Our Data Centers
In order for data to be found and used in the long term – not only by its creators, but also by other researchers and interested parties – it must have been published. In this, data centers play a key role: they provide the infrastructure that allows data to be stored in the long term, ensure that data is described in a standardised way through complex data curation, and enable data to be found and used through interfaces to other data portals and collections.
Within NFDI4Biodiversity, the network of ten GFBio data centers is a cornerstone for the mobilisation of biodiversity data. Three specialised data centers for plant, nucleotide and ecological and geological data and seven natural science collections offer the opportunity to manage, archive and publish digital and physical data in a citable manner over the long term.
Get to know our data centers! You can also find more information on the tasks and profiles in our Knowledge Base.
ENA
The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) archives, curates and publishes nucleotide sequence data and associated metadata.
e!DAL-PGP
The Plant Genomics and Phenomics Research Data Repository e!DAL-PGP archives, curates and publishes plant-related research data.
PANGAEA
PANGAEA archives, curates and publishes multidisciplinary data (e.g. geochemical and biological occurrences) from the marine and terrestrial environment.
BGBM
The Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum (BGBM) Berlin focusses on collection and observation data as well as the management of data at taxon level.
DSMZ
The DSMZ Data Center focuses on the provision of organism-related information covering the many aspects of bacterial biodiversity.
LIB
The Biodiversity Data Center of the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB) manages data from research and zoological collections.
MfN Berlin
The Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) Berlin focusses on collection and observation data as well as taxonomic and trait data.
Senckenberg Society
The Senckenberg Society for Nature Research focusses on collection and molecular data, observational and environmental data, measurement series and trait data.
SMNS
Data archiving at the Stuttgart Natural History Museum (SMNS) focuses on research projects on botanical, zoological and palaeontological data.
SNSB
The IT Center of the Bavarian State Natural History Collections (SNSB) is the latter's repository for scientific bio- and geodiversity data from the natural history collections.
The data center as a network
The GFBio Data Centers are collaborating as a network to promote the standardisation and interoperability of research data. The data centers have developed common formats, standards and pipelines for sustainable data management, archiving, access and publication of data, on the basis of which they are continuously developing their services. The data archived and published in the data centers are accessible via the GFBio data portal. In addition, the collection data centers supply their data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF); a large part of the group also forms the German GBIF node.
Role in NFDI4Biodiversity
Within Task Area 3, the representatives of the data centers develop common data standards and data pipelines for long-term data preservation and data quality assurance in accordance with the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data. They are significantly involved in the provision of various GFBio services for the management of data products:
Data Submission
Experts from the data centers guide users of the Data Submission Service in preparing their (heterogeneous) biological, ecological and environmental datasets for submission to a federated network of data centers. The datasets are reviewed by experts from the respective GFBio data center, curated according to subject, archived for the long term, and published.
Helpdesk and sustainability
Experts from the data centers work at the helpdesk – our point of contact for all questions relating to research data management – and provide advice on data publication and archiving.
Data Management Plan Tool (DMPT)
The GFBio DMP tool is available for researchers to create professional data management plans (DMPs) for biodiversity-related projects. Data curators from the data centers provide individual support in planning for specific data types and archives and personally advise researchers in order to establish the basis for a later transfer of data products into the established data pipelines of the GFBio data centers already in the DMPs.
GFBio Data Portal and BioCASe Monitor Service
The GFBio Data Portal makes the published data from the GFBio Data Centers accessible to researchers. This is made possible by the curation and provision of data via the established pipelines. At the same time, the data is mapped to uniform standards; ontologies and format validations are also carried out.