Towards structured biodiversity data

Over the last 15 years there was a huge progress in mobilising biodiversity data through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). However, the standard adopted for this work, the Darwin Core, was designed with museum collection data in mind and is only appropriate for capturing species occurrence data. The Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) aims at improving biodiversity monitoring and making the data available. Most biodiversity monitoring protocols include some sampling procedure and repeated observations. Similarly, much biodiversity data collected by ecologists falls under the form of species per site matrices, where the absences and presences are recorded for the whole community at each site. The original Darwin Core was not appropriate for this kind of structured biodiversity data. Here we present recent developments in extending the Darwin Core to handle this data, the Darwin Sampling Event, and other related efforts. We also present the initiative being developed by GEO BON, iDiv and GBIF, to allow scientists around the world to publish directly on a iDiv repository, the APIS repository, structured biodiversity data.