GeoNature, Open-Source FAIR Biodiversity Data Management

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Abstract

Huge improvements have been made throughout the years in collecting and standardising biodiversity data (Bisby 2000, Osawa 2019, Hardisty and Roberts 2013) and in overhauling how to make information in the field of biodiversity data management more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) (Simons 2021), but there is still room for improvement. Most professionals working in protected areas, conservation groups, and research organisations lack the required know-how to improve the reuse ratio of their data. The GeoNature and GeoNature-Atlas (Monchicourt 2018, Corny et al. 2019) are a set of open-source software that facilitate data collection, management, validation, sharing (e.g., via Darwin Core standard) and visualisation. It is a powerful case study of collaborative work, which includes teams from private and public sectors with at least fifteen national parks and forty other organisations currently using and contributing to the package in France and Belgium (view it on github).

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A decadal view of biodiversity informatics: challenges and priorities

Alex Hardisty, Dave Roberts, Todd Vision … (2013)

Biodiversity informatics plays a central enabling role in the research community's efforts to address scientific conservation and sustainability issues. Great strides have been made in the past decade establishing a framework for sharing data, where taxonomy and systematics has been perceived as the most prominent discipline involved. To some extent this is inevitable, given the use of species names as the pivot around which information is organised. To address the urgent questions around conservation, land-use, environmental change, sustainability, food security and ecosystem services that are facing Governments worldwide, we need to understand how the ecosystem works. So, we need a systems approach to understanding biodiversity that moves significantly beyond taxonomy and species observations. Such an approach needs to look at the whole system to address species interactions, both with their environment and with other species. It is clear that some barriers to progress are sociological, basically persuading people to use the technological solutions that are already available. This is best addressed by developing more effective systems that deliver immediate benefit to the user, hiding the majority of the technology behind simple user interfaces. An infrastructure should be a space in which activities take place and, as such, should be effectively invisible. This community consultation paper positions the role of biodiversity informatics, for the next decade, presenting the actions needed to link the various biodiversity infrastructures invisibly and to facilitate understanding that can support both business and policy-makers. The community considers the goal in biodiversity informatics to be full integration of the biodiversity research community, including citizens’ science, through a commonly-shared, sustainable e-infrastructure across all sub-disciplines that reliably serves science and society alike.

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The quiet revolution: biodiversity informatics and the internet.

James A. Bisby (2000)

The massive development of biodiversity-related information systems on the Internet has created much that appears exciting but chaotic, a diversity to match biodiversity itself. This richness and the arrays of new sources are counterbalanced by the maddening difficulty in knowing what is where, or of comparing like with like. But quietly, behind the first waves of exuberance, biologists and computer scientists have started to pull together in a rising tide of coherence and organization. The fledgling field of biodiversity informatics looks set to deliver major advances that could turn the Internet into a giant global biodiversity information system.