Enhance biodiversity information infrastructure

Provide leadership, expertise and tools to support the integration of all biodiversity information as an interconnected digital knowledgebase.

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The focus of GBIF’s new generation of infrastructure emphasizes more reuse of software components, increased scalability, and richer biodiversity data.
Previous development cycles at GBIF have established a robust, reliable framework for large-scale batch processing of data and near real-time connections between systems. But development efforts are now increasingly concentrated on the increased use of shared resources, like shared software libraries, common codebases, open registries, and community-curated vocabularies. This shift in emphasis optimizes the staff allocation and computing investments, not just at the Secretariat, but across the wider network.

Through a paired commitment to steady improvement and technical innovation, GBIF has prepared to face emerging challenges to future growth while supporting publishers and users asking for data models, standards and formats better able to express and represent the inherent complexity of biodiversity.

Scaling the infrastructure

The demand for technical support, reliability and resilience continues to grow not just due to greater volumes of data available through GBIF (§3), but also from the increasing ranks of people and organizations who rely on GBIF for both data sharing and data access (§5).

Wider availability of sharing open biodiversity data and effective tracking of its reuse have made data publishing more important to institutions and stakeholders. The Integrated Publishing Toolkit(IPT) (https://www.gbif.org/ipt) plays perhaps the network’s most critical role in this area, with 1,350 organizations in 74 countries relying on it to manage more than 22 thousand datasets. To support the expansion of BID and BIFA into areas where data-publishing institutions have been sparsely represented, GBIF introduced cloud-hosted IPTs for Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and Central Asia in 2019.

Interest in these shared repositories and the need to support investigations of new data model (see §4) helped prompt a steady stream of improvements. Following a TDWG workshop in 2020 focused on user needs, GBIF developers have released 15 versions of the IPT between 2020 and 2022, while volunteers continued the work of maintaining translated IPT interfaces in seven languages.

A more reliable and robust system better equipped to manage increasing volumes of biodiversity data: that was the result of an extended collaboration to develop a data processing and indexing codebase shared by both GBIF and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), which hosts both its country’s GBIF delegation and node. Its users benefited greatly from these core infrastructure improvements, which are responsible for delivering species occurrence data while growing by more than one million records a year. But the better performance and response from searches, maps and analytical tools also reduced ALA’s annual cost of infrastructure operations by 43 per cent, or nearly €50,000, leading other GBIF member countries Germany, New Zealand and Sweden to explore adoption of these same data pipelines.

Delivering an infrastructure for names

GBIF’s collaboration with the Catalogue of Life (COL) has renewed its partner’s infrastructure and helped advance its mission to deliver a stable and comprehensive global service for indexing taxon names—a critical calling for GBIF or any other infrastructure whose users depend on accurate results when searching for species.

The December 2020 release of ChecklistBank (CLB), the result of this collaboration, has provided a stable repository where users can curate, publish, discover, and cite the taxonomic and nomenclatural information that forms the basis of any species checklist dataset. CLB has become the host for all of COL’s data sources, providing greater openness and transparency for a network of more than 500 taxonomic experts who contribute knowledge to COL.

Much as its improved functionality has streamlined production of COL’s monthly releases and integrated annual checklist, ChecklistBank has established a platform that expected to eliminate GBIF’s need to maintain the labour-intensive process of producing the GBIF backbone taxonomy, which grew by one million accepted species between 2017 and 2022. And because CLB’s Digital Object Identifier-based system for citing and tracking data use is modelled on GBIF’s, the platform provides stable references for different versions and downloads of taxonomic datasets, offering the persistence needed to credit contributors properly in future research.

Collections Catalogue

In 2018, GBIF agreed to a request from the Smithsonian Institution to host and maintain the Global Registry of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl). Building on their and other previous development cycles, GRSciColl has become a stable, community-curated open infrastructure that provides reliable information on collections of biological materials, associated codes and identifiers, and the institutions and professionals that maintain them.

After stabilizing GRSciColl, GBIF led a virtual workshop and consultation in early 2020 for the EU-funded SYNTHESYS+ project aimed at eliciting stakeholder input on its future direction. A key interoperability enhancement soon emerged through a weekly synchronization with Index Herbariorum, the world’s leading source of information on herbaria.

GRSciColl now makes it easier to access, improve and add to information about 6,793 collections from 8,180 institutions in 198 countries, but its wider community adoption has provided the power behind technical improvements. When associate participant iDigBio decided to share the GRSciColl infrastructure for displaying collection information on their portal, they simplified their own systems and the rationale for establishing a robust editing system that boosted curation worldwide.

Curators and editors can link collections descriptions from datasets on GBIF.org and collection records in GRSciColl, an efficient exchange of information that reduces duplication of efforts. Fifty-one countries now have dedicated editors responsible for increasing the quality and coverage of GRSciColl content. Feedback buttons have also empowered GRSciColl, whose 564 suggestions enabled more daily improvements, while GBIF’s regional teams have used the catalogue to fill knowledge in underrepresented regions and guide their outreach aimed at mobilizing more collections data.