The Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility (FinBIF) has launched a new portal providing free access to 35 million occurrence records of nearly 50,000 species recorded in Finland.
Released in a public test version, Laiji.fi (species.fi) is developed by the Finnish Museum of Natural History (LUOMUS), host of the GBIF national node. It is part of a wider three-year initiative called Envibase, administered by the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), aimed at developing methods and tools to support biodiversity monitoring and research.
One of the main aims of the Envibase project is to promote and apply the concept of open data. Core information such as taxonomy and location data is unified in Laiji.fi, enabling data from different data sources to be combined in one data warehouse.
Under the project, FinBIF is also developing a new biodiversity monitoring system, an updated citizen science observation system and collection management system open to all Finnish natural history collections.
In the area of citizen science, Laji.fi will support data contributions from volunteers through existing tools such as an online form to report Invasive species observations, and the Finnish nature observation database Fieldjournal.org.
The portal was launched during a seminar held at the end of May. Among the speakers was Dmitry Schigel, Programme Officer for Content Analysis and Use at the GBIF Secretariat. A video of Dmitry’s presentation on GBIF and open data (in English) is online, as are other presentations from the launch (in Finnish).
More information is on the laji.fi portal.
Photo: Ural owl (Strix uralensis), Kotka, Finland. By Jyrki Salmi. CC BY-SA 2.0
