provide authors with import and export functions for structured biodiversity data to/from GBIF, BOLD, iDigBio and more. I am also glad to announce that more than 30 Pensoft biodiversity journals will soon be present as separate hosted portals on GBIF thanks to our long-time collaboration with Plazi, ensuring proper publication, dissemination and re-use of FAIR biodiversity data,” said Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of Pensoft, and founding editor of BDJ.
“The release of the BDJ portal and subsequent ones planned for other Pensoft journals should inspire other publishers to follow suit in advancing a more interconnected, open and accessible ecosystem for biodiversity research,” saidVince Smith, editor-in-chief of BDJ and head of digital, data and informatics at the Natural History Museum, London.
Pensoft is among the first signatories dedicated to fully leveraging biodiversity knowledge from research publications within an open science framework by 2035
Some of the world’s leading institutions, experts and scientific infrastructures relating to biodiversity information are uniting around a new 10-year roadmap to ‘liberate’ data presently trapped in research publications.
The initiative aims to enable the creation of a ‘Libroscope’ – a mechanism for unlocking and linking data from scientific literature to support understanding of biodiversity, as the microscope and telescope previously revolutionized science. The plan largely builds on existing technology and workflows, and does not rely on construction of a new technical infrastructure.
The proposals result from a symposium involving 51 experts from 10 countries held in August 2024 at the 7th-century monastery at Disentis in the Swiss Alps, supported financially by the Arcadia Fund. The symposium was a 10-year follow-up to the 2014 meeting at Meise Botanic Garden in Belgium, which led to the Bouchout Declaration on open biodiversity knowledge management. The Disentis meeting evaluated progress since then, and identified priorities for the decade ahead.
Group photo from the Disentis meeting (Switzerland, August 2024).
While acknowledging major advances in the sharing and use of open biodiversity data, the participants noted that accessing data within research publications is often very cumbersome, with databases disconnected from each other and from the source literature. Liberating and linking data from such publications – estimated to encompass more than 500 million total pages – would represent a compelling mission for the next decade.
A roadmap for staged action over the next decade was agreed by the symposium participants, with the following vision: “By 2035, the power of biodiversity knowledge from research publications will be fully leveraged within an open science framework, including unencumbered data discovery, access, and re-use across scientific disciplines and policy applications.”
The ‘Disentis Roadmap’, further developed following the symposium, and now released publicly, has already been signed by 26 institutions and a further 46 individual experts on five continents – among them major natural history collections such as Meise Botanic Garden, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), Catalogue of Life, LifeWatch ERIC and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB); journal publishers such as Pensoft Publishers and the European Journal of Taxonomy; research institutions such as Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research; and networks such as TDWG Biodiversity Information Standards and Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF). See the full list of signatories here.
The roadmap remains open for further signatures, ahead of the launch of an action plan at the Living Data conference in Bogotá, Colombia in October 2025. The original signatories hope that a much broader group of institutions and individuals, across global regions and disciplines, will join the initiative and help to shape implementation of its vision. Engagement of funders will also be critical to realize its objectives.
The specific goals of the roadmap are that by 2035:
All major public biodiversity research funders and academic publishers will encourage and enable publication of data adhering to the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable);
Biodiversity-focussed publications will be accessible in machine-actionable formats, with all non-copyrightable parts of articles flowing into public data repositories;
Published research on biodiversity will be ‘fully AI-ready’, that is openly available for AI training and properly labelled for ingestion by machine-learning modelled, within appropriate ethical and legal frameworks;
Dedicated funding from research and infrastructure grants will be reserved for ensuring access to biodiversity data and knowledge.
“We finally have a chance to make a quantum leap in understanding and monitoring biodiversity, by leveraging the power of digital technologies, and combining modern genomic methods with the vast amount of research data published daily and currently stuck in the publication prison. The ‘Libroscope’ will help to explore the universe of existing knowledge, accumulated over hundreds of years, and bring it to the forefront of developments in the digital age, helping nature and people across the globe.”
commented Donat Agosti of the Swiss organization Plazi, who convened the Disentis symposium.
A recent demonstration of the principles of the ‘Libroscope’ was the launch of data portals for the European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT) and the Biodiversity Data Journal, as part of the GBIF hosted portal programme. The new portals showcase the data contained within taxonomic literature published by the journals, making use of the workflow originally developed by Plazi and partners to extract re-usable data from articles traditionally locked in static PDF files. Once created, these data objects then flow into platforms such as GBIF, Catalogue of Life, ChecklistBank and the BiodiversityPMC, and are stored in the Biodiversity Literature Repository at Zenodo hosted by CERN. This process enables data on new species and the location of related specimens cited in the literature to be openly accessible in near-real time, and available for long-term access.
The newly launched Biodiversity Data Journal data portal is part of the GBIF-hosted portal programme. It showcase the data contained within taxonomic literature published by the journal.
“As a publisher of dozens of renowned academic journals in the field of biodiversity and systematics with experience in technology development, at Pensoft, we have always recognised the key role of academic publishers in scholarly communication. It’s not only about publishing the latest research. Above all, it’s about putting scientific work in the hands of those who need it: be it future researchers, policy-makers or their AI-powered assistants. Now that the Disentis roadmap is already a fact, we hope that many others will also join us on this ambitious journey to open up the knowledge we have today for those who will need it tomorrow.”
said Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO at Pensoft, who attended the Disentis symposium.
“By repositioning scientific publications as an essential part of the research cycle, the Disentis Roadmap encourages publishers and the scientific community to move beyond open access towards FAIR access. Proactively ensuring data quality and dissemination is the core mission of the European Journal of Taxonomy. In this way, EJT enhances the immediate discoverability and usability of the taxonomic information it publishes, making it more valuable to the scientific community as a whole. Adherence to the Disentis vision marks a crucial step in the liberation and enrichment of knowledge about biodiversity.”
said Laurence Bénichou, founder and liaison officer of the European Journal of Taxonomy.
The Chief Executive Officer of Meise Botanic Garden, Steven Dessein, who attended the Disentis Symposium, commented:
“Meise Botanic Garden fully supports the Disentis Roadmap, which builds on the foundation laid by the Bouchout Declaration. Open biodiversity data is essential to tackling today’s pressing environmental challenges, from biodiversity loss to climate change. By ensuring research publications become more accessible and interconnected, this roadmap represents a critical step toward harnessing biodiversity knowledge for science, policy, and conservation.”
Christophe Déssimoz, Executive Director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, another signatory of the Disentis Roadmap, added:
“We have long championed the principles of open, structured, and interoperable data to advance life sciences. The Disentis Roadmap applies these same principles to biodiversity knowledge, ensuring that critical data is not just available, but truly actionable for research, policy, and conservation.”
The director of the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum of Berlin, Thomas Borsch, noted that more than any other branch of science, taxonomic research depended on the machine-actionable availability of biodiversity data from the literature:
“The ‘Libroscope’ postulated in the Disentis Roadmap will enable a new generation of research workflows through its interoperable approach,” said Professor Borsch. “This will be very helpful to address pressing issues in biodiversity research and in particular to improve the use of quality information on organisms in national and global assessments.”
The chief scientist of the national museum of natural history in Paris (MNHN) said:
“We, like all similar museums and taxonomic institutions, are focussed on linking taxonomic and collection data with digital reproductions and molecular information to create the ‘extended digital specimen.’ However, the potential of taxonomic publications and text mining should not be underestimated either. On the contrary, it is a smart and accessible way to dig into scientific publications so as to retrieve, link and consolidate, research data of great relevance to many disciplines. This is why our institution fully supports the Disentis initiative.”
Christos Arvanitidis, CEO of the Biodiversity and Ecosystem e-Science Infrastructure LifeWatch ERIC, commented:
“LifeWatch ERIC is proud to be part of this initiative, as providing access and support to biodiversity and ecosystem data is fully aligned with our mission. The Disentis Roadmap opens up new opportunities for our research infrastructure to help make what science has provided us accessible and usable, and to improve the FAIRness of data for research and science-based policy.”
Tim Robertson, deputy director and head of informatics at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), who also attended the Disentis meeting added:
“We’re excited to see the results from Disentis partners like Plazi, BHL, Pensoft and the European Journal of Taxonomy who are focussed on liberating data connected with scientific publications,” said . “GBIF will continue to do our part to improve the standards, tools and services that help expand both the benefits and the impact of FAIR and open data on biodiversity science and policy.”
Olaf Bánki, Executive Director of the Catalogue of Life, commented:
“We call out to the scientific community, especially the younger generation, to join our effort in unlocking biodiversity data from literature. Actionable biodiversity and taxonomic data from digitized literature contributes to creating an index of all described organisms of all life on earth. We need such data to tackle and understand the current biodiversity crisis.”
In a world increasingly defined by data-driven decisions, biodiversity research stands to benefit from standardized and accessible data. Despite their importance for research, biodiversity datasets often fail to meet FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) standards, leading to concerns about data quality, reliability, and accessibility.
To address this, we propose a framework to retrieve, refine and align secondary biodiversity data with FAIR standards, utilizing the Darwin Core model. We followed four steps:
data localization (systematic review)
quality validation
standardization using the Darwin Core standard
sharing and archive in the appropriate repository.
Our approach integrates data validation and quality control steps to ensure that secondary data sets can be trusted.
Our study in Biodiversity Data Journalfocused on ecotonal estuarine ecosystems near the easternmost Amazon, where we recovered data from 46,000 individuals representing 3,871 taxa across eight biotic groups (birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, phytoplankton, benthos, and plants) from 1985 to 2022. These data were used to illustrate how our strategy improves validation, making the data more reliable for macroecological modeling and conservation management. As data becomes more standardized, researchers around the world will be better equipped to collaborate, identify trends, protect ecosystems, and advance sustainability efforts.
Relationships between numbers of taxa and occurrences gathered through an extensive review of secondary biodiversity data from the Golfão Maranhense area, in the estuarine regions of eastern Amazonia.
Accessible biodiversity data empowers stakeholders and provides critical insights into ecosystem health and species conservation. However, without standardized formats, this data is often fragmented, incomplete, or difficult to compare. By creating a consistent framework for collecting, storing, and sharing data, we are opening the door to more informed decision-making and innovation in biodiversity conservation.
The key to conserving biodiversity is collaboration and transparency. By prioritizing accessible and standardized data, we ensure that vital information reaches those who need it most – whether it’s for scientific study, habitat management or policymaking.
Let’s continue to make biodiversity data a tool for global change!
Research article:
Marques N, Soares CDdeM, Casali DdeM, Guimarães E, Fava F, Abreu JMdaS, Moras L, Silva LGda, Matias R, Assis RLde, Fraga R, Almeida S, Lopes V, Oliveira V, Missagia R, Carvalho E, Carneiro N, Alves R, Souza-Filho P, Oliveira G, Miranda M, Tavares VdaC (2024) Retrieving biodiversity data from multiple sources: making secondary data standardised and accessible. Biodiversity Data Journal 12: e133775. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.12.e133775
The beetle species Grebennikovius basilewskyi. Numbers next to arrows indicate patterns of phenotype statements explained in the section “Phenoscript: main patterns of phenotype statements”. Arrow numbers from T1 to T5 illustrate individual body parts. See more in the research study.
One of the most beautiful aspects of Nature is the endless variety of shapes, colours and behaviours exhibited by organisms. These traits help organisms survive and find mates, like how a male peacock’s colourful tail attracts females or his wings allow him to fly away from danger. Understanding traits is crucial for biologists, who study them to learn how organisms evolve and adapt to different environments.
To do this, scientists first need to describe these traits in words, like saying a peacock’s tail is “vibrant, iridescent, and ornate”. This approach works for small studies, but when looking at hundreds or even millions of different animals or plants, it’s impossible for the human brain to keep track of everything.
Computers could help, but not even the latest AI technology is able to grasp human language to the extent needed by biologists. This hampers research significantly because, although scientists can handle large volumes of DNA data, linking this information to physical traits is still very difficult.
To solve this problem, researchers from the Finnish Museum of Natural History, Giulio Montanaro and Sergei Tarasov, along with collaborators, have created a special language called Phenoscript. This language is designed to describe traits in a way that both humans and computers can understand. Describing traits with Phenoscript is like programming a computer code for how an organism looks.
Phenoscript uses something called semantic technology, which helps computers understand the meaning behind words, much like how modern search engines know the difference between the fruit “apple” and the tech company “Apple” based on the context of your search.
“This language is still being tested, but it shows a lot of promise. As more scientists start using Phenoscript, it will revolutionise biology by making vast amounts of trait data available for large-scale studies, boosting the emerging field of phenomics,”
explains Montanaro.
In their research article, newly published in the open-access, peer-reviewed Biodiversity Data Journal, the researchers make use of the new language for the first time, as they create semantic phenotypes for four species of dung beetles from the genus Grebennikovius. Then, to demonstrate the power of the semantic approach, they apply simple semantic queries to the generated phenotypic descriptions.
Finally, the team takes a look yet further ahead into modernising the way scientists work with species information. Their next aim is to integrate semantic species descriptions with the concept of nanopublications, “which encapsulates discrete pieces of information into a comprehensive knowledge graph”. As a result, data that has become part of this graph can be queried directly, thereby ensuring that it remains Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) through a variety of semantic resources.
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Research paper:
Montanaro G, Balhoff JP, Girón JC, Söderholm M, Tarasov S (2024) Computable species descriptions and nanopublications: applying ontology-based technologies to dung beetles (Coleoptera, Scarabaeinae). Biodiversity Data Journal 12: e121562. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.12.e121562
What expert recommendations did the BiCIKL consortium give to policy makers and research funders to ensure that biodiversity data is FAIR, linked, open and, indeed, future-proof? Find out in the blog post summarising key lessons learnt from the Horizon 2020 project.
The publications so far include the grant proposal; conference abstracts, a workshop report, guidelines papers and deliverables submitted to the Commission.
The dynamic open-science project collection of BiCIKL, titled “Towards interlinked FAIR biodiversity knowledge: The BiCIKL perspective” (doi: 10.3897/rio.coll.105), continues to grow, as the project progresses into its third year and its results accumulate ever so exponentially.
Following the publication of three important BiCIKL deliverables: the project’s Data Management Plan, its Visual identity package and a report, describing the newly built workflow and tools for data extraction, conversion and indexing and the user applications from OpenBiodiv, there are currently 30 research outcomes in the BiCIKL collection that have been shared publicly to the world, rather than merely submitted to the European Commission.
Shortly after the BiCIKL project started in 2021, a project-branded collection was launched in the open-science scholarly journal Research Ideas and Outcomes(RIO). There, the partners have been publishing – and thus preserving – conclusive research papers, as well as early and interim scientific outputs.
The publications so far also include the BiCIKL grant proposal, which earned the support of the European Commission in 2021; conference abstracts, submitted by the partners to two consecutive TDWG conferences; a project report that summarises recommendations on interoperability among infrastructures, as concluded from a hackathon organised by BiCIKL; and two Guidelines papers, aiming to trigger a culture change in the way data is shared, used and reused in the biodiversity field.
At the time of writing, the top three of the most read papers in the BiCIKL collection is completed by the grant proposal and the second Guidelines paper, where the partners – based on their extensive and versatile experience – present recommendations about the use of annotations and persistent identifiers in taxonomy and biodiversity publishing.
Access to data and services along the entire data and research life cycle in biodiversity science. The figure was featured in the BiCIKL grant proposal, now made available from the BiCIKL project collection in RIO Journal.
What one might find quite odd when browsing the BiCIKL collection is that each publication is marked with its own publication source, even though all contributions are clearly already accessible from RIO Journal.
This is because one of the unique features of RIOallows for consortia to use their project collection as a one-stop access point for all scientific results, regardless of their publication venue, by means of linking to the original source via metadata. Additionally, projects may also upload their documents in their original format and layout, thanks to the integration between RIO and ARPHA Preprints. This is in fact how BiCIKL chose to share their latest deliverables using the very same files they submitted to the Commission.
“In line with the mission of BiCIKL and our consortium’s dedication to FAIRness in science, we wanted to keep our project’s progress and results fully transparent and easily accessible and reusable to anyone, anywhere,”
explains Prof Lyubomir Penev, BiCIKL’s Project Coordinator and founder and CEO of Pensoft.
“This is why we opted to collate the outcomes of BiCIKL in one place – starting from the grant proposal itself, and then progressively adding workshop reports, recommendations, research papers and what not. By the time BiCIKL concludes, not only will we be ready to refer back to any step along the way that we have just walked together, but also rest assured that what we have achieved and learnt remains at the fingertips of those we have done it for and those who come after them,” he adds.
The FAIR Data Place – the key and final product of the partnership – is meant to provide scientists with all types of biodiversity data “at their fingertips”
The Horizon 2020 – funded project BiCIKL has reached its halfway stage and the partners gathered in Plovdiv (Bulgaria) from the 22nd to the 25th of October for the Second General Assembly, organised by Pensoft.
The BiCIKL project will launch a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in the biodiversity and life sciences based on open science practices through access to data, tools and services.
BiCIKL’s goal is to create a centralised place to connect all key biodiversity data by interlinking 15 research infrastructures and their databases. The 3-year European Commission-supported initiative kicked off in 2021 and involves 14 key natural history institutions from 10 European countries.
BiCIKL is keeping pace as expected with 16 out of the 48 final deliverables already submitted, another 9 currently in progress/under review and due in a few days. Meanwhile, 21 out of the 48 milestones have been successfully achieved.
Prof. Lyubomir Penev (BiCIKL’s project coordinator Prof. Lyubomir Penev and CEO and founder of Pensoft) opens the 2nd General Assembly of BiCIKL in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
The hybrid format of the meeting enabled a wider range of participants, which resulted in robust discussions on the next steps of the project, such as the implementation of additional technical features of the FAIR Data Place (FAIR being an abbreviation for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable).
This FAIR Data Place online platform – the key and final product of the partnership and the BiCIKL initiative – is meant to provide scientists with all types of biodiversity data “at their fingertips”.
This data includes biodiversity information, such as detailed images, DNA, physiology and past studies concerning a specific species and its ‘relatives’, to name a few. Currently, the issue is that all those types of biodiversity data have so far been scattered across various databases, which in turn have been missing meaningful and efficient interconnectedness.
Additionally, the FAIR Data Place, developed within the BiCIKL project, is to give researchers access to plenty of training modules to guide them through the different services.
Halfway through the duration of BiCIKL, the project is at a turning point, where crucial discussions between the partners are playing a central role in the refinement of the FAIR Data Place design. Most importantly, they are tasked with ensuring that their technologies work efficiently with each other, in order to seamlessly exchange, update and share the biodiversity data every one of them is collecting and taking care of.
By Year 3 of the BiCIKL project, the partners agree, when those infrastructures and databases become efficiently interconnected to each other, scientists studying the Earth’s biodiversity across the world will be in a much better position to build on existing research and improve the way and the pace at which nature is being explored and understood. At the end of the day, knowledge is the stepping stone for the preservation of biodiversity and humankind itself.
The Biodiversity Knowledge Hub is no longer existing on paper only! We are opening the 2nd day of the #BiCIKL_H2020 General Assembly looking at the prototype of the BKH created by the @LifeWatchERIC team. It's so exciting to see projects taking shape! 🤩 #Plovdivpic.twitter.com/RidzwBpxZx
“Needless to say, it’s an honour and a pleasure to be the coordinator of such an amazing team spanning as many as 14 partnering natural history and biodiversity research institutions from across Europe, but also involving many global long-year collaborators and their infrastructures, such as Wikidata, GBIF, TDWG, Catalogue of Life to name a few,”
said BiCIKL’s project coordinator Prof. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft.
“I see our meeting in Plovdiv as a practical demonstration of our eagerness and commitment to tackle the long-standing and technically complex challenge of breaking down the silos in the biodiversity data domain. It is time to start building freeways between all biodiversity data, across (digital) space, time and data types. After the last three days that we spent together in inspirational and productive discussions, I am as confident as ever that we are close to providing scientists with much more straightforward routes to not only generate more biodiversity data, but also build on the already existing knowledge to form new hypotheses and information ready to use by decision- and policy-makers. One cannot stress enough how important the role of biodiversity data is in preserving life on Earth. These data are indeed the groundwork for all that we know about the natural world”
Prof. Lyubomir Penev added.
Christos Arvanitidis (CEO of LifeWatch ERIC) at the 2nd General Assembly of the BiCIKL project.
“The point is: do we want an integrated structure or do we prefer federated structures? What are the pros and cons of the two options? It’s essential to keep the community united and allied because we can’t afford any information loss and the stakeholders should feel at home with the Project and the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub.”
Joe Miller, Executive Secretary and Director at GBIF, commented:
“We are a brand new community, and we are in the middle of the growth process. We would like to already have answers, but it’s good to have this kind of robust discussion to build on a good basis. We must find the best solution to have linkages between infrastructures and be able to maintain them in the future because the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub is the location to gather the community around best practices, data and guidelines on how to use the BiCIKL services… In order to engage even more partners to fill the eventual gaps in our knowledge.”
Joana Pauperio (biodiversity curator at EMBL-EBI) atthe 2nd General Assembly of the BiCIKL project.
“BiCIKL is leading data infrastructure communities through some exciting and important developments”
said Dr Guy Cochrane, Team Leader for Data Coordination and Archiving and Head of the European Nucleotide Archive at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).
“In an era of biodiversity change and loss, leveraging scientific data fully will allow the world to catalogue what we have now, to track and understand how things are changing and to build the tools that we will use to conserve or remediate. The challenge is that the data come from many streams – molecular biology, taxonomy, natural history collections, biodiversity observation – that need to be connected and intersected to allow scientists and others to ask real questions about the data. In its first year, BiCIKL has made some key advances to rise to this challenge,”
“As a partner, we, at the Biodiversity Information Standards – TDWG, are very enthusiastic that our standards are implemented in BiCIKL and serve to link biodiversity data. We know that joining forces and working together is crucial to building efficient infrastructures and sharing knowledge.”
The project will go on with the first Round Table of experts in December and the publications of the projects who participated in the Open Call and will be founded at the beginning of the next year.
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Learn more about BiCIKL on the project’s website at: bicikl-project.eu
The purpose of this call is to solicit, select and implement four to six biodiversity data-related scientific projects that will make use of the added value services developed by the leading Research Infrastructures that make the BiCIKL project.
The BiCIKL project invites submissions of Expression of Interest (EoI) to the First BiCIKL Open Call for projects. The purpose of this call is to solicit, select and implement four to six biodiversity data-related scientific projects that will make use of the added value services developed by the leading Research Infrastructures that make the BiCIKL project.
By opening this call, BiCIKL aims to better understand how it could support scientific questions that arise from across the biodiversity world in the future, while addressing specific scientific or technical biodiversity data challenges presented by the applicants.
We need and want to assess real-world problems and make the best possible use of our data and technical capabilities. This will greatly assist in defining the long-term development goals of the participating Research Infrastructures and improve the way they can technically and operationally work together to deliver greater scientific value.
explain the project partners.
The BiCIKL project – a Horizon 2020-funded project involving 14 European institutions, representing major global players in biodiversity research and natural history, and coordinated by Pensoft – establishes a European starting community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other biodiversity and life sciences stakeholders based on open science practices through access to data, tools and services.
From 17th to 21st October 2022, the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference – to be held in Sofia – will run under the theme “Stronger Together: Standards for linking biodiversity data”.
Between 17th and 21st October 2022, the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference – to be held in Sofia, Bulgaria – will run under the theme “Stronger Together: Standards for linking biodiversity data”.
In addition to opening and closing plenaries, the conference will feature 14 symposia and a mix of other formats that include lightning talks, a workshop, and panel discussion, and contributed oral presentations and virtual posters.
For a seventh year in a row, all abstracts submitted to the annual conference are made publicly available in the dedicated TDWG journal: Biodiversity Information Science and Standards (BISS Journal).
Thus, the abstracts – published ahead of the event itself – are not only permanently and freely available in a ‘mini-paper’ format, but will also provide conference participants with a sneak peek into what’s coming at the much anticipated conference.
