The project: Preparation of historical records from forestry offices
The General Directorate of the State Archives of Bavaria (GDA) is particularly involved in NFDI4Biodiversity in the area of long-term archiving. The archive holdings, which date back to the Middle Ages, also contain historical data that can be used by biodiversity research. (In-depth information on how we cooperate within NFDI4Biodiversity can be found here.)
In 1845, in the course of the Bavarian forest district reform, the fauna in the individual forest offices was recorded:
In order to make the data available to the community, one inventory from the district of Upper Bavaria was developed. The other descriptions from the individual forestry offices are still waiting for processing and scientific analysis from the biodiversity community.
The results could be made available to both biodiversity and historical research in a joint publication. The metadata from the archive information system could be delivered to GBIF via the ABCD export interface implemented as part of NFDI4Bio.
In preparation for the collaboration within NFDI4Biodiversity, inventories were reviewed and a first, by no means complete, overview of historical biodiversity data was compiled. This includes hunting statistics, fish stocks in Bavarian lakes, moorland maps, etc. With the help of digital data from state authorities (including hunting statistics), historical and current data could be compared and, if necessary, expanded with additional data, for example on land use.
In the course of the cooperation, the General Directorate of the State Archives of Bavaria (GDA) would like to jointly advance the following projects:
- Transcription of the documents
- Enrichment with metadata
- Data analysis
- Publication of the results and the data set, e.g. as a paper
What the GDA offers
- Sample data
- Expertise in researching historical biodiversity data
- Findings database
- Cataloguing of analog and digital archive material
- Design of archiving interfaces
- Metadata enrichment
- Data harmonization
- Long-term archiving and documentation
- Publication of the research results
What the GDA is looking for
The GDA is looking for interested parties from the biodiversity research community who are interested in the historical data, its processing, analysis and publication. A joint application for third-party funding is also conceivable.
Contact info
The exact form of cooperation can be discussed together. To do so, please contact Markus Schmalzl (Markus.Schmalzl@gda.bayern.de), Head of GDA's Research Unit, directly.
