TY - JOUR
T1 - Connecting data and expertise
T2 - A new alliance for biodiversity knowledge
AU - Hobern, Donald
AU - Baptiste, Brigitte
AU - Copas, Kyle
AU - Guralnick, Robert
AU - Hahn, Andrea
AU - van Huis, Edwin
AU - Kim, Eun Shik
AU - McGeoch, Melodie
AU - Naicker, Isayvani
AU - Navarro, Laetitia
AU - Noesgaard, Daniel
AU - Price, Michelle
AU - Rodrigues, Andrew
AU - Schigel, Dmitry
AU - Sheffield, Carolyn A.
AU - Wieczorek, John
PY - 2019/1/1
Y1 - 2019/1/1
N2 - 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 nongovernmental 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. 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. This paper summarises the GBIC2 discussions and presents a set of 23 complementary ambitions to be addressed by the global community in the context of the proposed alliance. The authors call on all who are responsible for describing and monitoring natural systems, all who depend on biodiversity data for research, policy or sustainable environmental management and all who are involved in developing biodiversity informatics solutions to register interest at https://biodiversityinformatics.org/and to participate in the next steps to establishing a collaborative alliance. The supplementary materials include brochures in a number of languages (English, Arabic, Spanish, Basque, French, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese). These summarise the need for an alliance for biodiversity knowledge and call for collaboration in its establishment.
AB - 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 nongovernmental 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. 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. This paper summarises the GBIC2 discussions and presents a set of 23 complementary ambitions to be addressed by the global community in the context of the proposed alliance. The authors call on all who are responsible for describing and monitoring natural systems, all who depend on biodiversity data for research, policy or sustainable environmental management and all who are involved in developing biodiversity informatics solutions to register interest at https://biodiversityinformatics.org/and to participate in the next steps to establishing a collaborative alliance. The supplementary materials include brochures in a number of languages (English, Arabic, Spanish, Basque, French, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese). These summarise the need for an alliance for biodiversity knowledge and call for collaboration in its establishment.
KW - Alliance
KW - Biodiversity
KW - Biodiversity data
KW - Biodiversity informatics
KW - Collaboration
KW - Data quality
KW - GBIC2
KW - Investment
KW - Open data
KW - Open science
KW - Research infrastructure
KW - Sustainability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85071599500&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3897/BDJ.7.e33679
DO - 10.3897/BDJ.7.e33679
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85071599500
SN - 1314-2836
VL - 7
JO - Biodiversity Data Journal
JF - Biodiversity Data Journal
M1 - e33679
ER -