DiSSCo joins the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) as the latest non-country Participant in the network.
“The DiSSCo Research Infrastructure is delighted to become an active member of the GBIF family”, said Dimitris Koureas, coordinator of DiSSCo. “As European consortium of natural science collections, DiSSCo will underpin GBIF’s mission with a validated evidence base consisting of up to 1.5 billion digital objects.”
By joining GBIF, DiSSCo becomes a part of a network of participating countries and organisations which provides data-holding institutions around the world with common standards and open-source tools that enable them to share information about where and when species have been recorded. This knowledge derives from many sources, including everything from museum specimens collected in the 18th and 19th century to geotagged smartphone photos shared by amateur naturalists in recent days and weeks. It draws all these sources together through the use of data standards, such as Darwin Core, which forms the basis for the bulk of GBIF.org’s index of hundreds of millions of species occurrence records.
Like GBIF, DiSSCo embraces open data to ensure that mass-scale digitisation of specimens of European collections mobilises data that is FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
“The GBIF Secretariat is excited to welcome DiSSCo as a formal member of the GBIF network,” said Joe Miller, Executive Secretary of GBIF. “We are already working closely together on projects like the EU-funded SYNTHESYS+ and the newly awarded DiSSCo Prepare, and this step solidifies our close relationship.”
Toegther with CETAF, iDigBio, Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), and LifeWatch ERIC (all fellow GBIF associate participants), DiSSCo and GBIF are also jointly presenting the Biodiversity_Next conference, hosted by Naturalis Biodiversity Center and NLBIF in Leiden, the Netherlands, in October 2019.