Biodiversity

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This is the public page with information about the project Nordic-Baltic Collaboration on e-Infrastructures for Biodiversity Informatics.

Phase: Completed

Project partners

  • Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA)
  • Icelandic Institute of Natural History (IINH)
  • University of Gothenburg (UGOT)
  • Finnish Museum of Natural History (FMNH)
  • Aarhus University (AU)
  • ArtDatabanken, Swedish University of Agriculture (SLU)
  • Natural History Museum, Tartu University (TU)
  • Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC)


Background and Goals

Many questions within biodiversity research and nature conservation inherently require easy access to, and combination of, spatio-temporal biodiversity and ecosystem data. The data needs are not restricted to individual countries or areas, but spread wider depending on the temporal or geographical scale of the hypotheses.

Biodiversity informatics is a methodological discipline that helps biodiversity research overcome issues related to the whole value chain of data from data capture to analyses and data products regarding vocabularies, ontologies, digitization of collections, data sharing, data integration, data reliability (fitness for use), data quality, visualization, analysis and long-term archival.

Over the past decade some of the Nordic-Baltic countries have developed their own Biodiversity & Ecosystem e- Infrastructures. However, due to different funding regimes, the countries have reached different levels of maturity when it comes to the technical state of their national e-Infrastructures for biodiversity research. Each of the 5 Nordic countries have joined the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and implemented a national GBIF node, DanBIF (2001), FinBIF (2001), GBIF Iceland (2001), GBIF Sweden (2001, node in 2003), GBIF Estonia (2003), GBIF Norway (2004, node in 2005).

Sweden and Norway have in addition established a complementary national biodiversity information center. The Swedish Species Information Centre and the Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre have been collaborating closely with each other and with the respective national GBIF nodes over the last years. In 2014, Finland started developing it’s Finnish Biodiversity Information Centre (FinBIF) into a national research infrastructure (RI). Norway has started the development of a Norwegian Marine Data Centre (NMDC) Research Infrastructure. The Swedish LifeWatch is one of the most advanced biodiversity and ecosystem research infrastructure in the Nordic countries, able to access and process much of the country's biodiversity data. Norway, Finland and Denmark likewise made significant progress in assembling technical knowhow and scientific stakeholders in national LifeWatch networks. In Finland, the FinBIF portal is currently developed to become a national aggregator and RI of biodiversity data with a similar mandate as the Swedish LifeWatch. In the Baltic countries Estonia has developed several online biodiversity information solutions (complementary to the national GBIF node). Massive digitization of data from biological collections has been started in Finland and Norway, and Finland has built Digitarium – a dedicated digitization infrastructure.

The goal of this collaboration is to explore synergies in e-infrastructure development among the Nordic and Baltic countries, and establish common services based on best practice and technical interoperabilty to support biodiversity and ecosystem research.

Links

Trello https://trello.com/b/HBQjDXmq/d12-report-on-pilot-for-a-virtual-support-centre

Results

To be listed here.

People

Steering group

Meetings, 3-4 per year: Biodiversity steering group minutes

  • Tomasz Malkiewicz, FI (Project owner, Chair)
  • Matthias Obst, SE (Project manager)
  • Flemming Skov, DK
  • Kari Lahti, FI
  • Roald Vang, NO
  • Starri Heiðmarsson, IS
  • Holger Dettki, SE
  • Urmas Kõljalg, EE

Reference group

None as yet.

Project personnel

Meetings, monthly: Biodiversity team meetings (internal).

  • Allan Zirk, EE
  • Frank Hanssen, NO
  • Matts Djos, SE
  • Anders Telenius, SE
  • Jesper Bladt, DK
  • Kjartan Birgisson, IS
  • Tapani Lahti, FI
  • Urmas Kõljalg, EE
  • Ville-Matti Riihikoski, FI

Management

Meetings, Weekly: Management minutes (internal).

  • Project owner: Tomasz Malkiewicz
  • Project leader: Matthias Obst (acting)

Training resources and publications

DeepDive has initiated the a series of Biodiversity Informatics Training Opportunities. These are smaller courses & workshop in Nordic countries, which are co-financed and co-ordinated with national educational initiatives. Online modules of DeepDive courses can be found here:

  • Handling spatial data in R [1]
  • Advanced handling of spatial data in R [2]
  • Python for Biologists [3]
  • Advanced Python for Biologists [coming in December 2019]
  • Access biodiversity data through web services [4]
  • Machine learning in applications of biodiversity informatics [5]
  • Collection data management using IrisBG [6]
  • SuperSmartR [7]


Publications

  • Deep Relations in Nordic and Baltic Biodiversity e-Infrastructures (DeepDive) [8]
  • Linked Open Data for Taxonomic Databases: The Nordic/Baltic implementation [9]
  • Establishing Taxon Links Between the Nordic/Baltic Countries via Linked Open Data [10]
  • Linked Data Tools for Managing Taxonomic Databases [11]

Public documents

Governance documents:

Links