Abstract:The Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) was formed in 2011 with the principal aim of making high-quality well-documented and vouchered collections that store DNA or tissue samples of biodiversity, discoverable for research through a networked community of biodiversity repositories. This is achieved through the GGBN Data Portal (http://data.ggbn.org), which links globally distributed databases and bridges the gap between biodiversity repositories, sequence databases and research results. Advances in DNA e… Show more
“…By providing access to samples for the scientific community, GBOL further integrates into other biodiversity and taxonomy research programs. The German DNA bank network with its associated institutions (Gemeinholzer et al 2011), which are all GBOL partners, provides the infrastructure and is integrated at a global level into the GGBN Data Portal (Droege et al 2014).…”
Section: Commitment To Common Repositories and International Cooperationmentioning
Biodiversity loss is mainly driven by human activity. While concern grows over the fate of hot spots of biodiversity, contemporary species losses still prevail in industrialized nations. Therefore, strategies were formulated to halt or reverse the loss, driven by evidence for its value for ecosystem services. Maintenance of the latter through conservation depends on correctly identified species. To this aim, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding the GBOL project, a consortium of natural history collections, botanic gardens, and universities working on a barcode reference database for the country's fauna and flora. Several noticeable findings could be useful for future campaigns: (i) validating taxon lists to serve as a taxonomic backbone is time-consuming, but without alternative; (ii) offering financial incentives to taxonomic experts, often citizen scientists, is indispensable; (iii) completion of the libraries for widespread species enables analyses of environmental samples, but the process may not hold pace with technological advancements; (iv) discoveries of new species are among the best stories for the media; (v) a commitment to common data standards and repositories is needed, as well as transboundary cooperation between nations; (vi) after validation, all data should be published online via the BOLD to make them searchable for external users and to allow cross-checking with data from other countries.Key words: biodiversity assessment, citizen science, DNA barcoding, reference library, Germany.Résumé : La perte de biodiversité découle principalement de l'activité humaine. Tandis que les inquiétudes grandissent sur le sort des milieux à forte biodiversité, la disparition d'espèces contemporaines a toujours cours dans les pays industrialisés. Ainsi, des stratégies ont été proposées pour arrêter ou renverser ces pertes d'espèces, lesquelles interventions sont motivées par la valeur de la biodiversité en matière de services écosystémiques. Le maintien de ces services par le biais de la conservation dépend d'une identification correcte des espèces. C'est dans ce but que le Ministère fédéral de l'éducation et de la recherche de l'Allemagne a financé le projet GBOL, un consortium de collections d'histoire naturelle, de jardins botaniques et d'universités oeuvrant à développer une
“…By providing access to samples for the scientific community, GBOL further integrates into other biodiversity and taxonomy research programs. The German DNA bank network with its associated institutions (Gemeinholzer et al 2011), which are all GBOL partners, provides the infrastructure and is integrated at a global level into the GGBN Data Portal (Droege et al 2014).…”
Section: Commitment To Common Repositories and International Cooperationmentioning
Biodiversity loss is mainly driven by human activity. While concern grows over the fate of hot spots of biodiversity, contemporary species losses still prevail in industrialized nations. Therefore, strategies were formulated to halt or reverse the loss, driven by evidence for its value for ecosystem services. Maintenance of the latter through conservation depends on correctly identified species. To this aim, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding the GBOL project, a consortium of natural history collections, botanic gardens, and universities working on a barcode reference database for the country's fauna and flora. Several noticeable findings could be useful for future campaigns: (i) validating taxon lists to serve as a taxonomic backbone is time-consuming, but without alternative; (ii) offering financial incentives to taxonomic experts, often citizen scientists, is indispensable; (iii) completion of the libraries for widespread species enables analyses of environmental samples, but the process may not hold pace with technological advancements; (iv) discoveries of new species are among the best stories for the media; (v) a commitment to common data standards and repositories is needed, as well as transboundary cooperation between nations; (vi) after validation, all data should be published online via the BOLD to make them searchable for external users and to allow cross-checking with data from other countries.Key words: biodiversity assessment, citizen science, DNA barcoding, reference library, Germany.Résumé : La perte de biodiversité découle principalement de l'activité humaine. Tandis que les inquiétudes grandissent sur le sort des milieux à forte biodiversité, la disparition d'espèces contemporaines a toujours cours dans les pays industrialisés. Ainsi, des stratégies ont été proposées pour arrêter ou renverser ces pertes d'espèces, lesquelles interventions sont motivées par la valeur de la biodiversité en matière de services écosystémiques. Le maintien de ces services par le biais de la conservation dépend d'une identification correcte des espèces. C'est dans ce but que le Ministère fédéral de l'éducation et de la recherche de l'Allemagne a financé le projet GBOL, un consortium de collections d'histoire naturelle, de jardins botaniques et d'universités oeuvrant à développer une
“…The new identifiers are increasingly accepted by the scientific community and used in scientific publications referencing specimens as well as in institutional web-based query systems and large scale information systems such as the data portal of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility GBIF (Figure 3, http://www.gbif.org) and the Global Genome Biodiversity Network [GGBN, (18)]. Figure 3.CETAF stable HTTP URIs in the GBIF data portal.…”
With biodiversity research activities being increasingly shifted to the web, the need for a system of persistent and stable identifiers for physical collection objects becomes increasingly pressing. The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities agreed on a common system of HTTP-URI-based stable identifiers which is now rolled out to its member organizations. The system follows Linked Open Data principles and implements redirection mechanisms to human-readable and machine-readable representations of specimens facilitating seamless integration into the growing semantic web. The implementation of stable identifiers across collection organizations is supported with open source provider software scripts, best practices documentations and recommendations for RDF metadata elements facilitating harmonized access to collection information in web portals.
Database URL: http://cetaf.org/cetaf-stable-identifiers
“…First, the systematics and biodiversity community urgently needs a well‐funded data repository to ensure long‐term sustainability of the vast biodiversity data the community has generated and will be generating (Wen et al, ). Several important major initiatives, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF; http://www.gbif.org/), the Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio; Page et al, ; Soltis & Soltis, ), Asia Biodiversity Conservation and Database Network (ABCDNet; http://www.abcdn.org/), and the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN; Droege et al, ; Seberg et al, ) have contributed to provide an infrastructure for data repository, promote data sharing, and facilitate collaboration of scientists on biodiversity. To move forward, this infrastructure should serve as the basis for informatics pipelines that will enable the efficient production of taxonomic revisions, checklists, floras and monographs, to promote goals of systematics as a field.…”
Section: Systematics In the Biodiversity Informatics Era: Call For mentioning
Systematics is the science of discovering, organizing and interpreting the diversity of all living organisms. Recent developments in genomics and biodiversity informatics are transforming systematics and have opened up many new opportunities. Major digitization efforts and developments in biodiversity informatics have helped the systematics community explore ways to enhance the efficiency in organizing, publishing, and utilizing systematic information. At the same time, genomics is rapidly facilitating construction of the tree of life, improving taxonomic classification, and disentangling complex evolutionary histories. In the informatics and genomics era, systematics has an incredible capacity to integrate with computational and exploratory platforms for discovery as well as with other, related disciplines while maintaining its core strengths in biological collections and morphology. We call for the establishment of a new global cyberinfrastructure or Biodiversity Cyberbank that will function as the main repository of many types of biodiversity data to ensure the long-term sustainability of the vast and growing amount of systematic data. This Biodiversity Cyberbank will contain new and efficient analytical pipelines for systematics research, especially for efficiently generating taxonomic treatments (revisions, e-monographs and floras). Integrative systematics requires the training of the next-generation systematists with taxonomic, phylogenomic and informatics skills to address grand questions about biodiversity and its assembly and continue to develop the Biodiversity Cyberbank. Integrative systematics must also proactively educate the public and policy makers on the importance of systematics and collections for addressing the biodiversity crisis of the Anthropocene, and a Biodiversity Cyberbank may represent one powerful tool for outreach.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
