What we do

The handling of biodiversity data can only be improved and further developed together with those who collect and work with these data – this conviction forms the core of NFDI4Biodiversity. Task Area 1 is therefore concerned with involving the biodiversity community in our work. It focuses not only on scientific actors, but also on other institutions and initiatives that collect and/or work with biodiversity data, such as natural history societies or environmental agencies.

Our network therefore includes cooperation partners such as the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ), das Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) oder das Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM), but also museums and state offices as well as civil society initiatives such as Naturgucker or the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND) and other institutions in the field of nature conservation.

At the heart of our collaboration are more than 20 use cases. These use cases are, in a sense, temporary experimental laboratories in which we use real cases to look at how biodiversity data can be made accessible according to the FAIR principles. The goal is to identify problems, develop prototype solutions, and thus gain experience for other, similar cases. The solutions developed range from the implementation of suitable software components and the establishment of sustainable data archiving to the clarification of legal requirements for more open data and licensing models.

To engage our use case partners and the community beyond, we hold annual meetings and workshops where we actively collaborate – such as the Community Workshop on the Further Development of the Living Atlas. Another important aspect is the organization of training and educational activities. Through targeted trainings and information events, a cultural change is aimed at: The goal is to raise awareness of the value of conscientious, sustainable management of research data and to help stakeholders acquire data literacy. The already well-established helpdesk, run by the GFBio Association and affiliated data centers, handles data submissions from researchers and research collaborations. In addition, in our application projects, other larger data collections are connected to the common infrastructure.

Task Area Leads

Contact persons for

• Use Case Projects
• Trainings on data management
• Tool support
• Networking opportunities

Embedded in an evolving landscape of national and international initiatives, projects and services, we work closely with other actors in the NFDI and strong partners in the international biodiversity landscape. The goal is to avoid duplication of efforts and to learn from each other so that isolated solutions do not emerge. Specifically, we ensure that our experts in the NFDI sections contribute to the important cross-cutting issues for scientific data management. These topics include ethics, legal and social aspects, metadata, terminologies and provenance, shared infrastructures, and education and training in research data management.

In addition, we maintain a portfolio of over 60 national and international initiatives, with activities ranging from strategic cooperation to monitoring of work results. We have identified cooperation with the following ten actors as particularly relevant for the development of a national biodiversity data infrastructure and are therefore pursuing this strategically and with the highest priority: Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), Research Data Alliance (RDA), European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), Bioschemas. org, Society for Ecology (GfÖ), German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI), BMBF Research Initiative for Biodiversity Conservation (FEdA), German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), and Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG).

Together, we focus on three main topics:

• Contribute to the development of data standards, protocols, APIs, services and strategies in international working groups
• Coordination of services to make NFDI4Biodiversity services comparable to other infrastructures in terms of usability, availability, performance and stability
• Develop a framework for data use agreements to make data outside of biodiversity research usable for our purposes

Actions in this work package will be accompanied by our use cases and application reports that support various aspects of using standards for interoperability of data and services both within the community and across disciplines.

Task Areas Leads

Contact persons for

• Standards
• Joining the NFDI

In TA3, we capture and document the current range of services and tools in biodiversity research. Our goal is to proactively search for relevant software solutions, repositories, and services that are relevant to biodiversity research. In doing so, we work closely with other players in the NFDI landscape to continuously improve the quality and effectiveness of existing services and tools.

We guide the addition of new data pipelines, technical services, and tools to the NFDI4Biodiversity service portfolio. In addition, we conduct a regular, standardized assessment that is intended to provide the providers with indications of important further development needs.  In this way, we ensure that the services in the portfolio meet the requirements of the different user groups and application areas. We pay particular attention to tools that can be used at an early stage of the data lifecycle. 

To ensure that the services and tools are well received by the biodiversity community, we rely on open software solutions that are actively developed. We work closely with domain-specific subject repositories, the GFBio data centers, and other digital archives, advising them on implementing solutions that meet the needs of users and providers, and supporting them in building cloud-based infrastructure in the NFDI Research Data Commons (NFDI-RDC).

Furthermore, it is important to us that services and tools serve international standards and community-specific formats for data exchange as well as current practices in biodiversity research. We actively advocate for compliance with data publication and archiving standards, support certification of repositories as well as implementation of the FAIR principles. Through these efforts, we help ensure that research data are sustainably stored, accessible, and reusable.

Our work in this area aims to continuously improve the range of data, services, and tools available in biodiversity research and to ensure that researchers, data providers, and data users have high-quality, efficient, and reliable tools to optimally manage and analyze data in the long term.

Task Area Leads

Contact persons for

• Service provider, e.g. if interested in becoming part of the service portfolio

In Task Area 4, we are working to provide a cloud-based technical infrastructure to store, analyze, and share biodiversity data. Data sources can be various types of data, including existing datasets, real-time data, and user-submitted data. This virtual environment pools existing data and applications and enables researchers and other interested parties, such as those in conservation or policy, to work collaboratively on and with data.

To ensure seamless integration, use and dissemination of biodiversity data, it is of great importance to establish structural, semantic and content consistency. For this purpose, terminology services and existing resources such as taxonomies and ontologies are used to harmonize the data and metadata. The overall goal of NFDI4Biodiversity is to make biodiversity data from different sources accessible via uniform interfaces, thus enabling easy further use for further analyses.

The infrastructure of NFDI4Biodiversity is based on cloud computing, which should enable location-independent access to the stored data. This requires close cooperation between different IT centers to create the technical and organizational conditions for sharing the cloud. Providers of existing services will have to revise their databases and set up special IT workflows to submit their data to the shared portal. A central data and software solutions team supports them in this.

NFDI4Biodiversity builds on existing services, such as the GFBio online portal, which allows for centralized search and submission of biological and environmental data.

Task Area Leads

Contact persons for

• Service providers interested in the concept of the Research Data Commons

The interaction of the 50 partner institutions, the financial management and the steering of the large-scale project NFDI4Biodiversity is organized by a joint project office in Bremen. It ensures a good interaction of all actors and committees in the project and with the expert groups: It provides a platform for collaboration, takes care of the steering group and the strategic advisory board, coordinates cross-cutting issues such as public relations, NFDI collaboration, competence acquisition, service monitoring and strategy, and is responsible for reporting. A developer pool supports partner institutions with necessary adaptations of their services and processes to the common infrastructure.

At the conceptual level, the basic guidelines for cooperation are developed in this work area and submitted to the steering group for decision-making. In addition, concepts are developed in order to be able to jointly provide services for research and practice beyond the end of the project.

Task Area Leads

Contact persons for

• Project coordination issues
• Cooperations 
• Inclusion in the NFDI4Biodiversity partner network