GBIF Work Programme 2022

Annual Update to Implementation Plan 2017–2022
Version 1.0, 2021-10-26

Table of Contents
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Suggested citation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Persistent URI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Document control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
GBIF Annual Work Programme 2022 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Financial situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Planned expenditure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Secretariat staffing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Overview of 2022 Work Items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52022 Implementation Plan Update. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Priority 1: Empower Global Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Activity 1a: Focus on people . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Activity 1b: Strengthen skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Activity 1c: Equip Participant nodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Activity 1d: Equip data publishers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Activity 1e: Expand national participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Activity 1f: Plan implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Activity 1g: Coordinate resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Priority 2: Enhance Biodiversity Information Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Activity 2a: Modernize data standards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Activity 2b: Deliver names infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Activity 2c: Catalogue collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Priority 3: Fill Data Gaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Activity 3a: Identify priority gaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Activity 3b: Expand data streams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Activity 3c: Engage data holders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Activity 3d: Rescue datasets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Activity 3e: Liaise with journals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Priority 4: Improve Data Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Activity 4a: Ensure data persistence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Activity 4b: Assess data quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Activity 4c: Enable data curation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Priority 5: Deliver Relevant Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Activity 5a: Engage academia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Activity 5b: Document needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Activity 5c: Support biodiversity assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Activity 5d: Assess impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

Colophon
Suggested citation
GBIF Work Programme 2022: Annual Update to Implementation Plan 2017–2022: GBIF Secretariat.
https://doi.org/10.35035/doc-jjrz-b144

Persistent URI
https://doi.org/10.35035/doc-jjrz-b144

Document control
Approved version

Overview
This document serves both as the 2022 revision of the GBIF Implementation Plan for the period
2017-2022 and also as the GBIF Annual Work Programme 2022. Both elements are based upon the
GBIF Strategic Plan for 2017-2021, which was extended for one year due to the challenges createdby the global pandemic.
The GBIF Annual Work Programme 2022 represents the final programme based on the current
strategic plan. The new strategic planning framework for the period 2023-2027 was approved at the28th GBIF Governing Board meeting (GB28) in October 2021, and it will form the basis of a new
implementation plan to be developed during 2022.
The Strategic Plan 2017-2021, agreed at the GB22 meeting in 2015, established five priorities for
GBIF’s work. The Implementation Plan identified 22 activities which GBIF must undertake to addressthese priorities during the six-year period.
Each year, GBIF has reviewed progress against these activities and available resources (including
Secretariat staff and other uses of core and supplementary funding, as well as resources committed
by GBIF Participants). Using this information, an Annual Work Programme is defined for thefollowing year. Each Annual Work Programme identifies a prioritized set of work items during theyear. Annual Work Programmes in the second and subsequent years have also reported on progressagainst the plan.
The relationship between these documents is represented by the following graphic.

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The Work Programme is presented here with updates reflecting progress during 2021 and planned
activities for 2022.

GBIF Annual Work Programme 2022
Information on activities planned for 2022 is included under each of the Activity sections included in
the 2022 implementation plan update below. For convenience, this information has also beencollated as an Overview of 2022 Work Items listing the items for which approval is sought from theGoverning Board at GB28.

Financial situation
As of September 2021, current and imminent voting participant contributions are slightly above
expected contributions approved in the GB27 budget. This targeted total, however, takes into
consideration expected inability of some countries to pay contributions. Therefore, the total financial
contribution provided by countries remains below the goal set forth in the financial model approved
at GB22.
The 2021 budget approved by GB27 included funds for travel and in-person meetings in 2021
(including regional meetings and GB28), but very little of this was used, and these budget items were
downscaled in a mid-year revision. Partly due to these savings, €200K budgeted within the 'COVID-19
reserve' was deemed not to be needed, and following mid-year approval by the Executive Committee
the Secretariat removed this level of reserve from the budget.
The 2021 Work Programme budget items were adjusted with the overall budget level similar to thebudget adopted in GB27. Changes approved by the Budget Committee and Executive Committee for2each Strategic Plan Priority are listed below. Information on each new or amended item is included in
the 2021 progress reported for all activities.

2021 expenditure on external contracts and workshops
In addition to salary and operating costs (including support for GBIF Governance mechanisms),
funding was allocated from core funds to the 2021 Work Programme. These projects and amounts
were updated throughout 2021 with EC approval. Estimates for total 2021 spending for the following
activities are:Priority 1:• Communications to promote value proposition responses to the 20 review (€30K).
• Support for Living Atlas Activity (€20K).
• alliance for biodiversity knowledge (€10K).
• Capacity Enhancement Support Programme (€80K).

Priority 2:• Consultancy to begin development of improved data models (€30K).
• Contracted Web Development (€20K).
• To support contractor and costs to maintain and update processes for constructing the GBIF
taxonomic backbone in conjunction with COL+ (€108K).

Priority 3:• Human disease vector data mobilization campaign (€25K)• Soil biodiversity data mobilization campaign (€25K)

Priority 5:• Up to €80,000 for a quantitative analysis of the value and impact of the GBIF network

Supplementary income
The following additional expenditure was enabled by supplementary funds received or budgeted
during 2021:• JRS Biodiversity Foundation additional contribution to African Biodiversity Information for
Development (BID) projects: €411K• Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) project (EU Horizon 2020):
Developer costs €66K
• Support for Asia regional support contracts through SYNTHESYS+ (European Union): €109K• Salary subsidies (BID, SYNTHESYS+, DiSSCo Prepare and BiCIKL): increased to €152K

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As a result of the past year’s staffing and Work Programme changes, GBIF is expected to close 2021
with net capital of around €398,181, with an additional €461,000 in the COVID-19 Reserve.
The 2022 proposed budget includes a smaller allocation (€400K) for contracted activities in the Work
Programme expenditure (i.e. non-salary costs allocated to calls, workshops, contracts, etc.) thancurrently budgeted for 2021. The proposed 2022 budget uses just over half (€261K) of the COVID-19
Reserve. The planned expenditure for 2022 is €188,155 greater than the income projected in thebudget. This is considered to represent a responsible balance between advancing GBIF’s mission andreserving some funds against future risks (€471,026, net capital forecast for the end of 2022).
GBIF is a maturing infrastructure and network of people. This maturation has enabled infrastructure
improvement, inclusion of new data types and stronger global engagement. It also comes at anincreased cost to maintain the infrastructure and engagement at current levels. The current corebudget is based on €3.5 million from Voting Participants, but the amount actually received is typicallyless than this. Staff growth in past years means that staff salaries and basic operational costs(including insurance) are now similar to or exceed Voting Participants' contributions. This leaves little
room for increased feature development and engagement using core funds.
To meet the development needs, the Secretariat has initiated a resource mobilization strategy tomeet these needs with supplementary funding. The Secretariat is confident that the value presented
by BID and other supplementary programmes, present infrastructure and data quality
improvements will be translated into a strong external funding stream.

Planned expenditure
In addition to salary and operating costs (including support for GBIF Governance mechanisms), corefunding is reserved in the Work Programme 2022 for the following activities:

Priority Area 1• Commission risk assessment study for sensitive species data (€15K)• Launch a new call for proposals under the Capacity Enhancement Support Programme (€80K)• Support further development of the Living Atlases community (€15K)• Support for 2022 Regional Nodes Meetings (€32K) - note that some meetings will be supported
from supplementary funds or funds reserved from previous budgets• Support for the alliance for biodiversity knowledge (€20K)

Priority Area 2• Update GBIF data models (€40K)• Maintain and update processes for constructing the GBIF taxonomic backbone. €108K has been
allocated in the budget to support GBIF contractor costs• Web Developer contract (€30K)

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Priority Area 3• Support for thematic data mobilization (€40K)

Priority Area 5• Support for phylogenetic integration with occurrence data (€20K)

Other Funds• Governance funds: Launch 2022 calls for the Ebbe Nielsen Challenge and Young ResearchersAwards (€25K)

Secretariat staffing
The Secretariat is in the process of hiring two new staff members. In response to GB value
proposition discussions and the recommendations of the CODATA review of GBIF’s first 20 years, theSecretariat has hired a new communications officer to begin in October 2021. This new staff member
is part of the Participation and Engagement staff. We currently are recruiting an administrative
assistant to supplement our capacity in our administrative staff. These new hires will bring ourstaffing level to 30 staff, three of whom work part-time. In addition to the Director and Deputy
Director, the Secretariat is structured as four teams, as follows:• Participation and Engagement (nine staff)• Data Products (four staff)• Informatics (eight staff)• Administration (seven staff)
All staff work towards accomplishing the goals of the five Priority Areas in the 2017-2022
Implementation Plan, with most staff working towards multiple areas. The Secretariat internallyreports salary to the Work Programme Priority Areas and Secretariat management based on an
estimate of staff time spent on the areas.

Overview of 2022 Work Items
This following is a summary of all 2022 Work Items proposed in the 2022 update of the
Implementation Plan below. It is intended to summarize the work items for which approval is soughtfrom the Governing Board at GB28. Accordingly, it does not include the additional commitments
made and reported by Participants in the detailed activity sections.

Activity 1a: Focus on people• Improve representation of individuals on GBIF.org, with more coherent and integrated handlingof the roles and profiles of Secretariat staff and network members, including biographies,
activities and other related information

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Activity 1b: Strengthen skills• Develop new training module on data quality management, targeted at GBIF nodes• Monitor impact of GBIF training programmes, based on uptake of existing training resources,
skills certification through digital badges, replication of courses throughout the network, andoutputs of data and other products linked to participation in training• Further develop joint guidance with OBIS on publication of marine datasets through both
networks

Activity 1c: Equip Participant nodes• Mature the technical capabilities and community processes to expand the hosted portal service,focusing on the needs of GBIF participant nodes. This activity assumes positive feedback fromparticipants of the pilot program. The expanded programme will determine the level of service
that will be available to each node (including number of portals), and possible additional services
that would be available through extra financial contributions• Continue support for the Living Atlases collaboration through extended contract for the technicalcoordinator (€15K)• Support in-person regional nodes meetings for 2022, if permitted by the travel situation (€32K
from core funds)• Actively explore supplementary funding for additional regional support contractors in Latin
America, the Pacific, and E Europe/Caucasus/Central Asia
• Refresh existing guidance materials for GBIF nodes and associated support, including node-level
mentoring, capacity self-assessment and training for national-level project teams• Develop guidance on best practices for working with indigenous and local knowledge, including
application of the CARE principles, following recommendations of the working group establishedduring 2021

Activity 1d: Equip data publishers• Building on the 2021 work of the sensitive species working group, commission an analysis of thecurrent scale of sensitive species data published through GBIF, evaluation of the evidence thatsuch data presents risks of harm, and recommendations for applying a risk assessment approach(€15K)• Based on work carried out in 2021, develop plans for the future of the IPT• Implement new technical documentation website

Activity 1e: Expand national participation• Review the current status and models of participation in GBIF both at national and organizationlevel, with a view to developing recommendations for the new strategic implementation period at
GB29• Take a more proactive role with HoDs through global science collaboration activities such as theGroup of Senior Officials

6• Use the delayed agreement of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework to further emphasize
GBIF’s value to countries and promote expanded participation

Activity 1f: Plan implementation• Organize the 3rd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC3), hosted by the LifeWatch
European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), to address the ongoing operation andgovernance of the alliance for biodiversity knowledge (€10K)• Organize and run the 2nd SYNTHESYS+ workshop relating to citation of collections

Activity 1g: Coordinate resources• Launch a call for proposals under the 2022 Capacity Enhancement Support Programme (€80K)• Following approval of the resource mobilization strategy at GB28, develop implementation roadmap and begin implementation, with a view to targeting additional supplementary funds as wellas consolidating core contributions from Voting Participants• Subject to an improved travel situation in 2022, organize an in-person engagement meeting in
Asia, using supplementary funds from BIFA (€20K) and the SYNTHESYS+ project (€19K), co-locatedwith the 2022 Asia regional nodes meeting

Activity 2a: Modernize data standards• Continue to participate in the ongoing Open Digital Specimen and Extended Specimen Network
standards development and strive towards a common solution• Together with the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), support the Living Atlas community, in adoptionof the shared data pipelines• Following open review of the revised data model, prototype new infrastructure that allows thedemonstration of data mapping, publishing and indexing into new catalogues, developed in an
open manner. This will involve development in the IPT, new data pipelines, APIs and userinterfaces to explore content and communities of data publishers willing to shape data for thepilot. It is envisaged one or more developer workshops will be arranged to encourage more open
development and collaboration• Ensure all vocabularies are included in the GBIF Registry and maintained in a collaborative
mannerActivity 2b: Deliver names infrastructure• Complete outstanding tasks to integrate the extended Catalogue of Life in GBIF, partly within theframework of the BiCIKL project• Maintain and update processes for constructing the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, including
monitoring the content and helping to prioritize editorial effort. €108K has been allocated in thebudget to support GBIF costs. This work is in collaboration with Catalogue of Life
• Explore feasibility of supporting national taxonomies for exploring GBIF occurrence data tobetter enable national-level reporting (carried over from 2020 and likely to be incomplete in
2021)

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• Continue and expand the taxonomy curation pilot projects in collaboration with COL and thetaxonomic community

Activity 2c: Catalogue collections• Complete outstanding tasks to deploy an enriched GRSciColl providing search and access ofcollections, specimens and people• Focus on content of GRSciColl: cleanup of existing entries and registration of new ones bypromoting use and giving training and support to editors, and promoting consistent use of codes
within data shared• Seek to identify links between journal articles and collections based on the collection codes,
within the framework of the EU-funded BiCIKL project• Support user interface translations for GRSciColl• Carried over from 2020: Explore synchronization of content with the Consortium of European
Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) Registry (under development)

Activity 3a: Identify priority gaps
• Publish updated best practices on prioritizing data mobilization based on data gap analysis, forincorporation into guidance for nodes and data publishers• Explore the use of data gap analysis to prioritize support for data mobilization through funded
programmes coordinated by GBIF, and to document the value added by existing projects• Work with partners to address the information needs of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity
Framework through filling priority data gaps, including for those countries not yet participatingin GBIF

Activity 3b: Expand data streams• Building on the framework developed in 2021, establish data mobilization campaigns for
additional thematic data streams (possibly freshwater, DNA-derived data and tropicalbiodiversity) (€40K)• Seek supplementary funding to support scaling up of support for thematic data mobilization
throughout the GBIF nodes network (see also Activity 3c)• Continue working with partners to increase mobilization and improve visibility of biodiversity
monitoring datasets in GBIF

Activity 3c: Engage data holders• Building on preparatory work and partnerships developed in 2021, scale up mobilization ofprimary biodiversity data from the private sector, through the Data4Nature initiative andestablishment of help desk services• Engage additional sectoral associations, financial and other initiatives to integrate biodiversity
data-sharing commitments into best practices for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) or
regulatory requirements

8Activity 3d: Rescue datasets• Continue to implement workflow for prioritizing and drawing upon potential data sources
reported through the ‘suggest a dataset’ tool, including involvement of nodes, mentors andcrowdsourced solutions (carried over from 2021)• Based on the outcome of the re-evaluation, work with interested parties to roll out a workflow forprocessing data mobilization requests arising from the ‘suggest a dataset’ tool

Activity 3e: Liaise with journals• In consultation with journal publishers, explore solutions to enable academic authors to submit
and publish datasets to GBIF alongside research articles• Further develop the model for sponsored data papers, in connection with mobilization
campaigns from thematic data streams• Continue BiCIKL collaboration to improve integration of data extracted from research literature

Activity 4a: Ensure data persistence• Support adopters of cloud technologies for accessing GBIF-mediated data, and revise proceduresand formats as necessary.
• Explore opportunities to strengthen integration of the GBIF network within research data
infrastructures

Activity 4b: Assess data quality• Implement improvements to data validation reports identified in community consultation• Promote integration of the data validator in tools connected to GBIF, including the IPT, throughuse of the validator API

Activity 4c: Enable data curation• Explore what can be enabled to offer annotation services in GBIF.org following ideas offeredduring the consultation topic during 2021 (see Activities 1f and 2a).
• Continue to explore the use of the GBIF data index to support stable persistent resolvable
identifiers for all specimens and occurrence records (see Activity 2a)

Activity 5a: Engage academia• Consolidate training resources aimed at academic users and publishers of GBIF-mediated data,for use in funded programmes and guidance for nodes• Support implementation of the BioDATA and BioDATA Advanced projects through partners in
Norway, Ukraine, Armenia, the Russian Federation and South Africa• Promote GBIF at relevant fora including the 9th International Barcode of Life Conference,scheduled for August 2022, and the International Congress of Entomology, scheduled for July
2022

9• Begin pilot project to integrate phylogeny with occurrence data (€20K)

Activity 5b: Document needs• Coordinate work of the expert group on mobilization and use of data on zoonotic diseases basedon outputs from the systematic review commissioned in 2021
• Continue programme for mobilization of soil biodiversity data through partnerships and work
streams initiated in 2021
• Continue partnership with the IUCN Invasive Species Specialist Group and the Convention on
Biological Diversity Secretariat to improve content and curation of data relating to invasive alien
species

Activity 5c: Support biodiversity assessment• Through the alliance for biodiversity knowledge, hold a workshop on the outcomes of the analysis
of primary data needs for the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, involving partners in
GEO BON, the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership, CBD Secretariat and others• Implement a process enabling key checklists to be used in filtering occurrence data, such as Red
Listed species and invasive alien species (carried over from 2020 and likely to be incomplete in
2021)• Work with the new secretariat of GEO BON to improve connections between Biodiversity
Observation Networks (BONs) and nodes at national, regional, thematic and global levels• Continue collaboration with IUCN to implement the Memorandum of Cooperation, including
exploration of publication of reference datasets associated with Red List assessments, anddevelopment of training material for use of data in the Key Biodiversity Area (KBA) process• Continue to engage with the IPBES Data and Knowledge Task Force to support use of GBIFmediated data in ongoing and upcoming assessments

Activity 5d: Assess impact• Publish quantitative analysis of the value and impact of the GBIF network, and promote inengagement with governments, funders and other partners• Launch Ebbe Nielsen Challenge and Young Researchers Awards competitions for 2022 (€25K),
and generate communications connecting past awardees with subsequent work and impact• Explore options for a 'Nodes Award Scheme' to recognize progress, performance and innovation
across the community• Produce communication materials including short videos demonstrating the impact of GBIF’s
funded programmes such as BID and BIFA
• Complete and promote communication materials demonstrating GBIF’s impact across thematiccommunities, thereby supporting the case for increasing the number of Voting Participant
countries10

2022 Implementation Plan Update
Note that the 'Rationale' section in each activity is presented with the original wording from the
Implementation Plan in 2017, to show the original intention of the activity. Updates on Participant
contributions and Participant plans provided by the nodes are included in this final version for review
alongside the Work Programme.

Priority 1: Empower Global Network
Ensure that governments, researchers and users are equipped and supported to share,
improve and use data through the GBIF network, regardless of geography, language or
institutional affiliation.

Activity 1a: Focus on people
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
GBIF is the result of work by thousands of people in agencies and institutions worldwide. This
network’s long-term sustainability depends on demonstrating the value of such contributions andjustifying continued investment of effort.
The GBIF Secretariat can enhance efforts to develop capacity within the network and build an
effective distributed help desk system that acknowledges and showcases relevant skills andexperience that people across the network possess. Users of GBIF data products would also benefit
from showcasing the network’s indispensable human resources and their impact on assessing andimproving biodiversity data.
For these reasons, the next round of improvements to GBIF.org should enhance the network’s
capacity to serve as a hub for the GBIF community by identifying its active contributors, integrating
information on their relevant GBIF activities, and supporting broader knowledge exchange and skill
development.

2021 Progress
Building on previous efforts during the current Implementation Plan, GBIF has continued to makeuse of the growing cadre of volunteers— Biodiversity Open Data Ambassadors, mentors andtranslators—who contribute their time and energy toward fulfilling the network’s global mission.
While the opportunities for representing the GBIF community in relevant fora were limited due tothe COVID-19 pandemic, the GBIF volunteer community has remained active in numerous virtual
events this year, including mentoring and training workshops, e-conferences and symposia.
Apart from maintaining lists of volunteers, progress on this activity since 2017 has mainly focused on
establishing the ability to connect individual ORCID IDs with various activities on GBIF.org anddeveloping the GBIF Community Forum as an effective space for both general discussions andtargeted consultations. More ambitious plans to represent and increase connections between the11individual contributions across GBIF.org have not been implemented, due in part to challenges ofeffectively managing and protecting personal data. The final year of the Implementation Plan
presents an opportunity to review and consolidate this work in order to make progress toward theoriginal objectives of this activity.

2022 Work items• Improve representation of individuals on GBIF.org, with more coherent and integrated handlingof the roles and profiles of Secretariat staff and network members, including biographies,
activities and other related information

2021 Participant contributions• Andorra: We are working on purely national activities (migration of the portal to an AmazonWSserver, script correction, etc.).
• Argentina: Once the pandemic is resolved (we have an estimate of the possibility of vaccination
only in April 2021) the plan is to resume the pending activities of 2021. All our node performs its
tasks with the home office mode and it has been impossible to continue with many activities that
depend on of the Ministry. Therefore, being able to resume activities normally would be ourpriority one.
• Belgium: Many mentors/trainers/translators activities.
• Brazil: Citation tracking possibilities were evaluated, but not implemented. Was implemented atool that allows the user to know the number of downloads made for each collection, thus
valuing the datasets of a given publisher.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF staff members facilitated the BIFA workshop as mentors and helped theevaluation of BIFA and CESP projects. TaiBIF node manager is serving as Deputy Representative
for Asia.
• France: We are involved as mentors and translators in different online trainings, we organized awebinar on data mobilization and we are engaged in Living Atlases symposiums. We arepromoting the use of ORCID identifiers among our community of data providers.
• Korea, Republic of: The new two institutes has participated in Korean Biodiversity Consortium in
2021. Field surveys on biodiversity data with the Korean Biodiversity Consortium (approx. 70
people) has been conducted in June and September 2021 to collect biological samples andoccurrence data from the principal classification. KBIF collected the data from the institutions
participated in the field investigations, and incorporated the data into GBIF data portal.
• Mauritania: Improvement of knowledge on the biodiversity of three wetland areas in
Mauritania.
• Spain: We did some dissemination on the matter and got back some interest … and GBIF
ambassadors.We collaborated in the proposal for a BID project led by Cuba, that was finallyawarded. We look forward to start working in it soon. We led a CESP proposal in partnership with
Argentina and Colombia that was turned down. Besides we participate, learn and contribute ininitiatives such as LifeWatch, DiSSCo, and EOSC.
• Sweden: GBIF-Sweden staff have contributed to several evaluation processes organized by GBIF
(BID, Hosted Portals) and by our neighbouring colleagues in Norway (data mobilization projects

12

proposals).
• Uganda: In 2021, the Uganda node supported the response to the Biodiversity for Development
programme call for concept notes. A total of 5 concept notes were endorsed.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: Significantly increase the number of data on the national portal, with an important data
reorganization. Then make the GBIF portal more widely available to biodiversity managers inAndorra. All these actions must have to permit a better network’s long-term sustainability inAndorra.
• Argentina: Unfortunately, we (partially) follow the restrictions due to COVID19 and our situation
is not different from the previous year. It remains our priority to reactivate face-to-face activities
as soon as possible, despite everything, we have transferred the activities of data publication andsupport to publishers to virtual media, as well as training.
• Belgium: Organize EBRII conference to gather all Biodiversity Informatics people of our country.
Continue our mentors/trainers/translators activities.
• Brazil: Continue the assessment of citation tracking possibilities; communicate the benefits topublishers.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF will continue to work closely with the Secretariat on these.
• France: We will continue to support and organize workshops, webinars, symposia, and otherevents aimed at increasing digitization, mobilization, and research use of biodiversity data.
Continue to update the metadata of the organizations and disseminate the benefits of using
ORCID.
• Korea, Republic of: The field surveys of 2022 on biodiversity data with the Korean Biodiversity
Consortium will be conducted in June and September 2022. And new two institutes will be
participated in Korean Biodiversity Consortium in 2022.
• Spain: Support of data providers, data users, and interested parties in GBIF and biodiversity data
is provided through a range of core operations: annual training program, e learning platform.
Data publication and quality control services (inc. IPT), helpdesk, software development,
communication services, Citizen Science services.
• Sweden: To the extent possible and asked for we will continue to provide such support as
described above. We encourage being included in the public catalogue of potential trainers,
mentors, technical support persons etc.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: At TDWG, our 2021 Conference Theme: Connecting theworld of biodiversity data: standards uniting people, processes, and tools highlights that weunderstand, value, and note the need to focus on the fact that people create much biodiversity
data (or create the tools that collect automated data), and people use, curate, develop policies
and tools, and publish using this information. Our plans include developing a new strategic plan
for TDWG, and continuing work to build a community understanding of a) how to contribute tostandards development, b) how to implement them, and c) help the community to adopt any
changes in the standards. This work will include continuing to strategize around what theTechnical Architecture Group of the future looks like for TDWG. Additionally, TDWG notes theworldwide strain on all for constant "virtual" meetings (due to Covid). While in-person meetingsrequire a lot of logistics, so too do virtual or hybrid meetings. The costs (both for humans, and13software to do this well) are high. We have very actively sought support this year in order toenhance what our small group can manage. We are already doing similar for next year.
• Uganda: The successful proposals will be helped to publish the datasets in the GBIF data portal
through participating in the activities preceding data publishing.

Activity 1b: Strengthen skills
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
The strengthening of personal skills through international collaboration has been one of the great
successes of the GBIF global network. During this implementation period, GBIF must build on thispast experience (including the support mechanisms developed for the BID programme) to reinforce
efficient training and capacity enhancement across the network.
Central to this is the development of a collaborative help desk capability and the alignment ofrelevant aspects of national training initiatives with a global curriculum to facilitate direct reuse ofresources.

2021 Progress
The current implementation period has seen very substantial progress in skills development acrossthe GBIF network, including the consolidation of training resources in multiple languages, mainly
developed through BID but re-used across a range of projects and programmes. Increasingly theseresources are available both for rollout in Secretariat-led workshops (virtual as well as in-person) andfor self-instruction.
A new training and e-learning page on GBIF.org now provides open access to a core curriculum
including courses on a general introduction to GBIF, node management, data mobilization, and data
use for decision making. These courses use a flexible format enabling easy updates, self-guided
instruction and embedding of videos. They complement the e-learning platform hosted by GBIF
Spain which is still used to organize training workshops for participants in programmes such as BID
and BIFA.
The following progress can be reported on the specific work items listed in the 2021 Work
Programme:• During 2021, collaboration between nodes and secretariats from GBIF and the Ocean
Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) resulted in a series of videos prepared for the virtual
Global Nodes Meeting, outlining the overlaps and differences involved in publishing marine data
for the two networks. This collaboration is the first step towards aligning guidance and training
materials between OBIS and GBIF, with further opportunities provided by the data mobilization
workshops in the second phase of BID, especially in the Caribbean where several funded projects
have a marine focus.
• Following the release of manuals updating guidance on georeferencing, data cleaning andgeneralizing data on sensitive species, GBIF’s core documentation programme proceeded withidentification of further guidance to be commissioned in 2021. These include updated guidanceon digitization and publication of data from camera traps, and new guidelines on species

14migration and telemetry data, targeted filling of data gaps and data quality.
• Work on developing an e-Learning strategy to support GBIF’s training needs has begun and will
be completed in the final quarter of 2021.
• While opportunities to engage with external projects remained limited due to the pandemic, GBIF
continued to support and develop training materials for the BioDATA programme, and a
graduate programme for the UK Natural Environment Resource Council (see Activity 5a).
• Work was scheduled for the final quarter of 2021 to develop the curriculum for a data quality
management course aimed at nodes, with rollout expected to carry over to 2022.
• The Secretariat launched a new sign-up form for volunteer mentors, and further steps forengaging and monitoring the work of mentors were planned for the final quarter of 2021.
• Improvements to the guidance materials for project writing, including better organization of
FAQs and subtitles for guidance videos, are under way and expected to be substantiallycompleted by the end of 2021.

2022 Work items• Develop new training module on data quality management, targeted at GBIF nodes• Monitor impact of GBIF training programmes, based on uptake of existing training resources,
skills certification through digital badges, replication of courses throughout the network, andoutputs of data and other products linked to participation in training• Further develop joint guidance with OBIS on publication of marine datasets through both
networks

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Participation as mentor and trainer (national, regional and global), (start to) publish
the National Biodiversity Inventory of the Environment Secretariat on the ALA Portal of Argentina. Continue with the advice of our publishers to facilitate and promote the publication of data sets.
• Belgium: Help developing an online data cleaning course, to support guidance on expected data
quality services.
• Brazil: Tutorials were made available on the national platform, and an alignment with OBIS Brazil
was carried out.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF developed a training module on publishing data paper and is developinga training module on the use of GBIF-mediated data.
• Finland: FinBIF has actively been training FinBIF staff and the Finnish biodiversity informatics
community in various skills in biodiversity informatics: georeferencing, data cleaning and data
management by providing workshops and trainings.
• France: GBIF France supplied trainers and mentors for online workshops organized by GBIF
during 2021 under BID and BIFA for capacity enhancement in data publishing. We cooperated
with Cameroon and Benin to prepare a mentoring CESP proposal which has been accepted in
2021.
• iDigBio: iDigBio hosts a large number of workshops, webinars, symposia and other event on
digitization and data related topics. iDigBio gave a presentation about several of these15

opportunities at the April 2021 GBIF Community Webinar.
• Mauritania: Training of students; raising public awareness of endangered species and sources ofpollution in continental wetlands.
• Netherlands: The Dutch node has supported and guided the development of a successful BIFA
application from Indonesia. NLBIF as DiSSCo-NL national node representative has provided aworkshop on harmonizing and updating GRSciColl records for the entire DiSSCo consortium.
• South Africa: The annual Forum will continue in the form of online virtual engagements with thecommunity.
• Spain: Capacity building for the different communities involved in GBIF is a pillar of our ongoingstrategy. Our e-learning platform and the use that GBIF and its communities make of it so proves
it. We plan to continue and expand this area of activity and collaboration. Activities directed toenhance the network’s capacity are well under way. These may be summarized as follows:
Workshops (this year all held remotely on the GBIF Spain eLearning Platform◦ Data management and data publishing in Polar research◦ Data management and data publishing in LTER studies◦ Data visualization and analysis with R (scheduled for September)◦ Getting the most of GBIF Data portals (Scheduled for November) Webinars: This year focusedon Collections. One carried out, two scheduled◦ Workshop with Spanish Environmental administrations on sharing and disseminating
Biodiversity Information (scheduled for November)• Sweden: In giving several courses directly or indirectly related to biodiversity informatics (basic
and advanced training) in part using tools developed by, and in connection to GBIF - incl. othernodes - GBIF-Sweden has contributed to strengthening the national and regional community ofbio- and biodiversity informaticians. We have actively contributed to the development of tools forgenomic data provisioning and use.
• Uganda: The Ugandan Node together with the French node provided technical help for the data
publishing organizations in Uganda notably National Fisheries Research Resources Institute.

2022 Participant plans• Argentina: Participation as mentor and trainer (national, regional and global). Continue with theadvice of our publishers to facilitate and promote the publication of data sets. Continue with theimplementation of the Regional Portal for LAC, as well as the activities proposed by the CESPs in
which Argentina is the leader/participant. Strengthen ties with other nodes/organizations
through thematic networks. Coordinate and improve the data of the institutions/collections/staff
of Argentina in the GRSciColl.
• Brazil: Alignment and technical guidance with OBIS Brazil will be continued.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF will continue to expand the topics in the national training workshops andwill develop virtual training workshops.
• France: GBIF France will continue support for capacity enhancement activities and workshops.
We plan to reuse the BID data mobilization training and some other available materials at
national level and we will spread the joint guidance with OBIS on publication of marine datasets

16

as soon as it will be available.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue offering its training and workforce development activities via
workshops, webinars, symposia, and other events.
• International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Based on the biodiversity data
mobilization survey we are doing in 2021, ICIMOD will try to explore opportunity for capacity
strengthening for data mobilization in collaboration with CAS Node. We will also be seeking help
from GBIF Secretariat in terms of technical expertise.
• Mauritania: As part of the response to climate change, we plan to work on the seagrass beds of
the National Park, Banc d’Arguin, and the restoration of coastal ecosystems in this protected
area, which is an international connectivity point for the green turtles.
• Netherlands: Motivate and support potential GBIF partners to develop and submit applications
to The BID and BIFA calls.
• **South Africa: SANBI-GBIF will continue to conduct training workshops and develop
communities of practice in identified biodiversity informatics areas.
• Spain: Besides continuing and expanding this area of activity and collaboration, we plan to
upgrade our eLearning Platform to incorporate new functionalities, to make easier for everyone
to re-use the material hosted there, and to facilitate finding them.
• Sweden: Through integration into the new Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (SBDI)
context, comprising all major active units within the biodiversity informatics field in Sweden
within one organization, we will increase our capacity and activity to strengthen and encouragedata mobilization, enhance data flow and and support data use.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: Our plans now, and going forward include our TDWG
Outreach and Communications Committee, currently led by Mareike Petersen. With this group’s
efforts, we are planning events like webinars (e.g. Darwin Core Hour) that help us bridge andexpand participation in the world between those who develop standards, those who build tools
to implement them well, those who use them (e.g. in their CMS, on export from their CMS), those
who work to make our data more discoverable (e.g. schema.org, bioschemas.org), those who use
these data for regional / national / global resource tracking and planning, and those who publish
using these data.
• Uganda: Train more stakeholders on the use of the Integrated Publishing Toolkit for data paper
publishing.

Activity 1c: Equip Participant nodes
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
By coordinating national, regional and thematic networks, Participant nodes play an essential role inhelping GBIF engage the broadest possible community of institutions, initiatives and individuals
engaged in biodiversity informatics. GBIF must provide learning materials and tools to support
nodes efficiently as they work to mobilize biodiversity data, promote the reuse of available data andsupport users by improving data management and quality. Preferred approaches enable any one
node to invest in developing tools and capacity that others can easily leverage for the benefit of thewhole community. The skills and experience of the node managers and other team members arerecognized as uniquely valuable in helping new Participants establish their nodes and allowing the17community to develop together.

2021 Progress
The following progress can be reported on the work items in the 2021 work programme:• Due to the continuing COVID-19 travel restrictions, plans for in-person regional nodes meetings
during 2021 were impossible to implement. Instead, and through consultation with the Nodes
Steering Group, the Secretariat decided to organize a virtual Global Nodes Meeting in June/July
2021, returning to the usual cycle of holding such meetings every second year. As part of theseries of sessions held over five days, regional breakout sessions were organized for all six of the
GBIF regions. To maximum engagement during the meeting, a series of videos produced bySecretariat staff, nodes and other partners were made available ahead of time, with the live
sessions focused on panel discussion and interventions from participants. The virtual format
attracted record attendance for a Global Nodes Meeting, with 168 participants attending at least
one live session, including node managers, node staff and observers from all regions.
• The involvement of OBIS in the virtual Global Nodes Meeting laid the ground for improved
connections between OBIS and GBIF nodes, and this is evident from the progress reported byseveral nodes. Further work is planned for the remainder of 2021 to map the overlap and gaps
between the two networks and determine where further connections could be made, including at
regional level.
• The Secretariat established a working group involving several nodes to share experiences andmake recommendations on working with indigenous and local knowledge (ILK), especially withregard to application of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.
• The Secretariat began development of guidelines to provide more consistent visual branding ofproducts and platforms associated with GBIF nodes, regions and publishers, as well as externallymanaged platforms with a dependency on GBIF services. This was in connection with the hosted
portal programme (see below), and outcomes of the work are planned for rollout in the final
quarter of 2021.
• Following a call for expressions of interest from nodes to take part in the pilot phase of the
GBIF hosted portal programme, the Secretariat accepted 19 hosted portal projects, covering
institutional, national, regional and thematic examples. The first version of the technicalframework was complete as of July 2021, and participants were in the process of preparing theircontent and styling. Terms were drawn up through legal consultation enabling the Secretariat toprovide this hosted service through agreements with participating nodes. The first portals were
expected to be made public on the internet in August 2021.
• Consideration of possible pricing structures for additional services was deferred until thecompletion of the hosted portal pilot, and will be taken up in the final quarter of 2021 andcontinued into 2022.
• Following discussion of the concept of regional offices at GB27 a stepwise approach to regional
support was adopted in 2021, and the selection of regional project support contractors for Africa,
the Caribbean and Asia (see Activity 1g) may be seen as the first step in this process.
• The Living Atlas community has continued to collaborate virtually throughout the Covid
disruption with activity from 16 partners and virtual technical sessions with five. The toolkit that
configures and manages an installation has been reworked to simplify the processes, and18

installations are now able to include DOI citation and Sensitive Data Service modules. The
community of users are increasingly contributing code to the core ALA software, particularly
from France, Sweden and Spain, and the Technical Coordinator has contributed to the GBIF / ALA
data pipeline work in preparation for rolling out across the wider Living Atlas community. A new
website is near completion, and revisions to the community MoU, branding and documentation
have been ongoing.

2022 Work items• Mature the technical capabilities and community processes to expand the hosted portal service,focusing on the needs of GBIF participant nodes. This activity assumes positive feedback fromparticipants of the pilot program. The expanded programme will determine the level of service
that will be available to each node (including number of portals), and possible additional services
that would be available through extra financial contributions.
• Continue support for the Living Atlases collaboration through extended contract for the technicalcoordinator (€15K)• Support in-person regional nodes meetings for 2022, if permitted by the travel situation. The Asia
regional nodes meeting will co-located with the Asia regional engagement meeting andsupported by supplementary funds (see Activity 1g); €28,000 is carried over from 2020 for
hosting of the Africa regional meeting in Togo; €32,000 will be available from the 2022 Work
Programme budget to support additional meetings.
• Actively explore supplementary funding for additional regional support contractors in Latin
America, the Pacific, and E Europe/Caucasus/Central Asia
• Refresh existing guidance materials for GBIF nodes and associated support, including node-level
mentoring, capacity self-assessment and training for national-level project teams• Develop guidance on best practices for working with indigenous and local knowledge, including
application of the CARE principles, following recommendations of the working group establishedduring 2021

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Mentor to new nodes. Support and organization of regional nodes meeting.
• Belgium: CKAN Data portal, a light weighted solution for national nodes. See Belgian Biodiversity
Data portal.
• Brazil: Only one assessment for the private sector approach was carried out. Regarding theinfrastructure of the national platform, the Living Atlas tool was updated, in addition to important
updates and improvements to the website.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF staff members form a reading group on the topics related to biodiversity
informatics.
• Finland: FinBIF has shared best practices in developing national node for European colleaguesby having several meetings. There has also been relevant cooperation with the Nordic countries
in e.g. taxonomy.
• France: We keep on to contribute and support the Living Atlases community while implementing
the French national portal "openobs": sharing code on GitHub, support other nodes of the19community, contribution to workshop and symposium.
• iDigBio: iDigBio regularly participates in the GBIF community webinars, Global Nodes Meetings,
Governing Board meetings, and North America regional meetings. iDigBio continues to hostregular meetings of the Collections Data Infrastructures Working Group CDIWG.
• International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Explore possibilities to jointly
organize HKH level regional workshop to define data gap in collaboration with CAS and other
GBIF Asian Node. This work did not materialize, however the biodiversity data mobilization
capacity survey we are doing this year will allow us to understand the need on part of the ourHKH member countries, and guide our future actions to support the data mobilization process as
per their need. Partnership and support with other institutions will also be formally explored in
2022. The possibility of joint work between ICIMOD and CAS was outlined by the HKHBIF nodepresentation during the Asian Regional Node meeting. Prof. Ma Keping, Head of Delegation of
CAS China Node acknowledged the possibility of collaboration with ICIMOD in future. Formal
discussion between Head of Delegations would be necessary.
• Korea, Republic of: New IT staff has been employed to operating and managing the KBIF IPT
server in May 2021, and constantly working on updating the data to increase usability in use inresearch, exhibition, and education.
• South Africa: SANBI-GBIF has supported the establishment of the ACM, as part of the broadconcept to establish regional offices (bullet 5). The Node has developed a draft resource
diversification strategy for consideration. SANBI-GBIF will also be presenting the ACM efforts at a
Digitization Conference organized by GBIF/IDigBio and The U.S. National Museum of Natural
History – Smithsonian (NMNH).
• Spain: We (in conjunction with GBIF-Portugal and technological partners - EGI, Ibergrid) havesubmitted a proposal to the EC for a project aiming fort the developing of a pilot biodiversity data
portal for Europe. All Living Atlases activities continue. Progress: The mentioned EC project was
granted and initial works started. More details here. Currently prototyping some ALA spatial
module capabilities.
• Sweden: GBIF-Sweden staff participated in workshops e.g. customizing ALA portals (Tanzania)
ans on sensitive species, and in consultations on digital extended specimens (Alliance for
Biodiversity Knowledge and internationally. We have continued to develop and provide tools forbiodiversity data management under the SYNTHESYS+ and DiSSCo headings.
• Uganda: The Uganda node participated in the virtual events in 2020 and 2021.

2022 Participant plans• Argentina: Mentor to new nodes. Support and organization of regional nodes meeting.
• Belgium: Continue to adapt our CKAN data portal.
• Brazil: For the coming year we expect greater involvement with the private sector. Regarding
tools and services, training and help desk will be maintained for the IPT and another tools of
Living Atlas.
• France: We will continue to participate in the activities of the Living Atlases Community.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to participate in the GBIF community webinars, Global Nodes
Meetings, Governing Board meetings, and North America regional meetings. iDigBio willcontinue its partnerships, discussions, and collaborations among the major global aggregators
20

via the Collections Data Infrastructures Working Group (CDIWG).
• Mauritania: Equipment for creating databases and for digitizing and sharing information on
biodiversity.
• South Africa: SANBI-GBIF will engage as a participant in the GBIF-Africa Network.
• Spain: As the EGI-ACE will be in full motion we plan to deliver a first prototype of the joint portal,and start evaluating it. It will fully integrated in the EOSC infrastructure and procedures. We plan
to increase the capacities of our national data portal to take better advantage of the spatial
module. We aim to deploy several hubs in responding a demand by some institutions to present
a more coherent view of their publisher data.
• Sweden: We intend to maintain, possibly increase, during 2022 our participation in similar
activities as in 2021. By remaining an active part in the Living Atlases Community (LAC) we expect
to contribute as before to tools and skills development internally and in connection to joint
endeavours, and by incorporating colleagues from partners in the Swedish Biodiversity Data
Infrastructure into our common capacity pool we will be even more able to assist and support
efforts to strengthen node’s skills.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: In general, TDWG activities benefit from Node Member
participation and our outputs benefit Nodes. We will continue to align with GBIF efforts andneeds as our objectives and reach complement each other.
• Uganda: More participation by Ugandans in the events.

Activity 1d: Equip data publishers
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
Data publishers are an essential component of the GBIF network as they share their content throughthe common infrastructure. More than 1,700 data publishers actively distribute datasets throughGBIF.org, and their ranks increase steadily. Publishers from different parts of the world often faceunique challenges, though common themes emerge. These problems range from lack of data
publishing experience or skills, lack of equipment, language barriers, difficulties in managing data
hosting facilities, and the inability to publish high-quality data or curate data into the future. The
Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) requires ongoing improvements and enhancements, including theestablishment of hosted instances that reduce the technical burden on data publishers.

2021 Progress
The following progress can be reported for work items in the 2021 Work Programme:• The first bi-annual newsletter to data publishers is scheduled for the final quarter of 2021.
• Enhancements were made to the pages associated with DOI citations of GBIF-mediated data, toenable easier export of citations using standard formats.
• Exploration of push notifications to data publishers for new citations was deferred.
• Further development of regional helpdesk services was redirected into the establishment of theregional project support contractors (see Activity 1g).
• The open curation of vocabularies has been included in the GBIF registry with the LifeStage

21

vocabulary being the first pilot used by GBIF and the ALA. Work is underway with the TDWG
Vocabulary Task Group to migrate all existing vocabularies into the registry. Once complete,communities can get involved in the maintenance of the vocabularies which dictate how data is
treated in GBIF.org.
Following publication of the updated guidance on generalizing data on sensitive species and in
response to issues raised during GB27, the Secretariat set up a working group of nodes to document
the various approaches across the community in application of national sensitive species lists. This
group will make recommendations on a more consistent approach, and options for helping data
publishers to identify records that may present risks if published with precise location details.
At the 2020 TDWG Conference, GBIF and the BioCASe team held two virtual workshops to captureideas and hold discussion on the future of the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT). The final report
captures the outcomes which provided clear direction. Following this feedback GBIF has appointed a
new lead developer on the IPT product and released the 2.5.0 version of IPT which addresses manyof the key issues.
The framework for a technical documentation website has been created, with the IPT manual being
the first component included. Collating information on architecture, data processing, definitions offormats, tutorials, guides and the API is ongoing but requires more dedicated focus during theremainder of 2021 and 2022.

2022 Work items• Building on the 2021 work of the sensitive species working group, commission an analysis of thecurrent scale of sensitive species data published through GBIF, evaluation of the evidence thatsuch data presents risks of harm, and recommendations for applying a risk assessment approach(€15K)• Based on work carried out in 2021, develop plans for the future of the Integrated Publishing
Toolkit (IPT).
• Implement new technical documentation website

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Argentina has a collection catalogue (and institutions) since 2003. We keep updating
it. Try to reduce the number of IPT to centralize all the data sets in one IPT.
• Belgium: Helpdesk IPT and Darwin Core users.
• Brazil: Tutorials and training in the use of the IPT were improved and made available on thenational platform website. The data flow was discussed with the SiBBr Steering Committee, inorder to better structure the role of the national node.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF holds regular training workshops on data publishing and mobilization andcontinues to provide the help desk service to data publishers.
• Finland: FinBIF has continued to support the Russian initiatives in sharing data to GBIF throughEarthCape Biodiversity Data Platform. FinBIF has supported the sharing of Russian alien species
information with GBIF in the project “Collaborative Data and Information Exchange Network forManaging Invasive Alien Species”. FinBIF has also provided support to Vietnam National

22

University in sharing Bryophyte data to GBIF through FinBIF IPT installation.
• France: GBIF France offers data hosting and maintains IPT instances for several national
institutions and a dozen of southern countries. Our IT engineer contributed to the developmentof the IPT by implementing new functionalities and participated in the tests of the future version
2.5.
• iDigBio: iDigBio is an active partner with GBIF on the global collections registry (GRSciColl).
iDigBio continues to actively seek new specimen-based biodiversity datasets for ingestion byboth iDigBio and GBIF as part of its mission to coordinate a national digitization effort in the
United States.
• International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Sensitize data holders and data
providers in ICIMOD’s eight regional member countries in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region
about the importance of data publishing, and use of global publishing platform. Created a
HKHBIF web platform to sensitize data holders and data providers in the HKH region. Also
contributed to an opinion article to highlight importance of open access to data.
• Korea, Republic of: Two institutions per year has been engaged in the Korean biodiversity data
network as potential data publishers.
• Mauritania: Continue the digitization of the botanical collection of the National Herbarium ofMauritania (HNM).
• South Africa: The Node will continue hosting of the IPT and will continue its support to data
publishers. The Node is part of the pilot Hosted Portals implementation.
• Spain: IPT maintenance, publisher support, publishers (factual and potential) training (Seeactivity 1b.), data validation, quality control and associated tasks are operations routinely andcontinuously carried out by the node.
• Sweden: As described above GBIF-Sweden participates in the newly set up working group of
nodes to document the various approaches across the community in application of national
sensitive species lists. We have NOT contributed, but have followed closely the development of
the future "IPT solution".
• Uganda: A freshwater biodiversity data portal was developed and launched. This was a result ofa grant from the BID programme.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: Capture more data publishers.
• Argentina: Argentina has a collection catalogue (and institutions) since 2003. We keep updatingit.
• Belgium: Helpdesk IPT and Darwin Core users.
• Brazil: Training activities and data publication will be continued and strengthened with CESP’s
project "The role of Zoological Collections Networks to enhance and fill taxonomic andgeographic gaps in open access databases" with a focus on training curators of zoologicalcollections for the use of Specify 7.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF will continue to provide these services and will actively contact data
publishers to help them prepare and clean data for publishing.

23• Finland: FinBIF is building API connections for sharing occurrence data through API’s to replace
the IPT installation. This would greatly facilitate the sharing of the rest of the Finnish datasets to
GBIF by minimizing manual work needed e.g. in recording metadata.
• France: GBIF France will continue to support data hosting and publishing services for national
institutions and southern countries. We are willing to continue to help in the development andtesting of the future version of IPT.
• iDigBio: With renewed funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, iDigBio will continue
its efforts to coordinate a national digitization effort in the United States. iDigBio will continue towork with GBIF on the global collections registry (GRSciColl).
• Korea, Republic of: Two institutions which has been engaged in the Korean biodiversity data
network in 2021will be participated in data publishers. We are checking the data quality of them.
• Mauritania: We will continue to digitize botanical samples and we will continue our explorationsof wetlands that harbour endangered species in this tropical fringe in Mauritania on the southernedge of the Sahara and east of the Atlantic. It will involve exploring the forests of herbaria,
mangroves and marine and coastal algae still very little known in Mauritania and which respondto an international concern for carbon fixation and the mitigation of global warming.
• South Africa: The Node will continue hosting of the IPT and will continue its support to data
publishers.
• Spain: Same as 2021, plus updating the IPT to the latest version and hiring a second person ascore staff to cope with the work load in this area and provide a better service to the publishers.
• Sweden: 2022: In 2022 we will continue our efforts to encompass different kinds of lists ofsensitive or otherwise ( specifically appointed species (global, national, regional red, grey, blacklists). Our practical/technical support to data providers will continue and include also "new" datatypes.
• Switzerland: Contribute to the sensitive species working group.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: In general, TDWG activities benefit from Node Member
participation and our outputs benefit Nodes. We will continue to align with GBIF efforts andneeds as our objectives complement each other. For example, we will have a webinar in
September that focuses on recent changes to DwC to help everyone (including Node Managers)
understand them, and answer any questions about how to implement them.
• Uganda: To increase the usage of data in the decision making process. To assist in use of GBIF
mediated data in developing the National redlist for Fish in Uganda.

Activity 1e: Expand national participation
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
GBIF’s national membership has remained largely static in recent years. Active participation in the
network is confined to a limited number of regions, with the most dynamic activity in nodecollaboration and data publication focused in Western Europe, North America, Latin America,
Oceania, increasingly sub-Saharan Africa and limited parts of Asia. Thus, significant parts of theworld have little or no direct involvement in GBIF’s activities, which poses a risk to the long-term
credibility of GBIF as a global collaborative network. Secretariat staff and existing Participants

24constantly engage potential new members through ad hoc contacts, but the situation calls for amore strategic approach to expand membership.

2021 Progress
Looking across the whole implementation period to date, 13 new countries have joined GBIF as
national Participants. They include Mali (2017); Cameroon, Liberia, South Sudan, Viet Nam andZimbabwe (2018); Angola, Belarus and Tonga (2019); Armenia, Cambodia and Uzbekistan (2020); andNamibia (2021). Over the same period, seven regional or international organizations have joined asassociate participants: the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP),
iDigBio (Integrated Digitized Biocollections), LifeWatch ERIC, Specify Collections Consortium,
Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), the East Asia Biodiversity Conservation Network,
and Observation International. Several of the new members joined GBIF as a direct result ofengagement through funded programmes led or supported by GBIF, in particular the BID, BIFA and
BioDATA programmes.
Opportunities for direct engagement at international conferences and intergovernmental fora
continued to be severely limited in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a series ofregional engagement webinars was planned for later in the year, building on the successful outreachachieved by such webinars in 2020. In addition, targeted communication products were developed
during 2021 aimed at strengthening GBIF’s value proposition for existing and potential national
members, as well as supporting the new GBIF resource mobilization strategy (see Activity 1g).
While expansion in formal participation over the period has been modest, engagement through arange of activities has significantly increased GBIF’s global footprint both in terms of the sharing anduse of data through the network. By July 2021, institutions from 124 countries were publishing data
through GBIF, compared with 61 countries that participate through signature of the GBIF
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). Two countries outside the formal network (India and Italy)
were within the top ten locations of visitors to GBIF.org, while China ranked second in the world bothfor data download requests and peer-reviewed studies citing use of data accessed through GBIF.
Perhaps the most dramatic increase in activity outside the formal national membership has been in
the case of the Russian Federation, where data publishing stood at virtually zero in 2017, and by
2021 had reached more than 3.8 million species occurrence records, being shared through GBIF innearly 500 datasets published by 117 Russian institutions.
The following specific progress on work items in the 2021 Work Programme may be reported:• Pro-active engagement in the delayed process for agreeing the post-2020 Global Biodiversity
Framework through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has maintained GBIF’s profile insupporting national implementation of global goals and targets to address the biodiversity crisis.
Acknowledgement of GBIF in decisions and background documents still under negotiation aheadof the COP15 meeting in China will provide important additional support for expansion of GBIF’s
membership in the coming decade, especially in relation to GBIF’s role to support indicators,
taxonomy, knowledge management and capacity development (see also Activity 5c).
• Plans for an annual call for regional outreach proposals were deferred due to the impossibility oftravel during 2021.
• Exploration of potential additional funded capacity programmes was initiated throughdiscussions with a number of potential funding partners; this will be carried over into25

implementation of the resource mobilization strategy in 2022 (see Activity 1g).
• Further

progressintranslation

of

web

content

andkeypublications

tosupportinternationalization of GBIF.org was planned for the final quarter of 2021. In addition, thecontracting of professional live interpretation for virtual events was piloted in the BID Caribbean
data mobilization workshop, and will be further considered for the regional engagement
webinars.
• A catalogue of capacity enhancement services has been drafted as an internal document, and will
be developed further in the final quarter of 2021 to support outreach materials for funders under
the resource mobilization strategy (see Activity 1g).
• A set of communication products supporting GBIF’s value proposition across key thematic areas
was commissioned and will be rolled out in the final quarter of 2021.

2022 Work items• Review the current status and models of participation in GBIF both at national and organizationlevel, with a view to developing recommendations for the new strategic implementation period at
GB29• Take a more proactive role with HoDs through global science collaboration activities such as theGroup of Senior Officials• Use the delayed agreement of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework to further emphasize
GBIF’s value to countries and promote expanded participation

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Argentina participates actively in the translation of GBIF content. Support is provided,
as a regional representative, to all countries that do not have a node yet, but are interested injoining GBIF.
• Belgium: French and Dutch translations to help maintaining and expanding internationalizationof GBIF.org.
• Brazil: The internationalization of GBIF.org has been expanded, through the communication ofnotices on the SiBBr website and on social networks, in addition to making GBIF documents andguides available for specific users. We are also structuring and publishing data from long-term
research programs (PELD and PPBIO programs).
• France: Contribution to French translations on GBIF.org, BID workshop materials and support tofrancophone countries through documentation and engagement with countries or institutions.
Via our contribution as trainer or participant in working group in EU project such as COST
MOBILISE or DiSSCO prepare, we try to reinforce awareness on GBIF.
• iDigBio: iDigBio, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and GBIF are collaborating
on a two-day virtual event that highlights the collective successes of mobilization and digitization
efforts in the US and abroad. The event will be held on 22-23 Sep. Topics will include:◦ Innovations: Strategy & Coordination (Plenary & Lightning Talks)◦ Digitization Spotlights (Poster Session)◦ Community (Plenary & Lightning Talks)26◦ Natural History Collections in Grand Challenges (Plenary & Lightning Talks)◦ What’s Next Partnerships, new data concepts (Plenary & Lightning Talks)◦ Looking to the Future of Digitization: Conference Wrap-Up (Panellist Discussion)
The event follows the annual ADBC Summit on 21 Sep. Also, the iDigBio Node Manager currently
serves as the Regional Representative for participant nodes in North America, and iDigBio has aleadership role with the Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN), which aims to expand the efforts of
the NSF Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program.
• Korea, Republic of: As of September 2021, 61 organizations are participated in the Korean
Biodiversity Consortium to strength our data network.
• Netherlands: NLBIF has contributed to a successful BIFA application from Indonesia which might
result in the future expansion of the GBIF network.
• Spain: Maintaining and expanding our ties with LifeWatch, increasing participation with the LTER
communities via our participation the eLTER Plus and eLTER PPP, projects (EC funded) Willing to
get involved in BID projects pertaining the Caribbean. Progress: Work progressing according toplan. Workshops targeted to specific communities (polar research, LTER) aimed towards thisobjective.
• Sweden: By participating in, and staying updated with several of the most influential
organizations (active participation, visiting - virtual - conferences), Our staff is well updated withthe general progress on the BI field och activity. Until GB28 we hold a position in their Nodes
Steering Group, and have - as always - participated in Global Nodes Meeting and the Governing
Board (HoD associate representative).
• Uganda: The community of practice for biodiversity informatics enhanced with more open dataambassadors from Uganda.

2022 Participant plans• Argentina: Argentina participates actively in the translation of GBIF content. Support is provided,
as a regional representative, to all countries that do not have a node yet, but are interested injoining GBIF.
• Brazil: Through two CESP Projects, SiBBr will increase integration with curators and publishers in
Brazil and other partner countries• France: Help for French translations and support to francophone countries will continue.
• Korea, Republic of: Another two institutions will be engaged in the Korean biodiversity data
network will be participated in 2022 as potential data publishers.
• Mauritania: Work on endangered species, work in progress on medicinal and aromatic plants,
work on invasive species.
• Netherlands: Continue activities to motivate partners and countries to start sharing open
biodiversity data through the GBIF network.
• Spain: We plan to continue with our series of workshops targeting specific communities andmaintain specific contacts. We signed in support of the Alliance for Biodiversity Knowledge, andwould be happy to contribute, but we do not see how.

27

• Sweden: GBIF-Sweden needs to be aware and part of the global community and will remain as
participants in all relevant meetings and situations. However we have decided NOT to present acandidate for the new Nodes Steering Group in 2021 as we think this should be someone else’s
task for some time to come now. We will return to nominate candidates to such positions later on
as we intend to shift our present Node Manager for a new colleague late 2021.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: TDWG plans to continue to strategize and offer ways toparticipate around the clock, around the world, and in multiple ways and languages. We’ll
continue to do so. We are in contact with Pensoft, for example, for the last year, about changes
we’d like to see in ARPHA so that abstracts in BISS can be in multiple languages. Pensoft assures
us that changes like this are coming that will enhance our abilities to make our data and our
information FAIR and extensible.
• Uganda: Train more open data ambassadors with certifications.

Activity 1f: Plan implementation
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
Implementing this plan hinges on effective coordination with the plans of individual GBIF nationaland organizational Participants. GBIF must also ensure that node activities are well recognized andintegrated with other biodiversity research and informatics initiatives at national, regional andorganizational levels.

2021 Progress
As part of the system of reporting on the annual updates of the global GBIF Implementation Plan,
the Secretariat has raised the visibility of activities across nodes by including Participant
contributions and plans alongside the summaries for each activity within the strategic priority areas.
To reinforce this approach, the Secretariat is preparing to capture information from nodes about
budgets and in-kind resources dedicated to GBIF activity, so that the total investment in GBIF can bebetter reflected in financial reporting.
Following the 2nd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC2) in 2018, GBIF has taken aleadership role in convening a number of consultations across the broader biodiversity informatics
community through the alliance for biodiversity knowledge.
In 2021, as part of the EU-funded SYNTHESYS+ project and within the framework of the alliance, GBIF
convened a workshop focused on Converging Digital Specimens and Extended Specimens - Towards
a global specification for data integration. This workshop had been anticipated to be the third in aseries of but was moved forward. The consultation covered 11 subtopics and was held in two phases,
Phase 1 in February and Phase 2 in June.
Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, the 3rd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC3) was
postponed until 2022. The event will be aligned with the EU-funded BiCIKL (Biodiversity Integrated
Knowledge Library) grant.

28

2022 Work items• Organize the 3rd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC3), hosted by the LifeWatch
European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), to address the ongoing operation andgovernance of the alliance for biodiversity knowledge (€10K)• Organize and run the 2nd SYNTHESYS+ workshop relating to citation of collections

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Continue contributing to national, regional and global activities.
• Brazil: There was a monitoring of activities and services made available at GBIF. The calls for theEbbe Nielsen Challenge and Young Researchers Awards 2021 were nationally released.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF worked with major data holders in Taiwan to develop five-year strategicplans for enhancing data mobilization and developing biodiversity informatics through Taiwan
Biodiversity Information Association (see Activity 3c).
• Finland: An article describing the structure of FinBIF was published: Schulman, Leif; Lahti, Kari;
Piirainen, Esko; Heikkinen, Mikko; Raitio, Olli; Juslén Aino (2021). The Finnish Biodiversity
Information Facility as a best-practice model for biodiversity data infrastructures. Scientific Data
doi: 10.1038/s41597-021-00919-6. FinBIF has been actively participating in SYNTHESYS+ and
DiSSCo projects and in CETAF.
• France: Continue contributing to national, regional and global activities. Links with the Frenchbon of GEOBON.
• iDigBio: iDigBio currently hosts the steering group for the GBIF North America region. In
addition, iDigBio has often been hosting the regional meetings of GBIF North America.
• Korea, Republic of: Data gap discovery is carrying out for the data from National Science
Museum, a record of approx. 5.14 Mil. National Institute of Ecology uploaded total 1,000,134
occurrence data (1 dataset) to GBIF data portal in December 2020. East Asia Biodiversity
Conservation Network uploaded total 100 occurrence data (1 dataset, Flora of the Korean DMZ
and adjacent area) to GBIF data portal in February 2021. National Marine Biodiversity Institute of
Korea uploaded total 68,832 occurrence data (1 dataset) to GBIF data portal in June 2021.
• Mauritania: We are counting on the institutional support of our establishment and on thenational research and innovation agency for the execution of our work plan.
• South Africa: Further engagements with SANBI-GBIF Node Manager and HoD/DSI to evolve theNode planning. GBIF YRA national process established and call distributed.
• Spain: Ongoing collaborations and activities with LifeWatch, Synthesys , and CETAF. Increase
collaboration and integration of our citizen science activities with iNaturalist.
• Sweden: Since 2020, the strategic (5-yr), and annual work plans of GBIF-Sweden are integrated
into the same plans for SBDI (the former now spanning over 2021-2024). Where applicable they
are heavily congruent with GBIF:s planning, yet of course more detailed and extended where
specifically needed. As described we thus follow the development of the ABK and GBIC1, 2 and 3.
Buy being an active partner in the SYNTHESYS+ and DiSSCo we also by necessity have to stayengaged in these and other related organizations.
• Uganda: Participated and facilitated in the the biodiversity informatics stakeholder activities.

29

Data publishing and resource mobilization efforts were supported through provision ofrecommendation letters and endorsements for support.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: Significantly increase the number of data on the national portal, with an important data
reorganization. Then make the GBIF portal more widely available to biodiversity managers inAndorra. All these actions must have to permit a better network’s long-term sustainability inAndorra.
• Argentina: Continue contributing to national, regional and global activities.
• Brazil: Participation and monitoring of GBIF activities and national dissemination of these
activities will be continued in the coming year.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF will work together with the members in the Association on implementing
the plans.
• France: Continue contributing to national, regional and global activities. Ongoing collaborations
and activities with EU and southern projects. Increase collaboration with national iBOL node.
• iDigBio: iDigBio plans to continue attending, supporting, and/or hosting meetings for the GBIF
North America Region as required/requested.
• Korea, Republic of: We have a plan to complete the data gap discovery for the data from
National Science Museum, a record of approx. 5.14 Mil. within next year.
• Mauritania: We also count on GBIF to support next phase of certain activities within theframework of the digitization and the training of the agents of the research institutions.
• South Africa: Continue contributing to national, regional and global activities.
• Spain: Besides continuing with on going collaborations, we plan to participate in GBIC3, andSynthesys+ workshop.
• Sweden: See above! GBIF-Sweden will continue in 2022 to encourage its staff and SBDI partners
to engage in any relevant joint activity in the BI community.
• Uganda: To coordinate the national node participants to take part in the various biodiversity
informatics opportunities like capacity enhancement concepts among others.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: TDWG is participating in BiCIKL. TDWG and BiCIKL willhold a joint TDWG-BiCIKL2022 Conference in Sofia in October (in-person preferred, but may behybrid, or virtual, depending on Covid). TDWG looks forward to GBIC3 as part of the Alliance for
Bio and continuing the work to imagine the future together.

Activity 1g: Coordinate resources
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
Among its other roles, the GBIF Secretariat coordinates efforts to expand the scale and scope of GBIF
activity beyond the levels achievable using only annual core Participant contributions. GBIF
Participants commit to establish and operate nodes which serve as significant centres for GBIF
activity. Some nodes have sufficient resources to contribute skills and developments which advance
GBIF’s work, while others may require external support to become fully active. A limited amount of30

funding has been allocated each year under the GBIF work programme to support capacity
enhancement for GBIF nodes. GBIF or individual Participants may also secure supplementary funds
to contribute to particular areas of GBIF work. Improved coordination of these various resources willassist GBIF to advance more rapidly at all scales.

2021 Progress
During 2021, the Secretariat selected a total of 42 projects for funding under the second phase of the
Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) programme following the calls for the proposals
launched during 2020. These included 18 projects in sub-Saharan Africa, 18 in the Caribbean and 7
in the Pacific. In addition to the top-up funding of €1.6M from the European Commission’s
Directorate-General for International Partnerships (EU-INTPA) to support the new phase of BID,
GBIF secured a funding agreement with the JRS Biodiversity Foundation to contribute €411K
towards BID projects in Africa, enabling approval of five additional projects on biodiversity data
mobilization and use.
The continuing COVID-19 travel restrictions inevitably disrupted the original plans for implementing
BID activities during 2021. Apart from requiring funded projects to avoid international travel in theirplans for this year, the main impact was the need to replace planned in-person training workshops
organized by the Secretariat with virtual alternatives for the three target regions. The Secretariat
Participation and Engagement team organized virtual data mobilization training for BID grantees inAfrica (May), the Caribbean (July/August) and Pacific (August), using the curriculum developed during
the first phase of BID and combining a preparatory phase with 'live' sessions over a week andsubsequent submission of exercises to demonstrate acquisition of the necessary skills. Additional
virtual sessions were conducted for the project teams implementing the data use grants, introduced
as an innovation in the second phase of BID.
The BID Steering Committee approved a proposal from the Secretariat to redirect funds originallybudgeted for in-person workshops towards regional project support contracts, aimed at providing
ongoing technical support for the funded projects within the target regions, and helping to grow thecommunity of practice developed through the BID programme. Following open calls in Africa andthe Caribbean, three individuals in Africa and one in the Caribbean were selected to provide these
support services under 2-year contracts starting in August 2021. As well as supporting the projects
funded through BID, these contractors will work with regional node representatives to help
coordinate and direct technical support for GBIF nodes in the respective regions.
Following a call for proposals in December 2020, the Secretariat selected 13 data mobilization
projects in Asia, under the sixth funding round of the Biodiversity Information Fund for Asia (BIFA),
using supplementary funds contributed by the Ministry of Environment, Government of Japan. As
this was expected to be the last BIFA call in its present form, the BIFA Steering Committee agreed to'double up' two annual contributions into a single call with €220,000 available for grants up to€20,000 each, with projects implemented over 18 months. Particular priority in the call was given to
projects combining DNA-based techniques such as barcoding with mobilization of data throughGBIF. A virtual data mobilization training workshop for the BIFA projects was scheduled for
November 2021, with funds reserved for an in-person engagement meeting in Asia in 2022 if thetravel situation permits.
Based on the model developed for the BID programme, the Secretariat prepared a call for proposals
for regional project support contracts for Asia, using funds from the EU-funded SYNTHESYS+

31

programme under an agreement reached with the programme partners. These roles will be
recruited by November 2021 from Asian applicants and will support project teams funded through
BIFA as well as nodes and data publishers in the region.
The 2021 call for proposals under the GBIF Capacity Enhancement Support Programme resulted inselection of five projects involving a total of 14 nodes, led from Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Cameroon
and South Sudan. The themes of the selected projects included mentoring to support nodedevelopment, extending knowledge of data quality, and the role of zoological collections in fillingtaxonomic and geographic data gaps.
A draft GBIF resource mobilization strategy, aimed at broadening the funding base for GBIF’s global
activities, was developed by the Secretariat’s Strategic Partnership Officer and endorsed by the
Executive Committee, and will be presented for approval by the GB28 meeting alongside the draft
Strategic Plan for the period 2023-2027.

2022 Work items• Launch a call for proposals under the 2022 Capacity Enhancement Support Programme (€80k)• Following approval of the resource mobilization strategy at GB28, develop implementation roadmap and begin implementation, with a view to targeting additional supplementary funds as wellas consolidating core contributions from Voting Participants• Subject to an improved travel situation in 2022, organize an in-person engagement meeting in
Asia, using supplementary funds from BIFA (€20,000) and the SYNTHESYS+ project (€19,000)

2021 Participant contributions• Andorra: We have financial assistance from the government of Andorra to cover part of theoperating costs of GBIF Andorra.
• Argentina: Participation in 2 CESP programs (as a participant).
• Belgium: Help by mentoring BID, BIFA, CESP projects. At national level, the Belgian Biodiversity
Platform :• collaborates with LifeWatch.BE• acts as IPBES National Focal Point.
• Brazil: A new CESP proposal was submitted, and the proposal approved in 2020 is being
implemented with the countries of Latin America for the strengthening of regional nodes.
• Finland: The research infrastructure funding for FinBIF from the Academy of Finland is used tocontribute to GBIF work. The entire work of FinBIF aims to expand and develop the national
network and resources. The cooperation with Russian initiatives has been ongoing.
• France: We are partners in 1 CESP mentoring project led by Cameroon and 2 BID projects in
Africa : 1 regional led by Togo (Progress towards a regional data platform of West and Central
African herbaria) and 1 national led by Ivory Cost (Mobilization and strengthening of biodiversity
data supporting sustainable development in Côte d’Ivoire) We were trainer and mentor for thevirtual data mobilization trainings for BID grantees in Africa (May 2021) and the Caribbean(August 2021).

32• iDigBio: iDigBio, GBIF, ALA, and DiSSCo are making a concerted effort to coordinate efforts via
the Collections Data Infrastructures Working Group (CDIWG). iDigBio became a member of the
Research Data Alliance (RDA). iDigBio regularly participates in the collaborative efforts of GBIF,
BCoN, and DiSSCo, among others, to forge a path for implementation of Extended Specimens.
• Korea, Republic of: East Asia Biodiversity Conservation Network uploaded total 100 occurrence
data (1 dataset, Flora of the Korean DMZ and adjacent area) to GBIF data portal in February 2021.
National Marine Biodiversity Institute of Korea uploaded total 68,832 occurrence data (1 dataset)to GBIF data portal in June 2021. National Institute of Ecology and National Marine Biodiversity
Institute of Korea will upload more than total 700,000 occurrence data from the both institutes
within 2021, and also share the coordinates (partially updated) which is already published andpotential datasets in GBIF portal.
• Mauritania: On the level of the Node.
• Spain: Plans: Aiming to contribute to the CESP and BID programs. Progress: Participation in
CESP:0, in BID: 1.
• South Africa: Draft Resource Diversification Strategy developed and shared with Africa Nodes,
for consideration. Continued data mobilization funding through FBIP large and small grants.
• Sweden: 2021: Although we cannot support financially external initiatives, by pooling resources
allocated to biodiversity informatics in Sweden into the SBDI, and offering expertise thus
mobilized, we hope to be able to be more supportive technically to GBIF globally. This goes for2021 and 2022 (plus in at least the near future thereafter!).
• Uganda: The National Node reviewed and endorsed 5 project concepts and 1 was successful andfunded. Participated in the proposal development for the more resources regarding biodiversity
information for reporting on the 3 UN RIO Conventions for Uganda.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: We have financial assistance from the government of Andorra to cover part of theoperating costs of GBIF Andorra.
• Argentina: Participation in 3 CESP programs (1 as coordinator, 2 as a participant).
• Belgium: Get involve in DiSSCo.BE. Coordinate the BiodivERsA Partnership, a coordinatedEuropean initiative of biodiversity research funding agencies.
• Brazil: Implementation of the two CESP proposals coordinated by the Brazilian node.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF attempts to coordinate biodiversity informatics-related resources amongmajor data holders in Taiwan through Taiwan Biodiversity Information Association (see Activity
3c).
• France: Aiming to contribute to the CESP and BID/BIFA programs.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue its partnerships, discussions, and collaborations via CDIWG, RDA,
and BCoN International Partners.
• Mauritania: We intend to connect with our partners.
• South Africa: National funding process for data mobilization to continue.
• Spain: Same as for 2021.
• Sweden: 2022: Same as in 2021: Although we cannot support financially external initiatives, by33

pooling resources allocated to biodiversity informatics in Sweden into the SBDI, and offeringexpertise thus mobilized, we hope to be able to be more supportive technically to GBIF globally.
This goes for 2021 and 2022 (plus in at least the near future thereafter!).
• Uganda: To increase awareness and encourage more stakeholders to increase the response to
the call for proposals. Monitor and mentor the successful project implementation to achieve theintended goals of supporting conservation decision making.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: TDWG looks forward to continued collaboration with
GBIF in the coming years to help as we can with coordinating resources, use of those resources,
access to them, and contributing to the development of new ones.

Priority 2: Enhance Biodiversity Information
Infrastructure
Provide leadership, expertise and tools to support the integration of all biodiversity
information as an interconnected digital knowledgebase.

Activity 2a: Modernize data standards
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
The GBIF network participants are able to reliably exchange data thanks to their adherence to a setof standards. As GBIF looks to grow in capability, enable exchange of richer content and improve thequality of data, the standards must be revised and evolve accordingly.
Current standards adopted by GBIF are not yet adequate to accommodate the needs expressed bymany potential and existing data publishers. Weaknesses in the model have led to ambiguous orover-complex data representations and unclear documentation, leading to difficulties in data
integration and use. The main issues relate to uncertainties around the use of Darwin Core record
types, the basisOfRecord element, and the use of Core and Extension vocabularies. Reviewing andupdating the core domain model, tightening up the vocabularies and documentation and adopting
more robust exchange standards will result in an easier to use, and a wider reaching GBIF dataexchange network.

2021 Progress
In collaboration with partners, GBIF under the umbrella of the alliance for biodiversity knowledge
convened a two phase (phase I and phase II) virtual global consultation on Digital Extended
Specimens (DES) covering the following topics:• Making FAIR data for specimens accessible• Extending, enriching and integrating data
• Annotating specimens and related data
• Attributing work done (Data Attribution)34

• Analysing/mining specimen data for novel applications• Robust access points and data infrastructure alignment• Persistent identifier (PID) scheme(s)• Meeting legal/regulatory, ethical and sensitive data obligations• Workforce capacity development and inclusivity• Transactional mechanisms and provenance• Partnerships to collaborate more effectively
These consultations have helped bring together the communities and infrastructures that connect
with GBIF for targeted discussion and provided some guidance and ideas on pathways forward. Withso many stakeholders this remains a complex area and will require continued discussion and global
input. Consultation participants are working towards development of a shared roadmap for the
Digital Extended Specimen concept.
GBIF participate in the ongoing DiSSCo Prepare project, contributing to the design work relating to
the Open Digital Specimens.
The Secretariat have started work that will result in a new information model for GBIF. This model
will allow GBIF to better accommodate wider data types in its data infrastructure, potentially
including tracking data (organism-oriented data), ecological and monitoring data (site-oriented data),
automated detection (e.g. camera traps), preserved physical material (e.g. tissue or environment
specimens), DNA-derived data (e.g. metabarcoding projects) and literature-based data (e.g. material
citations). Following approval by the Science Committee, Budget Committee and Executive
Committee, the Secretariat has commissioned a contracted expert to work during in the second halfof 2021 to compile known use cases, and define a data model and initial formats for data exchange
beyond the Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A). The outputs of this work will be followed by prototyping
work in 2022.
As part of the EU-funded BiCIKL project, GBIF is running a hackathon topic focusing on
enhancements to the clustering algorithm in September. This will bring participants from ALA, Royal
Botanical Gardens, Kew and the DiSSCo project to collaborate on software development, with a goalof continued work following the event.
The GBIF IPT 2.5.0 was released in August 2021 addressing around 33% of issues and feedback
identified as priorities in the 2020 consultation, including contributions from the community intranslations and software improvements. A roadmap for the 2.5.x version of the IPT has beencreated and a lead developer appointed.
Work to revise the GBIF validator is underway (September) to bring this in line with processing with
GBIF.org. In addition to consistency, GBIF aim to provide a "data preview" capability and provide an
integration with the GBIF IPT, allowing data to be validated before publication in the IPT.
The work of the aligning the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Living Atlas community and GBIF
Registries has not yet started, but remains an objective. This was delayed as the teams completed
the alignment of the GBIF and ALA data processing. The teams will look to integrate this into thedeployments by the Living Atlas community, to further align infrastructure and increase ourcollective capacity and collaboration. It is anticipated this collaboration will expand to develop the35

prototype catalogue services in 2022.
The development work to support the pilot hosted portals (see Activity 1c) has resulted in a new
GraphQL-based API, and a collection of reusable ReactJS-based 'widgets'.
Collaborations with academic projects were initiated to display occurrence data within a phylogenetic
framework. These projects are expected to be continued and expanded in 2022 (see Activity 5a).
The following activities have not yet started (September)• Explore standards and interfaces to allow brokering of data clustering annotations to data
publishers; broaden the capabilities to include external annotations• Review the GBIF Metadata Profile to explore the feasibility and benefits of migrating to the latest
version of Ecological Metadata Language (EML)• Revise the GBIF quarterly data analytics, to follow recent changes in data processing, such as
handling counts of absence-based records

2022 Work items• Continue to participate in the ongoing Open Digital Specimen and Extended Specimen Network
standards development and strive towards a common solution• Together with the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), support the Living Atlas community, in adoptionof the shared data pipelines• Following open review of the revised data model, prototype new infrastructure that allows thedemonstration of data mapping, publishing and indexing into new catalogues, developed in an
open manner. This will involve development in the IPT, new data pipelines, APIs and userinterfaces to explore content and communities of data publishers willing to shape data for thepilot. It is envisaged one or more developer workshops will be arranged to encourage more open
development and collaboration (€40K)• Ensure all vocabularies are included in the GBIF Registry and maintained in a collaborative
manner2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Complete the pending 2020 objective and be able to obtain more information andtraining on Frictionless Data.
• Belgium: Further integration of Frictionless Data, EML and Darwin Core, see 2019 tool
Frictionless Darwin Core.
• Brazil: Several ecological datasets were published on the SiBBr platform, and an ecological datarepository was implemented. A continuous effort has been made to improve the visualization ofthese data with the integration of different variables.
• Finland: FinBIF has been actively developing and improving the FinBIF schema also taking into
account it’s compatibility to fit the data standards. FinBIF has applied for the certificate of atrustworthy data repository (Core Trust Seal). Process to meet the requirements is ongoing.
FinBIF has also made preparations to become more FAIR compatible (mostly technicalrequirements).

36

• France: Contribution on the development of new functionalities in the IPT and support to the LA
community.
• iDigBio: iDigBio, GBIF, ALA, and DiSSCo are making a concerted effort to coordinate efforts via
the Collections Data Infrastructures Working Group (CDIWG). iDigBio regularly participates in thecollaborative efforts of GBIF, BCoN, and DiSSCo, among others, to forge a path for
implementation of Extended Specimens.
• Mauritania: site GBIF Mauritania en veuil.
• Spain: Plans: We plan to integrate Plinian Core compliant data in our ALA-based national data
portal; linking species level information based on Plinian Core with occurrence-level data basedon Darwin Core. Progress: Plinian Corespecification and documentation has been refined and put
in a form complaint wit the TDWG SDS. Developments works to integrate Plinian Core into the
ALA architecture are being delayed. We lead de revamp and update of the TDWG’s World
Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD). We participate in the TDWG
"Biological Interactions Interest Group.
• Sweden: 2021: GBIF-Sweden has continued to participate in the ongoing Open Digital Specimen
and Extended Specimen Network standards development. Dissemination of the ODS concept is inprogress locally and nationally. We continue to support and participate in the Living Atlas
community adopting shared data pipelines. We stay updated but do not participate in practice inthe development of the "new IPT". We are prepared to examine and contribute to the pilot.
• Uganda: Data quality remains a key issue due to the different data formats available amongst
stakeholders. Integrated Publishing Toolkit has been applied in the stakeholder data publication
efforts. This was so with technical help from the French node.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: More participation in the Living Atlases community to better understand the newpotential of new data standards.
• Argentina: Complete the pending 2020 objective and be able to obtain more information andtraining on Frictionless Data.
• Belgium: Further exploration of modern data packaging such as Frictionless Data.
• Brazil: Research on tools for ecological data integration will be continued.
• France: Aiming to adopt new data pipelines and contribute to the implementation and testing of
new development. Willing to take part on the developer workshop if possible• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue its partnerships, discussions, and collaborations via CDIWG andBCoN International Partners. iDigBio will also continue to promote data standards andvocabularies via its many training and workforce development activities.
• Mauritania: Plans to collect new biodiversity data and share it with GBIF.
• Spain: To continue standard development works (Plinian Ciore, GeoSchemes, Interactions).
Impulse, develop and complete the integration of Plinian Core into the ALA architecture.
• Sweden: 2022: Still progressing with the setting up of SBDI we will follow, and where appropriate
participate/contribute to data model work and implementation.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: Certainly TDWG members have been part of this effort

37

and will continue to be. As current Chair, I’m also very interested in how we help people
implement and successfully adopt updated, modernized? data standards.
• Uganda: Conduct a data management training for potential data publishers in Uganda.

Activity 2b: Deliver names infrastructure
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
The most significant challenge to improving the quality of aggregated occurrence data is thecontinuing need for a comprehensive checklist of known species, and even for a comprehensive listof published scientific names. Interpreting and mapping names depends on the quality andcompleteness of these resources. Even in cases where names in occurrence records are incorrect or
misspelled, better names infrastructure can assist by increasing confidence that fuzzy matchalgorithms or human intervention is required.
Delivering these resources is the focus of a number of GBIF Participants and other stakeholders,
including the Catalogue of Life partnership, WoRMS, nomenclators (IPNI, Index Fungorum, ZooBank)and many national, regional or taxonomic databases. A comprehensive resource for scientific names
and taxon concepts organized at least as a workable reference classification (but with support for
additional classifications as appropriate) would also benefit other infrastructures, including
Encyclopedia of Life, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Barcode of Life and GBIF nodes, and improve
interoperability between data from these infrastructures. It would also be beneficial toaccommodate vernacular names, informal names for undescribed species and other identifiers suchas Barcode Index Numbers.

2021 Progress
The new Catalogue of Life infrastructure, powered by and hosted at GBIF, was launched in 2021. This
includes a new public website, COL ChecklistBank, and a new API. Monthly releases of COL areavailable and the first annual release committing to use stable record identifiers.
The outstanding development tasks were completed for the Catalogue of Life to resume monthly
releases. This included the introduction of stable identifiers for the taxon names exposed in theCatalogue of Life.
Citation practice based on Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) has been introduced to the datasets that
constitute the Catalogue of Life. The COL Checklist 2021 has been issued with associated DOIs for the
checklist and underlying species data resources.
Development work is still required around the management of user communities within theCatalogue of Life. Once complete, COL and GBIF data management groups can develop thenecessary processes around tasks.
A taxonomy curation pilot project run in collaboration SANBI and Canadensys to update theFabaceae sector of the GBIF taxonomic backbone. Metrics of occurrence data improvement are
being generated.
The March 2021 update of the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy included the work of the Genome

38

Taxonomy Database to improve the Bacteria and Archaea sections. A new edition of the GBIF
backbone will be created during September using the August Catalogue of Life release.
A tool to allow COL data managers to assess the differences between the GBIF and COL taxonomies
when treating occurrence data has been deployed for early testers and will be revised based on
feedback. This will help provide clear priorities on the segments in the taxonomy that require
attention.
The focus of the later part of 2021 is on building and integrating an extended Catalogue of Life in
GBIF as a replacement for the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, partly within the framework of the the EUfunded BiCIKL project. This will include assessing and reporting on gaps for organizing GBIF
occurrence records, and broadening the community of contributors.

2022 Work items• Complete outstanding tasks to integrate the extended Catalogue of Life in GBIF, partly within theframework of the BiCIKL project• Maintain and update processes for constructing the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, including
monitoring the content and helping to prioritize editorial effort. €108,000 has been allocated in
the budget to support GBIF costs. This work is in collaboration with Catalogue of Life.
• Explore feasibility of supporting national taxonomies for exploring GBIF occurrence data tobetter enable national-level reporting (carried over from 2020 and likely to be incomplete in
2021)• Continue and expand the taxonomy curation pilot projects in collaboration with COL and thetaxonomic community.

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Complete the pending 2020 objective.
• Brazil: Some reference lists such as the CITES species list and the invasive species list have been
added to SiBBr national platform, but the taxonomic reference list for microorganisms has not
yet been added.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF developed a protocol for exchanging scientific names among databases in
Taiwan, and is developing a taxonomic information management tool to facilitate the work oftaxonomists and integrate different taxonomic views.
• Finland: FINBIF maintains a national checklist of Finnish species, which is publicly available in the
portal Species.fi. FinBIF gathers up-to-date information about Finnish species into the checklist,
which also functions as a basis for handling observation and specimen data. An annual version of
the checklist was published in January. The checklist is maintained with a tool “TaxonEditor”
developed by FinBIF. Nordic cooperation has been ongoing to harmonize the taxonomy and map
the taxon concepts with tool TaxonID. More info: Piirainen E., Laiho E.-L., von Bonsdorff T., Lahti
T. (2019) Managing taxon data in FinBIF. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3:
e37422. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.37422• France: Update of TAXREF, the French national checklist.
• iDigBio: iDigBio uses the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy in its data ingestion processes.

39• Korea, Republic of: We are continuously updating and correcting the incorrect or misspellednames in occurrence records.
• Netherlands: NLBIF has financially contributed to the development of the new COL and has
funded (30k euro) a new COL application to 1) mobilize national (Dutch) species checklist through
COL, 2) develop training materials on the use of COL, and 3) to expand the Dutch user communityof COL.
• South Africa: Efforts to mobilize taxonomic data and support the names infrastructure has been
conducted.
• Spain: We will continue working on the activities already ongoing in 2020 in this area.
• Sweden: 2021: GBIF-Sweden continues to offer updated versions of national checklist "Dyntaxa"
connected to CoL. Also bringing in Micro-fungi and OTU:s/MOTU:s, Bacteria, and Archaea.
• Switzerland: National checklists registered for Butterflies and forester moths.
• Uganda: Some of the stakeholders have been trained by the BID project on this aspect of work.
• United Kingdom: RBG Kew will continue to work with GBIF/COL+ partnership in providing
nomenclatural and taxonomic data for use in the COL+ infrastructure.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: Correction of the plant species names according to the new Pyrenean reference
system.
• Argentina: Complete the pending 2020 objective.
• Brazil: The reference list for microorganisms should be included in the national platform, in
addition to updating the current lists of species of flora and fauna.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF will expand the current name-based scientific name ID system andintegrate a taxon-based ID system.
• Finland: FinBIF is planning to map the national taxonomy to GBIF backbone taxonomy (COL+).
• France: Publishing of new version of TAXREF.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to use the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy in its data ingestion
processes.
• Mauritania: Develop national taxonomies in order to explore GBIF occurrence data thus enable
reporting at the national level.
• Netherlands: Support the further development of COL where possible.
• South Africa: Efforts to mobilize taxonomic data and support the names infrastructure willcontinue.
• Spain: We participate in the development and maintenance of the national official taxon namelists. We work in coordination with Ministry for the Ecological Transition, and in partnership withother CSIC’s research groups.
• Sweden: 2022: Continued work with checklist data for various groups of organisms.
• Switzerland: Publication of national species checklists for red list groups and important
invertebrate groups (continued).

40• Uganda: To continue supporting the use of Digital Object Identifiers by data publishers in
Uganda.
• United Kingdom: RBG Kew will continue to support GBIF/COL+. We will also release a nameregistration system for vascular plants based on IPNI.

Activity 2c: Catalogue collections
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
Natural history collections are the largest source of data on biodiversity outside nature itself.
Collectively the worlds natural history collections number about 3 billion specimens and document
over 300 years of active human exploration of biodiversity on earth. In addition the fossil remains
provide us with glimpses into the very far past before humans existed. The collections and theirancillary materials (images, collectors’ notes, sequences, measurements, etc.), contain colossal
amounts of data that should be digitized and shared. Only about 10% of the world’s collections havebeen digitized and only a portion of digitized collections are shared publicly through the internet. A
large number of current GBIF publishers comprise natural history museums and herbaria. The
Secretariat will work with Participants to deliver the most comprehensive catalogue possible ofcollections, including metadata to publicize undigitized collections as a first step towards theirdigitization and mobilization.

2021 Progress
The Secretariat created a road map in 2021 for the GBIF Registry of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl),
focusing on the development necessary to allow wider external contribution, and to mature theprocesses around editing. Editors may now be given scoped responsibility at institutional or national
level. Induction webinars have been held with several nodes, resulting in a global team of 45 editorsand 12 mediators actively curating content in the registry as of July 2021. Training videos are being
developed.
The iDigBio collection catalogue is now powered by GRSciColl, through its open APIs. iDigBio data
managers edit directly through the online editing interface.
Documentation for editors is in progress and can be expected in Q3 2021. All GRSciColl fields areassociated with an English-language description available in the online forms. Capabilities for anyone
to suggest a change were deployed in May. Proposed data changes are reviewed by the pool ofeditors and mediators before being applied.
Capability for user interface translations is set up to support multilingual content. Editors andexternal communities in support of the catalogue are invited to propose translations to support theirwork. This has already been taken up by the Society for the Preservation of Natural History
Collections (SPNHC) Biodiversity Crisis Response Committee.
A service has been deployed allowing the linking of collections in GRSciColl to specimen records in
GBIF. This has resulted in 134 million records being linked to GRSciColl entries. A basic data
dashboard is now available for institutions and collections such as this example.
Options for a richer user interface for GRSciColl are being considered within the hosted portal

41

framework (see Activity 1c). There is work remaining on the data model, and how to make best use of
the data clustering to link related data before this can progress. It is anticipated the collections
catalogue user interface will continue into 2022.
Adoption of persistent identifiers, such as Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers is actively
being discussed within European nodes (e.g. through DiSSCo) with some nodes piloting use of ROR
IDs on their entries.
Integration with the CETAF registry remains an objective, but has not yet started due to the effort
required to enable external editors and focus on content issues. It is expected to extend into 2022.
Piloting a profile of the TDWG Collection Descriptions to capture collection-level metadata has also
been delayed and will be considered for 2023.

2022 Work items• Complete outstanding tasks to deploy an enriched GRSciColl providing search and access ofcollections, specimens and people• Focus on content of GRSciColl: cleanup of existing entries and registration of new ones bypromoting use and giving training and support to editors, and promoting consistent use of codes
within data shared• Seek to identify links between journal articles and collections based on the collection codes,
within the framework of the EU-funded BiCIKL project• Support user interface translations for GRSciColl• Carried over from 2020: Explore synchronization of content with the Consortium of European
Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) Registry (under development)

2021 Participant contributions• Andorra: None. This type of data is practically non-existent in Andorra.
• Argentina: Keep working with our catalogue and collaborate with the GRBio / GRSciColl initiative
presented at GBIF.
• Belgium: pilot GRSciColl cleanup for Belgian institutions.
• Brazil: It was not possible to add the DOI on the national platform, but the registration ofcollections on SiBBr was expanded and improved in several aspects, such as the addition of a toolthat enables the monitoring of downloads.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF is developing a web portal for cataloguing the natural history collectionsin Taiwan and sharing their information.
• France: Support with review and metadata about French Biological Collections to GRSciColl.
• iDigBio: iDigBio staff actively participate in TDWG and the Natural Collections Description (NCD)
group. iDigBio is an active partner with GBIF on the global collections registry (GRSciColl).
• Korea, Republic of: KBIF will support other institution to catalogue their natural history
collections, and share the data with GBIF.
• Mauritania: Digitization of several data on halophile plants and wetland biodiversity.

42• Netherlands: NLBIF as DiSSCo-NL national node representative has provided a workshop item
for DiSSCo partners on harmonizing institutional and collection identifiers at GRSciColl as a firststep to start providing full collection descriptions and to monitor digitization progress.
• South Africa: The Natural Science Collections Facility, funded by the Department of Science andTechnology plays a key role in the development of catalogues for collections.
• Spain: Plans: We plan to work in ways to synchronize our Registry and the GBIF Registry of
Scientific Collections (GRSciColl) to make available the most complete, coherent and updated
information through these two outlets. Progress: We are finalizing the updating and publication"National Registry of Natural history Collections and Biodiversity Databases" which will the basefor in turn review and synchronized it with the GRSciColl.
• Sweden: 2021: Discussion over GRSciColl contribution has been held locally but not yet reachedpractical work level. Swedish Museum of Natural History (SMNH; SBDI’s and GBIF-Sweden´sprincipal organization) member of CETAF.
• Uganda: The Fresh water occurrence data sets are being digitized and published in the National
freshwater biodiversity data portal.

2022 Participant plans• Argentina: Coordinate and improve the data of the institutions / collections / staff of Argentina
in the GRSciColl.
• Belgium: Maintain GRSciColl for Belgian institutions and collections.
• Brazil: Continue the registration of collections with an evaluation to improve the metadata
completion form by curators.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF will continue the web portal development.
• Finland: FinBIF is improving the findability of metadata by providing a publicly available
catalogue for metadata search - so far the metadata, although open data, has not been easilybrowsed or searched except in a closed system (collection management system). Also theprocess for improving the quality of metadata is ongoing in various collections.
• France: Continue support with review and metadata about French Biological Collections to
GRSciColl.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to support TDWG and the Natural Collections Description (NCD)
group. iDigBio will continue to work with GBIF on the global collections registry.
• Netherlands: NLBIF as DiSSCo-NL national node representative will provide guidance to the
Dutch DiSSCo partners on mobilizing collection description data to GRSciColl following the TDWG
CD (Collection Description) and CETAF passport metadata standards.
• South Africa: The Natural Science Collections Facility, funded by the Department of Science andTechnology plays a key role in the development of catalogues for collections, and this willcontinue.
• Spain: To review and synchronize the "National Registry of Natural history Collections andBiodiversity Databases" with the GRSciColl.
• Sweden: 2022: Continued effort to mobilize Swedish natural history collections to add
information to GRSciColl, linking also to publications. Swedish Museum of Natural History (SMNH;

43

SBDI’s and GBIF-Sweden´s principal organization) member of CETAF.
• Switzerland: Update and completion of GRSciColl Swiss institutional records at collection level(joint survey with SwissCollNet).
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: Of course, TDWG members have been actively working
on the Collection Descriptions (CD) standard to support this much-needed metadata. We lookforward to seeing it implemented and supporting its further development.
• Uganda: More data to be digitized and utilized in the conservation decision making in Uganda.

Priority 3: Fill Data Gaps
Prioritize and promote mobilization of new data resources which combine with existing
resources to maximize the coverage, completeness and resolution of GBIF data, particularly
with respect to taxonomy, geography and time.

Activity 3a: Identify priority gaps
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
GBIF has a range of tools, including fitness-for-use groups, other community consultations, feedback
channels, direct communication with authors of scientific studies, and societal demands, to identify
and collect data needs. Addressing data gaps may require focus on gaining additional occurrence
records, targeting data areas missing from published records, or getting additional metadata
elements. By consolidating and prioritizing demands for data content, in the context of alreadyaccessible data and knowledge of resources which are not yet available as open data, GBIF will bepositioned to inform collection and data holders, funding institutions and political decision makers ofthe most worthwhile and cost-effective ways to extend the available knowledge base.

2021 Progress
Analytics work in 2021 focused on the exploration of taxonomic gaps, checking for areas in GBIFmediated occurrences that are insufficiently mapped to the Catalogue of Life (CoL). No major areas
were discovered, most gaps being detected in the area of Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs)
rather than Linnean taxonomy. Minor results in that area were fed back to CoL’s issue tracking
system.
Updated guidance on prioritizing data mobilization based on analysis of data gaps was beingcommissioned in 2021 as part of the GBIF documentation programme (see Activity 1b). This guidance
will take account of previous work carried out by the Secretariat during the current implementation
period to analyse gaps and biases in data available through GBIF.org, such as those reported to the2020 regional meetings and documented in the GBIF data blog.
The Secretariat continued to work with the Knowledge and Data Task Force of theIntergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to
catalyse investment in priority research and data mobilization to address knowledge gaps identified44

in the IPBES assessment process. This will include participation in a series of regional dialogues withresearch funders and programmers, to identify potential funding sources to address data gaps.
In the context of discussions on the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework carried out throughthe Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Secretariat has begun discussions with partners
including the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) and Map ofLife (MoL) on how indicators of data completeness may be used to prioritize data mobilization,
supporting information targets under the new framework (see Activity 5c).

2022 work items• Publish updated best practices on prioritizing data mobilization based on data gap analysis, forincorporation into guidance for nodes and data publishers• Explore the use of data gap analysis to prioritize support for data mobilization through funded
programmes coordinated by GBIF, and to document the value added by existing projects• Work with partners to address the information needs of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity
Framework through filling priority data gaps, including for those countries not yet participatingin GBIF

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Continue with the publication of the national inventory of biodiversity and national
lists of species. On the other hand, it is expected to feed the national portal with these national
listings.
• Brazil: As there are long-term research programs in Brazil, covering different geographic
regions, an effort was made to publish these data on SiBBr, with training and help desk directed
at researchers. Other researchers working with viruses also had training on structuring andstandardizing data on DwC.
• Finland: FinBIF has prioritized sharing the sensitive and restricted-use data to decision makers.
The data is provided to public authorities through a separate portal in which all the data isavailable to the same extent as it is stored in the data warehouse. The use of this portal requires
authorization.
• France: We are working on the connection of DEPOBIO, the official national platform forEnvironmental Impact Assessment (EIA) data to GBIF.
• iDigBio: iDigBio has been working internally and with GBIF to ensure that all data ingested in
iDigBio are also ingested in GBIF.
• South Africa:Continued engagement of SANBI-GBIF on IPBES task force to support knowledge
gaps. Also, the Node will continue efforts to mobilize data through stakeholder engagement.
FBIP initiative to continue funding data generation and filling of knowledge and data gaps.
• Spain: Plans: Besides continuing the activities with the private sector and environmental
administrations, we plan to recover and activate the participation of collections in the light ofinitiatives such as Synthesys , DiSSCo and CETAF; and increase the involvement of the LTER
Community in GBIF though our participation in the eLTER RI projects (eLTER Plus and eLTER PPP)
Progress: Work goes according to plan
• Sweden: 2021: Started work on preparing and publishing information about taxonomically45

underrepresented groups (primarily micro-organisms) from hitherto unavailable datasets.
• Uganda: The priority has been on embracing open data principles in the Ugandan Public
institutions and this is still ongoing.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: We must first collect the potential data from the different Andorran administrations tobe able to identify the gaps.
• Argentina: Continue with the publication of the national inventory of biodiversity and national
lists of species. On the other hand, it is expected to feed the national portal with these national
listings.
• Brazil: A survey of biological collections in Brazil is in progress, which will be used for a gap
analysis, geographical and temporal, with support from the CESP Project “The role of ZoologicalCollections Networks to enhance and fill taxonomic and geographic gaps in open accessdatabases”• France: Continuing the activities with the private sector and environmental administrations, andpursue the links with the actors of DiSSCo and GEO BON at national level.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue its work to expand knowledge of what is contained withincollections. iDigBio will continue to work to ensure that all data ingested in iDigBio are also
ingested in GBIF.
• Korea, Republic of: Data gap discovery will be constantly carried out for the data from National
Science Museum and some other KBIF data providers.
• South Africa: IPBES task force work to continue including discussions on knowledge catalysis
and data management plans.
• Spain: Same as 2021 plus our targeted contacts with private sector, administrations and LTER
researchers, to be expanded with the inclusion of the remote sensing community• Sweden: 2022: Continued work with OTU:s and more - and larger - sets of monitoring data will be
provided. Updating already present collections datasets is another priority of GBIF-Sweden unfortunately slightly neglected due to the heavy focus on organizing SBDI during the recent
time period.
• Uganda: To contribute to the finalization of the Open data policy for Uganda as we support theestablishment of the one stop centre for all freshwater biodiversity data and information for
Uganda.

Activity 3b: Expand data streams
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
GBIF serves as an integration point for any source of evidence of the recorded occurrence of species
in time and space. A primary role for the GBIF infrastructure is to serve as a comprehensive single
point of access for discovery, access, use and curation of all such evidence. Several classes of data
are already well-supported within the GBIF network.
These include collections data, observations from field research, and many categories of citizen

46

science data. However, there are other new and developing streams of data which should beaccommodated if GBIF is to serve as the platform for supporting comprehensive data assessmentand modelling (e.g. for GEO BON Essential Biodiversity Variables, IPBES assessments, Red List
assessments, etc.). These include efforts to mine historical data records from literature, genomics
activities and particularly barcode-driven surveys, and potentially species-level data from remotesensing systems. More work is also still needed to engage with the full spread of research activities
delivering sampling event data of various kinds. GBIF needs to ensure that it provides simple,
effective and beneficial ways for researchers to share these and other streams of Darwin Core
compatible data.

2021 Progress
The guide to Publishing DNA-derived data has been released in its final version with theaccompanying Darwin Core extension. During the remainder of 2021 GBIF will work with early
adopters in preparing data following the guidelines. Mobilization of DNA-derived data was a priority
in selection of the projects funded through the latest call under the Biodiversity Information For Asia
(BIFA) - see Activity 1g. New training resources combining skills needed for DNA barcoding and GBIF
data mobilization were developed and tested during 2021, for rollout in workshops planned underthe BioDATA programme later in 2021 and 2022.
Efforts in 2021 to expand the mobilization of ecological datasets through GBIF included discussions
with the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) on the establishment of arepository for sampling-event datasets from individual researchers that would be published throughGBIF. These discussions are connected with GBIF’s involvement in the Humboldt Core task group in
TDWG exploring improved standards for exchanging data on species inventories. The Secretariat
also engaged with the EuropaBON and Tropical Andes Observatory projects to improve connections
between GBIF and biodiversity monitoring activities in Europe and South America, respectively. The
Secretariat was also invited to join the IUCN Species Survival Commission Species Monitoring
Specialist Group.
During 2021, the Secretariat developed a framework for running data mobilization campaigns basedon thematic data streams, including engagement of expert groups, identification of potential
mobilization targets, and help desk services to support data formatting and publication incollaboration with nodes. Specific mechanisms are being trialled with regard to data on disease
vectors and hosts, as well as soil biodiversity data (see Activity 5b), and data mobilized through theprivate sector (see Activity 3c).

2022 Work items• Building on the framework developed in 2021, establish data mobilization campaigns for
additional thematic data streams (possibly freshwater, DNA-derived data and tropicalbiodiversity) - €40k.
• Seek supplementary funding to support scaling up of support for thematic data mobilization
throughout the GBIF nodes network (see also Activity 3c)• Continue working with partners to increase mobilization and improve visibility of biodiversity
monitoring datasets in GBIF

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2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Continue with the promotion of the use of sampling event data model for ecologicaland monitoring datasets• Brazil: Campaigns were carried out to publish long-term research data on SiBBr, with pages forthese datasets• Finland:◦ PROTAX, ASI◦ GGBN◦ Red list assessment◦ Invasive alien species◦ R-package◦ Earth Cape
• iDigBio: iDigBio hosted a virtual workshop “Linking and Leveraging Biological Collections: Zoos
and Natural History Museums” on 3-5 May 2021 that brought together representatives fromliving animal collections (zoos), traditional animal preserved specimen collections (natural history
museums), universities, a botanical garden, and others.
• Spain: Plans: Without abandoning current and consolidated data strings, we plan to focus on
LTER communities. Progress: Work goes according to plan.
• Sweden: 2021: Preparations were made by SBDI/GBIF-Sweden to mobilize DNA-derived data,
including training needed for DNA barcoding and GBIF data mobilization. Another data stream
receiving attention by GBIF-Sweden refers to individual ecological research datasets.
• Uganda: There is positive coordination among the Clearing House Mechanism under theConvention on Biological diversity with GBIF mediated platforms to harvest data from all possible
sources for decision making.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: Start working with partners to increase mobilization and improve visibility of
biodiversity monitoring datasets in GBIF.
• Argentina: Continue with the promotion of the use of sampling event data model for ecologicaland monitoring datasets.
• Belgium: DNA-derived data project with other francophone nodes.
• Brazil: Several partnerships will be maintained with the group of researchers working withviruses and their hosts, with the publication of these datasets on SiBBr. It is expected to advancein the articulation with the private sector, seeking the publication of data from inventories andassessments of biodiversity.
• France: We would like to rely on the new training resources combining skills needed for DNA
barcoding and GBIF data mobilization to organize a workshop in 2022 for francophone
participants.
• Korea, Republic of: Illustrated books using KBIF taxonomic data with images has published 248

books in 2021.
• Netherlands: NLBIF has funded two projects, one on mobilizing bat sound data and another onmobilizing MOVEBANK data to GBIF.
• Spain: Adding the Remote Sensing Community to our portfolio of biodiversity data streams
poorly represented to be targeted and incorporated into GBIF.
• Sweden: 2022: In addition to continued work of aforementioned topics, long-term forest
inventories data (starting in the early 20th century) will be presented in 2022.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: TDWG will continue work via the Humboldt Core task
group in TDWG exploring improved standards for exchanging data on species inventories.
• Uganda: Continued cooperation and collaboration with all stakeholders.

Activity 3c: Engage data holders
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
GBIF has tools and support mechanisms in place to enable publication of several categories of
biodiversity data. The key requirement is for increased engagement with, and support for, thecommunities of institutions and individuals who hold these data. Such engagement is normally mosteffective at the national level, although international networks also have an important role to play.

2021 Progress
The Secretariat has continued to engage with nodes and external partners to support sharing of datafrom the private sector, in particular through monitoring activities connected with environmental
and social impact assessments. An updated guide on publishing primary biodiversity data throughimpact assessments was published in partnership with the International Association for Impact
Assessment (IAIA).
The Data4Nature initiative, designed in partnership with Agence Française de Développement (AFD)to engage development finance actors in sharing of biodiversity data, achieved visibility during thevirtual meeting of the CBD Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI3) with support from theEuropean Union’s delegation to the CBD, and further buy-in for this initiative was planned for the
IUCN World Conservation Congress taking place in Marseille in September 2021. Interest in
supporting this initiative and other activities focused on mobilizing private sector data through GBIF
has come from the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) throughthe Proteus Partnership, bringing together corporations in the oil, gas and mining sectors.

2022 Work items• Building on preparatory work and partnerships developed in 2021, scale up mobilization ofprimary biodiversity data from the private sector, through the Data4Nature initiative andestablishment of help desk services• Engage additional sectoral associations, financial and other initiatives to integrate biodiversity
data-sharing commitments into best practices for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) or
regulatory requirements49

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Keep promoting the CNC. Keep promoting the CC through RICAP and National Node
• Brazil: We have not made significant progress with the private sector. Regarding citizen sciencedata, a tutorial interface was created encouraging the sharing of records through the use of theiNaturalist application.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF has been working closely and holding monthly meetings with five major
data holders/users in Taiwan through Taiwan Biodiversity Information Association, which will be
officially established after signing a MOU among the six organizations/agencies on September
29, 2021.
• Finland: FinBIF has launched a service “Data Bank” which consists of tools for data holders sothat they can easily share their data to FinBIF. FinBIF has also started cooperation with Finnish
municipalities - almost 70 have already signed an agreement to start using the Public Authorities
Portal.
• France: GBIF France is involved in the discussions with the French development agency (AFD) and
the GBIF Secretariat in the Data4nature initiative. We organized a training session in august for
AFD staff and will take part of the event at the IUCN World Conservation Congress taking place inMarseille in September 2021 Due to the pandemic, we organized the webinar for the private
sector linked with the CESP project “OpenPSD - Engage and promote the private sector” led by
GBIF Spain in early 2021.
• iDigBio: Data mobilization is a core activity of iDigBio, including reaching out to collections.
• International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Support publishers from theHKH countries- probably next batch of BIFA grantee from the HKH countries Endorsed research
proposal for two BIFA applicants. Publish ICIMOD based biodiversity data from different
landscape initiatives. Published 3 datasets from HILIFE landscape and 1 from individual dataholder from Nepal. A checklist of Mistletoes of Nepal. List of Medicinal Plants of Gaoligong
Mountains. Native Orchids of Gaoligong Mountains Amphibia and Reptilia of Yunnan. Provide
technical services to data publishers in the HKH countries as required- in relation to data
publishing in HKH-BIF. Supported BIFA grantee from Nepal to publish six datasets on
Mushrooms and Lichens via HKHBIF. Lichens Flora of Nepal at Central Department of Botany,
Tribhuvan University, Nepal Lichens Flora of Nepal at National Herbarium and Plant
Laboratories (KATH) Lichens Flora of Nepal at Natural History Museum, Tribhuvan University,
Nepal http://rds.icimod.org:8080/hkh-bif/resource?r=lichens_nhm Mushrooms Flora of Nepal atCentral Department of Botany, Tribhuvan University, Nepal Mushrooms Flora of Nepal at
National Herbarium and Plant Laboratories (KATH)

Mushrooms Flora of Nepal at Natural

History Museum• Netherlands: NLBIF has assisted several new data publishers to mobilize their biodiversity data
among which a private sector ecological consulting partner.
• South Africa: SANBI-GBIF and the Systematics Division will implement the 2021 Foundational
Biodiversity Information Management Forum FBIP Forum, which is a key event to engage thedata holders in the community. This will be virtual for 2021 and will be a series of smaller
engagements.
• Spain: Plans: We plan to maintain connections made within OpenPSD and --building upon it-expand participation of private sector in GBIF. Collaborating with other GBIF nodes and50Secretariat is a given. Progress: Besides maintaining contacts and support with partners identify
during the OpenPSD Project, we maintained contacts and discussions with GBIFS (Goodson,
Copas) regarding involvement of private sector in GBIF and future plans.
• Sweden: 2021: By teaming up in a unified organization (SBDI), a considerable number of”lukewarm” providers have a stronger commitment to arrange, standardize and begin publishingdata with SBDI and thus GBIF-Sweden. This includes governmental agencies, universities (mainly
individual researchers but also monitoring programmes run on behalf of agencies). We have notyet seriously confronted private or semi-private data holders but expect to start doing this in thenear future. Yet, we have to be cautious not to interfere very strongly with the publicconservation management sector in Sweden since this domain has so far by itself and by various
responsible agencies been expected to be indigenously run a in parallel to GBIF using
idiosyncratic tools for data publication and extraction/analysis. As SBDI we now have themandate to become ”the major, single gateway to Swedish biodiversity data”.
• Uganda: Data holders are encouraged through online help desk support and information
sharing.

2022 Participant plans• Argentina: Keep promoting the CNC and the GSB. Keep promoting the CC through RICAP andNational Node
• Belgium: Engage with Belgian data holders to mobilize DNA-derived data
• Brazil: Mobilization for citizen science data, as well as from the private sector should be
expanded.
• Chinese Taipei: The association plans to recruit more data holders in Taiwan.
• France: We plan to maintain connections made within OpenPSD and AFD and building upon it,
expand participation of private sector in GBIF.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue its ongoing data mobilization efforts.
• International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: in 2022, we will promote HKHBIF
data publishing platform to data holders and also motivate experts, students, and citizens toshare information about biodiversity via HKHBIF web platform and contribute stories, researchhighlight, pictures, species of the month and more.
• Netherlands: NLBIF continues to expand the GBIF network through regular node activities andfinancial support through the NLBIF-call.
• South Africa: Pending COVID outcomes the annual Forum will continue either in person or
virtual.
• Spain: To continue 2021 activities in this regard.
• Sweden: 2022: GBIF-Sweden is aware of many data holders which will be approached in due time
but as described for 2021, we need to continue soliciting ourselves as SBDI and motivating ourexistence before being fully accepted by all potential providers. GBIF-Sweden has been accepted
but with some suspicion from several sides: collections managers have always complained –without realizing that the responsibility is in fact mainly theirs – about data quality issues,
whereas environmentalists have seen GBIF-Sweden – again without being aware of the realsituation - as serving mainly collections managers and researchers with far too sophisticated data51

for their meaningful use. During the entire period of the present Node Manager holding his
position (2009-2021) he has constantly struggled to convince both sides to accept the other!
• Switzerland: Publication of DNA-derived datasets. Coordinated activities with SwissBOL and
InfoSpecies.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: Hm. Via TaxonWorks and the Species File Group,
certainly I’m in the position of helping to engage data holders to share their data (collections,nomenclature, trait data, etc). And, in this role of Chair of TDWG, certainly we’re involved in trying
to encourage and expand data contributors.
• Uganda: This will continue and more data holders will be brought on board.

Activity 3d: Rescue datasets
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
Many researchers hold potentially valuable data which are not yet in a suitable digital format for
integration into GBIF. Historical publications are a similar source of valuable data which remain
inaccessible. This offers an opportunity to establish a community platform to capture information onsuch datasets where the researcher or owner lacks the time or capability to make the data available
as a GBIF-compatible dataset, and to enable interested individuals to volunteer time to collaborate
with the owner to publish a dataset, potentially in conjunction with a data paper credited to allparties. Such a model may address a key bottleneck in bringing valuable data online.

2021 Progress
Converting the growing collection of suggested datasets, submitted through the user interface, iswork in progress, with most of the 228 entries (as of July 2021) categorized for geographic coverage,
country of origin, and broader subject area. All entries are available in the adjoined GitHub
repository, and relate to data from and about 40 countries, including datasets with a wider
geographic scope.
Support for the uptake and data mobilization by the wider GBIF community requires re-evaluation ofthis work program item in the second half of 2021. With wide variations in the level of detail suppliedwith submissions, prioritization remains a major challenge, and requires more in-depth evaluation ofindividual suggestions. A more targeted approach, working with nodes and thematic communities
interested in the uptake of suggestions (see Activity 3b), is required to make more efficient use of theresources available.

2022 Work items• Continue to implement workflow for prioritizing and drawing upon potential data sources
reported through the ‘suggest a dataset’ tool, including involvement of nodes, mentors andcrowdsourced solutions (carried over from 2021)• Based on the outcome of the re-evaluation, work with interested parties to roll out a workflow forprocessing data mobilization requests arising from the ‘suggest a dataset’ tool52

2021 Participant contributions• Brazil: This activity had no progress.
• Finland: FinBIF has mapped out valuable datasets and has continued the work to store them inthe database.
• iDigBio: iDigBio hosts the Small Collections Network and participated in the Organization of
Biological Field Stations annual meeting.
• Spain: Plans: Using our National Registry of Biodiversity Collections and Databases, we plan toreview, check and help those not publishing data, or that published long time ago to update their
participation in GBIF. Progress: National Registry of Biodiversity Collections and Databases,
reviewed and updated. Collaborations with GBIFS in tracking and finding about the situation of
inactive data publishers• Sweden: 2021: No targeted activity within this field at present – but as described under 3c
individually approached researchers known to hold valuable/interesting data are approached
and asked to consider spending the extra effort needed to arrange and standardize ”old” data for
publication. In fact this is urgently needed as researchers retire, but also very time- and effortconsuming.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: Start to implement workflow for prioritizing and drawing upon potential data sources.
• Brazil: For the next year we hope to bring data from several collections that do not have theirdatasets available. An ongoing national survey will contribute to get data from different
stakeholders.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to provide digitization and workforce development activities andevents that are open to all. iDigBio will also continue to provide assistance with digitization, data
standardization, and data mobilization within the scope of its mission.
• Spain: To Issue National Registry of Biodiversity Collections and Database in various forms andreview activity levels of data publisher.
• Sweden: 2022: Continued efforts approaching researchers and other data holders as describedfor 2021, but not highly prioritized in spite of some urgency.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: Again, as TDWG, we’re in a support role. But from a
TaxonWorks perspective, we’re certainly involved in rescuing datasets that would otherwise
languish.
• Uganda: Plans to have a citizen science program envisaged.

Activity 3e: Liaise with journals
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
Journals are the traditional established avenues for scientific communication. They not only
disseminate research findings and other scholarly communications but are increasingly helping todisseminate research data. These data may be provided as supplementary materials or deposited inbiodiversity data repositories as a precondition for publication of the paper. However, such data53

publishing data does not necessarily facilitate its integration with other related data or make thedata discoverable and reusable. In order to benefit from data disseminated through journals, theSecretariat will lead or coordinate activity to engage directly with publishing houses, journal editors
and authors to promote GBIF-compatible approaches to publication and the use of GBIF-operated
repositories as accepted or preferred destinations for supporting data.

2021 Progress
Following the successful funding of the Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library(BiCIKL) grant through the European Union Horizon 2020 programme, the Secretariat begancollaboration with partners Pensoft Publishers and Plazi to improve integration of data extracted
from research literature (see also Activity 2a).
As use of GBIF-mediated data tracked by the Secretariat in research articles continued to increase,the quality of citations passed a significant milestone in 2021, with 50% of articles now correctly
citing the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) provided with data downloads. The use of DOIs in citations
is expected to improve further with the introduction of a new tool to generate DOIs from derived
datasets cited by researchers following further filtering or cleaning of data downloaded from
GBIF.org, or accessed via public cloud services (see Activity 4a).
Following the successful call in 2020 for sponsored data papers mobilizing data from European
Russia, using supplementary funds provided by the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility (FinBIF),
the model was repeated with a second call for Russian-based papers in 2021, and planned as ameans of mobilizing datasets relating to vectors, hosts and reservoirs of human diseases (SeeActivity 5b).

2022 Work items• In consultation with journal publishers, explore solutions to enable academic authors to submit
and publish datasets to GBIF alongside research articles• Further develop the model for sponsored data papers, in connection with mobilization
campaigns from thematic data streams• Continue BiCIKL collaboration to improve integration of data extracted from research literature

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Continue promoting the publication of data papers in Argentine journals.
• Brazil: This activity made no progress in 2021.
• Finland: Articles published recently:◦ Schulman, Leif; Lahti, Kari; Piirainen, Esko; Heikkinen, Mikko; Raitio, Olli; Juslén Aino (2021).
The Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility as a best-practice model for biodiversity data
infrastructures. Scientific Data doi: 10.1038/s41597-021-00919-6.
◦ Hyvärinen M-T, Väinölä R, Väre H, Ståhls-Mäkelä G, Sihvonen P, Kuusijärvi A, Myllys L, Kröger
B, Heikkinen M, Juslén A, Oinonen M, Schulman L (2020) General Collections Policy of theFinnish Museum of Natural History. Research Ideas and Outcomes 6: e58167. https://doi.org/
10.3897/rio.6.e58167

54• iDigBio: iDigBio is continuing to develop and refine citation guidance for data obtained from its
portal, which is available in the iDigBio Portal.
• Netherlands: The NLBIF node manager/DiSSCo-NL NN has accepted the role of liaison officer for
the European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT). This European open source taxonomic journal is looking(among others) for mechanisms to persistently link specimen derived data shared through GBIF
and DiSSCo in taxonomic treatments.
• Spain: Idem 2020
• Sweden: 2021: GBIF-Sweden continuously encourage data holders (including potential providers)to publish in Open Access publications, and to always prepare data papers to enhance dataset
visibility. We also point out the significance of, and expect correct usage of DOI:s for citation
purposes.
• Uganda: No progress.

2022 Participant plans• Argentina: Continue promoting the publication of data papers in Argentine journals.
• Brazil: TBD• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to update and refine its citation guidance in response to user
feedback.
• Korea, Republic of: Biodiversity research paper using the mobilized KBIF data has published in
JAPB (Journal of Asia Pacific Biodiversity) published by National Science Museum of Korea.
• Netherlands: Continue as liaison officer for EJT.
• Spain: Idem 2020.
• Sweden: 2022: Work is in progress, but again not a high priority (e.g. we have not committed
ourselves to BiCIKL) due to our primary focus on organizational matters with SBDI.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: TDWG works closely with Pensoft and has been
contributing some needs (e.g. supporting multi-language publishing, using bioschemas toimprove discoverability) and will be holding our joint 2022 Conference with BiCIKL.
• Uganda: This will be explored as well.

Priority 4: Improve Data Quality
Activity 4a: Ensure data persistence
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
There exists a significant portion of data available through GBIF.org that is not actively curated by adata host. In some cases, there are no resources or desire to make further edits to the datasets.
These datasets are effectively orphaned and the GBIF.org version of the dataset is often the lastremaining version available on the internet. As GBIF develops mechanisms to provide feedback todata publishers and support curation of datasets, we need to consider that these orphaned datasets
will not be updated with corrections or migrated to adhere to modern data standards.

55

2021 Progress
Work earlier in the current implementation period addressed the issue of orphaned datasets, with amajor effort to ensure that datasets no longer connected to their original host were transferred to a'live' version that could be successfully crawled by the Secretariat, with many nodes 'adopting' thesedatasets for the purposes of hosting and curation.
Following open discussion on the Community Forum, GBIF now provides monthly exports of GBIF
occurrence records and makes them available on Microsoft Azure in the Planetary Computer and on
Amazon AWS as Public Datasets. Tutorials and guides have been developed, and support will begiven to early adopters. The Secretariat anticipates that GBIF-mediated data will be available in asimilar manner on the Google Cloud, and made available in Google BigQuery during Q3 2020.
When implementing the new service for exports to cloud environments, the Secretariat was very
conscious of the risk of losing the connection between uses of GBIF-mediated data and the data
publishers whose records are included in applications using these services. To address this, a new
citation tool was developed in support of the cloud data services, known as the Derived Dataset
service. This ensure users of cloud environments, or after further filtering of any GBIF download, canstill provide a DOI-based citation for the content used (see Activity 3e).
GBIF has been accepted as a Data Provider within the European Open Science Cloud. The
Secretariat will now explore opportunities to strengthen integration of the GBIF network within thewider European research data infrastructures.

2022 Work items• Support adopters of cloud technologies for accessing GBIF-mediated data, and revise proceduresand formats as necessary.
• Explore opportunities to strengthen integration of the GBIF network within research data
infrastructures

2021 Participant contributions• Brazil: For institutions that do not updated their data for a significant time, a diagnosis was madeand it was verified that one of the problems was not updating the IPT version. Thus, for these
institutions, the datasets were migrated to the SiBBr’s IPT.
• France: We spread the news on the new service for exports to cloud environments. Currently weare not directly involved in EOSC activities but we are working with people involved in EOSC
projects.
• iDigBio: iDigBio offers a Strategic Planning online short course twice per year - one targeted at
herbaria, and the other targeted at all biodiversity collections. The goal is to produce a strategicplan for each represented collection, including vision, mission, stakeholders, strategies, values,
goals, objectives, evaluation, and sustainability, among other things.
• Spain: We will reactivate this activity set taking into account the lessons learned. Progress: We
refined the way our supported applications provide persistent identifiers to occurrence data andother data elements handled and relevant for biodiversity data management.
• Sweden: 2021: GBIF-Sweden do not publish any orphaned datasets – although we have noted56some that were not recently updated by the provider. In the latter situation the provider has
been contacted. We are aware of further providers that need to be pushed for updates. We havenot searched for, nor received information regarding ’Derived datasets´citations.
• Uganda: There has been no progress regarding orphaned datasets.
• United Kingdom: Nicky’s work will continue until March. hopefully she will be able to spend timein Copenhagen with the GBIF team. Unfortunately this work was delayed by COVID.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: Identified orphaned datasets.
• Brazil: The work of migrating the datasets of institutions that do not update their IPT will be
continued in the next year
• France: Strengthen integration of the GBIF network within research data infrastructures is ofgreat interest and we are eager to collaborate with fellow nodes and Secretariat in this area.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to refine its data mobilization efforts and workflows. iDigBio willcontinue it work with the community on strategies and solutions for long-term data storage.
• Spain: To launch a campaign among GBIF Spain data providers to increase the proportion ofrecords that are published in GBIF with persistent identifiers assigned in origin.
• Sweden: 2022: As part of our SBDI data mobilization strategy we will continue to push providers
and update datasets as required.
• United Kingdom: Nicky Nicolson will continue working with GBIF staff on the resolution of
duplicates and hopefully spend time with the GBIF team in Copenhagen.

Activity 4b: Assess data quality
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
Assessing data quality includes applying data validation tools to capture and monitor suspected andconfirmed errors and ambiguities in data, highlighting useful areas for additional information(metadata and qualifiers) that would improve usability and enhance processing options, anddocumenting completeness and standardization of information both within a dataset and withinaggregated data. A number of validation tools exist in the wider community, and should be brought
together to mutually profit from investments and to more efficiently plan future distributed
development efforts. This will benefit data publication frameworks as well as individual data holders,giving concrete feedback on best gains in data management.

2021 Progress
Documentation to support better and more targeted interpretation of issue labels has been
continued from 2020. A popular post in the GBIF data blog from October 2020 on "Issues and Flags",
supporting the interpretation and proposed action on diagnosed data issues, is at the centre ofcommunications and further planning. The post has been maintained through additions in 2021, andwill be part of the technical documentation under development (see Activity 1d). Other components
are development of training resources and materials targeted to alert data users to post-processing

57requirements when using GBIF-mediated data.
Ongoing work in 2021 on aligning the GBIF data validator tool with the GBIF.org data processing
pipeline, will be supplemented with a community consultation on data validator functionality fromQ3 2021.
GBIF participates in the EU-funded DiSSCo Prepare project, supporting the group with data exports
to assess existing content. This has included the creation of a DiSSCo network entity to easily
download the related content that is shared from the European institutions, and support for using
Google BigQuery to assess the current Minimum Information about a Digital Specimen (MIDS) levelof content. The current focus is on assessing the level of completeness of data shared by institutions,with clear guidelines of what level of information needs to be provided to achieve the next level ofMIDS.

2022 Work items• Implement improvements to data validation reports identified in community consultation• Promote integration of the data validator in tools connected to GBIF, including the IPT, throughuse of the validator API

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Training workshops in different areas of the country for data providers. Permanent
help desk in the publication and data quality. Participation on a CESP project of Data Quality.
• Brazil: This activity made no progress in this year.
• Finland: In addition to the process to assign each dataset with a quality label, FinBIF has
introduced an annotation system in which users can annotate observations in Species.fi portal.
All registered users of Species.fi can make annotations. In addition, experts have more rights tomake annotations that affect the visibility of observations. Read more of the quality.
• France: GBIF France help to run data quality tests before publishing datasets through GBIF. We
organized data mobilization workshops including data quality and promotion of the data
validator.
• Korea, Republic of: Data gap discovery will be carried out, and constantly updating andcorrecting the KBIF data.
• Netherlands: NLBIF has supervised a MSc student who analysed GBIF download records in order
the assess the use and importance of predicates. One of the key findings was that the presenceof geographical coordinates without geospatial issues (flag) is among the most.
• Spain: plans: Continuing with the Darwin-Test checking of datasets and training workshops as
the normal operations of the Spanish Node. Progress: According to plan.
• Sweden: 2021: Assuring and maintaining data quality is still primarily considered by GBIFSweden to be the responsibility of the providers, feedback in regard to issues found by users
being forwarded manually to contacts at host institutions.We have not in our planning expected
to take any measures to automatize such information loops but look forward to the integrationof the data validator in tools connected to GBIF, including the IPT, using the validator API.
• Uganda: Data providers are urged to ensure the fitness for use of their datasets582022 Participant plans• Andorra: None. We must first take stock of our data.
• Argentina: Training workshops in different areas of the country for data providers. Permanent
help desk in the publication and data quality. Participation on a CESP project of Data Quality.
• Brazil: Tutorials on the data quality tools available in the Living Atlas infrastructure will be madeavailable and disseminated.
• Finland: FinBIF will improve automatic validations of the data.
• France: GBIF France will continue to run data quality tests before publishing datasets throughGBIF. We can test the integration of the data validator in tools connected to GBIF if needed.
• Netherlands: Further implement the use of "Issues and Flags" to improve the data quality.
• Spain: Same as 20212: this is an ongoing core operation performed continuously.
• Sweden: 2022: GBIF-Sweden plans to contact and inform existing data providers about the
progress regarding the GBIF data validator tool but primarily for the time being, such matterswill continue to be dealt with via the support system developed within the SBDI.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: TDWG members are interested in data quality (as in'adherence to standards' or not). I’m particularly interested in how we can implement the BDQ
tests and assertions "locally" to improve and standardize data before it gets to the aggregator.
We plan to do this (as much as is feasible) in TaxonWorks. It would be good to continue to pursue
how to show those who generate these data, what it 'looks like' in their world. (e.g. "What do[paleo, your group here] folks put in this field?")• Uganda: Support the need to transform mobilized primary data into information and knowledge
products.

Activity 4c: Enable data curation
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
In a global network, curation of the shared data pool is increasingly becoming a joint responsibilityof aggregators, publishers, experts and data users. The goal is to integrate corrections,improvements, additional information and analysis results in a timely manner, with better visibility to
all network participants and data users. Expanding the existing knowledge base requires improved
communication channels and workflows for collaboration between all actors, tools to capture andrapidly display new or improved information, commentary and data, and not least tools, credit
systems and support to engage expert activities.

2021 Progress
Feedback received during the 2021 consultation on digital extended specimens through the alliancefor biodiversity knowledge (see Activity 1f) supported the need for GBIF to accommodate a more
expressive data model for specimens, and to consider how communities can assist in annotating,linking and cleaning data (see also Activity 2a). This will help to inform GBIF’s future work on enablingdata curation.

59

Further work on the data validator tool in 2021 (see Activity 4b) will flag issues with stable persistent
resolvable identifiers, supporting data curation.
The data clustering algorithm developed in 2020 has gone through iterative improvements, and by
July 2021 was detecting candidate links for 23 million records, including 12 million specimens. A
hackathon is being scheduled for Q3 2021 within the European BiCIKL project that will invite
additional developers to contribute improvements to this algorithm. The Secretariat has presented
the outputs at various conferences, and there is interest in brokering these annotations back tosource systems.

2022 Work items• Explore what can be enabled to offer annotation services in GBIF.org following ideas offeredduring the consultation topic during 2021 (see Activities 1f and 2a).
• Continue to explore the use of the GBIF data index to support stable persistent resolvable
identifiers for all specimens and occurrence records (see Activity 2a)2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Develop strategy and support mechanisms for expert communities to curate sectionsof GBIF data
• Brazil: A curatorship work has been implemented and is ongoing, whenever suspicious records,
geographic outliers are identified, publishers are informed at the time of publication.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF has developed a web system for managing monitoring and research
projects using camera traps and managing the images, video and annotated data, and isdeveloping a desktop program for data annotation and uploading for the use in field stations
without stable Internet connection.
• Finland: FinBIF will continue to use and develop the annotation system. FinBIF also has active
daily-basis cooperation with collection curators and is providing tools for them for their work.
FinBIF participates in DiSSCo and ELViS which enhances the possibilities to curate the collections.
• iDigBio: iDigBio regularly participates in the collaborative efforts of GBIF, BCoN, and DiSSCo,among others, to forge a path for implementation of Extended Specimens.
• International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Explore possibilities with China
Node (IB) a regional training on enhancing data quality of herbarium specimen This was initiallythought as in-person training, so we did not push this forward this year. However, this can beembedded in the capacity strengthening programme we hope to formalize in 2022 after inputs
from our data mobilization need survey.
• Spain: Continuing 2020 activities in this area.
• Sweden: 2021: GBIF-Sweden participated in the consultation on digital extended specimens but
understand that our providers have in general less advanced knowledge of its contents andexpectations/potential.
• Uganda: The National Node has been guiding the data holding institutions to co-opt experts inthe processes leading to a publication. Particularly the IT, Biologists and Curators.

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2020 Participant plans• Argentina: Develop strategy and support mechanisms for expert communities to curate sectionsof GBIF data.
• Brazil: TBD• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF plans to further develop the camera-trap data management system tobetter support metric calculation and data visualization.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to streamline its data mobilization workflows and will continue towork with GBIF on the global collections registry. In addition, iDigBio will continue to work with
the international community on the Extended Specimen implementation.
• Mauritania: Creation of the Gbif Mauritania webpage.
• Spain: Same as 2021
• Sweden: 2022: We intend to take up a discussion with our providers to inform both parties about
the awareness of the requirements and potential of common data curation processes. In earnest,
the concept ’digital extended specimens´ is not well known neither among collections curators
nor with managers of observational or research datasets.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: From a TDWG, and personal perspective, I note just how
hard it is for data providers to update their local datasets (for all the usual reasons). So, we needa) to see future grants that include "integration" of feedback included in the grant costs, and b)
software and tools that simplify this process. On a recent grant (just now finishing up), I put inthat we would meet with the data providers at the start to explain what we were doing with theirdata, keep the data providers in-the-loop (i.e. transparency) for the entire grant and meet withthem at the end to help them move forward to integrate what ever information they find useful(that we added or enhanced). We will have a paper coming out that discusses some of what welearned in trying to do this that may help enable future efforts to close this currently "one-way"path where we really need loops or a network.
• Uganda: Efforts for teams that have a diversified expertise put in place.

Priority 5: Deliver Relevant Data
Activity 5a: Engage academia
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
The most significant user community for GBIF is academic researchers. Even policy-related uses of
GBIF often derive from the work of such individuals. It is accordingly important for GBIF tounderstand the needs of researchers and academic societies and to communicate clearly regarding
the tools and services GBIF can deliver. Communication should include information and support
materials for students and early-career researchers, on both publication and use of data, including
citation, use tracking and data papers. University faculties and libraries may be important channels
for this information. In addition, GBIF needs to engage more closely with taxonomic societies andother academic bodies which could be key collaborators in curating and improving data. Achieving
such an outcome depends on understanding how GBIF can become a more central tool for their61

work, so that work on digital knowledge directly benefits those who contribute2021 Progress
The following progress can be reported on the work items included in the 2021 Work Programme:• The Secretariat developed new training resources in 2021 to support academic uses of GBIFmediated data, trialled in a virtual workshop for a graduate programme in the United Kingdom
coordinated by the Natural Environment Research Council. These resources focus on guidance
for finding and downloading data through GBIF.org, data cleaning and best practices for citation.
Once consolidated into a standard training package, this material will be incorporated into the
GBIF training curriculum for use in GBIF-coordinated workshops and self-instruction (see Activity
1b).
• The lack of face to face meetings has limited progress in growing and deploying the corps ofBiodiversity Open Data Ambassadors. However, the Secretariat has improved the means of
tracking events at which ambassadors may be deployed, and continues to work on the resources
available to ambassadors to communicate and promote GBIF.
• GBIF continues its engagement with the BioDATA programme, funded by the Norwegian Agency
for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education (DIKU), focused on
developing biodiversity data management skills for students in Eastern Europe, South Caucasus
and Central Asia. During 2021, the Secretariat worked with GBIF Norway to secure follow-up
funding for a four-year 'BioDATA Advanced' project which aims to accelerate biodiversity
research through DNA barcodes, collection and observation data with academic partners in
Norway, the Russian Federation and South Africa.
• Work on engaging professional societies to advance knowledge of GBIF functionalities in user
communities did not progress significantly in 2021. Components of this work are carried over
into the 2022 Work Programme.

2022 Work items• Consolidate training resources aimed at academic users and publishers of GBIF-mediated data,for use in funded programmes and guidance for nodes• Support implementation of the BioDATA and BioDATA Advanced projects through partners in
Norway, Ukraine, Armenia, the Russian Federation and South Africa• Promote GBIF at relevant fora including the 9th International Barcode of Life Conference,scheduled for August 2022, and the International Congress of Entomology, scheduled for July2022
• Begin pilot project to integrate phylogeny with occurrence data (€20K)

2021 Participant contributions• Argentina: Keep continue attending scientific meetings to continue promoting the national
biological data system and GBIF.
• Brazil: Analysis and publication tools were disseminated to the academic community• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF has been helping researchers publish data papers and holding mini-62

symposium on ecological informatics. TaiBIF regularly organizes promotion activities in academic
conferences.
• Finland: FinBIF is part of an academic institution, University of Helsinki. FinBIF has been
providing instructions and trainings for students and researchers such as courses in R. FinBIF
also maintains a species learning environment Pinkka for students. FinBIF also has cooperationand projects with research projects (such as LIFEPLAN) and is providing tools for the researchers
for collecting observation data in various projects (Glow worm project, Fungi atlas).
• France: Contributions to modules in Biology and Systematics master and doctoral modules at
MNHN and Sorbonne University.
• iDigBio: The Florida Museum of Natural History in collaboration with iDigBio and the Natural
Science Collections Alliance held the fifth annual Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference,
virtually 7-9 June 2021. This was the second year the conference was held virtually. The virtual
format again proved successful with 439 registrants from 40 countries.
• International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Conduct a survey with academiaof the HKH region in relation to the capacities and challenges for data holders for biodiversity
data mobilization. Biodiversity data mobilization capacity survey has been designed, andcurrently being drafted in lime survey. We will be sending the survey to the universities in the
HKH region that are under HUC network, in September. Results will be synthesized by end of
November 2021. The survey result is expected to guide our action for 2022.
• Korea, Republic of: Commercial companies collaborating with National Science Museum of
Korea, such as NAVER, KAKAO, and WOONGJIN THINKBIG provide an e-dictionary to generalpublic and children using the data that KBIF have mobilized.
• Mauritania: Master programme on the regeneration of biodiversity.
• Netherlands: NLBIF node manager has provided several lectures that include the importance of
GBIF mediated data for scientific purposes.
• South Africa: SANBI-GBIF has developed an MoU with the University of Sol Plaatje forPartnership and collaboration with regards to training and capacity development in biodiversity
informatics.
• Spain: Planned: Engaging with professional societies: specially with the Spanish-Portuguese
Botanical Collections Association, and with the Spanish LTER network. Progress: According toplan.
• Sweden: 2021: Being funded by the Swedish Research council (SRC) as a national research
infrastructure (with 50% co-funding by the partners in SBDI) GBIF-Sweden’s predominant users
are by definition expected to be found within academia. It is mandatory for us to produce key
performance indicators regarding the use of the infrastructure in terms of academic users alone.
altogether disregarding use by any other group (this in fact being mandatory!). Against this we
struggle to convince both the SRC and particularly the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency(SEPA) whose influence on environmental management practitioners otherwise advised to use
indigenous tools for data extraction and analysis is inevitably high, of the advantage of instead
using and collaborating in developing SBDI and GBIF tools. We obviously have strong
connections to academia, yet we still need to find more opportunities to contribute to basic andadvanced education, training at least the next generation of researchers and management
officials in the use of SBDI and GBIF. As described under the first major heading of the annual
work plan update, GBIF-Sweden, and by the SBDI collaboration also our colleagues, participate

63in, or run a set of courses and workshops in biodiversity informatics in Sweden. Outside of oursphere, interest is unfortunately alarmingly low!
• Uganda: Engagement with the academia is still a key priority for the Uganda node. The UNCST is
key in the development and sustenance of the national biodiversity data bank housed at
Makerere University. Plus more collaboration in the many faculty scholars at the various
universities in Uganda.

2022 Participant plans• Andorra: Promote GBIF at local level but there are mostly online universities in Andorra, whichmakes the task quite difficult (the assistants are not in Andorra, sometimes nor in neighbouring
countries).
• Argentina: Keep continue attending scientific meetings to continue promoting the national
biological data system and GBIF.
• Brazil: The dissemination of analysis and publication tools will be continued.
• France: Participations to master and doctoral modules to be continued. Possibility to translate
some material if needed.
• iDigBio: iDigBio is currently planning the 2022 Digital Data conference. iDigBio will continue topublish newsletters, including Biodiversity Spotlight and Research Spotlight articles.
• Mauritania: Research on animal and plant biodiversity.
• Netherlands: Continue to highlight the importance of GBIF mediated biodiversity data andpromote their further use.
• South Africa: Will continue efforts with academia.
• Spain: Same as 2021: This is a core ongoing operation that is performed continuously.
• Sweden: 2022: In 2022 we will continue our efforts to convince all potential present and futureusers of our services about the advantages and potential of advancing biodiversity informatics tofind, attend to and solve problems within their different areas of interest. We seek to participate
in conferences and other similar arrangements as frequently as possible, marketing ourselves(SBDI, GBIF) and related organizations.
• Switzerland: Coordination with Swiss Research Infrastructures.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: By its very nature, TDWG engages academia and willcontinue to do so. Certainly we also have a focus on enabling those in the southern hemisphereand other under-served parts of the planet.
• Uganda: Continued collaboration with academia especially in the valorisation of Uganda’s
genetic resources.

Activity 5b: Document needs
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
GBIF-mediated data are aggregated from many sources and are consequently heterogeneous,varying in fitness for various uses. During 2015–2016, GBIF established three task groups on data64

fitness-for-use, in agrobiodiversity research, in distribution modelling and in research on invasive
alien species, to document how these communities use GBIF data and to understand their data
quality demands. The resulting reports inform data mobilization, data processing and improvements
to GBIF.org. Further expert groups are considered during the current Strategic Plan period.
Depending on resources, these groups will operate through a combination of face-to-face meetingsand online or remote collaboration.

2021 Progress
The GBIF task group on mobilization and use of biodiversity data for research and policy on humandiseases was formally established in November 2020, and during 2021 expanded its membership toinclude experts from Africa and Asia as well as Europe, North America and South America. Amongthe early activities of the group was to approve commission of a systematic review of literatureusing GBIF-mediated data relating to human health. Following an open call, Dr Francisca Astorga of
Universidad de Chile was selected to carry out this review, which will will help to inform GBIF’s future
work in meeting the biodiversity data needs of the biomedical research community.
Additional work requested by the task group is an initiative to promote mobilization of biodiversity
datasets relevant to human health, through support for data papers to be published in a special
journal issue following a call later in 2021. This will be enabled through a financial contribution fromthe Tropical Disease Research centre (TDR) of the World Health Organization, with GBIF providing
funded help desk support to ensure that datasets associated with the data papers are correctly
formatted and published through GBIF.org (see also Activity 3e).
With the completion and improved bibliographical content of checklists available in GBIF.org throughthe Global Register of Introduced and Invasive Species (GRIIS), the Secretariat continued
discussions with the IUCN Invasive Species Specialist Group on how data on invasive alien species
can be better organized and curated, including through an improved research database managed by
La Trobe University in Australia. An updated research article describing GRIIS is in preparation, andthe discussions will focus on how the collaboration can best support information and indicators
addressing invasive species within the CBD post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (see Activity 5c).
With additional funding approved by the Executive Committee for the 2021 Work Programme, theSecretariat is scoping activities for the second half of the year to engage experts to promotemobilization of soil biodiversity data, recognized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as asignificant information gap to support links between biodiversity and food security. This work
involves collaboration with the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative (GSBI) and the Soil Biodiversity
Observation Network (SoilBON) - see also Activity 3b.

2022 Work items• Coordinate work of the expert group on mobilization and use of data on zoonotic diseases basedon outputs from the systematic review commissioned in 2021
• Continue programme for mobilization of soil biodiversity data through partnerships and work
streams initiated in 2021
• Continue partnership with the IUCN Invasive Species Specialist Group and the Convention on
Biological Diversity Secretariat to improve content and curation of data relating to invasive alien
species65

2021 Participant contributions• Brazil: We are monitoring the work of a network of researchers who are collecting viruses invertebrates, providing support for the DwC standard and subsequent publication in SiBBr and
GBIF.
• Finland: Compiled user case dossier for DiSSCo. Participation in The Synthesys Virtual Accessdevelopment and piloting for proper documentation (Digitation on demand)• iDigBio: iDigBio hosts a large number of workshops, webinars, symposia and other event on
digitization and data related topics, many of which are community-requested topics.
• Spain: Exploring ways on how to engage in these activities in a productive way. First dataset from
GBIF Spain on soil diversity published.
• Sweden: 2021: Beyond the mentioned focus areas (diseases/human health – introduced andinvasive species – soil biodiversity) GBIF-Sweden is aware of several existing and potential needs
where our data is useful. We try to approach them all by raising interest in our offerings but havenot coordinated nor participated specifically in work towards any of the three classes mentioned.
If resources (staff time) were at hand, and provided that it be considered to be within the scopeof our task as seen by other organizations in Sweden, we would probably be best suited tocontinue to explore the opportunity to mobilize further research and monitoring data on underrepresented organisms, and from areas in Sweden (including marine environments and for thatmatter soil) where we know information is still scarce.
• Uganda: The node has been involved in the development of the capacity for National Reportingon the 3 UN RIO conventions for the national focal points.

2022 Participant plans• Brazil: Continuing monitoring of a network of researchers working with viruses, as well as
documentation of the publication of viruses x hosts datasets.
• iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to be responsive to community needs by offering training andworkforce development activities via workshops, webinars, symposia, and other events.
• Mauritania: We need documents on the value of biodiversity.
• Netherlands: The NLBIF node manager as Open Biodiversity Data Ambassador will document
user needs for GBIF data wherever relevant.
• Spain: To work with this recently contacted community to expand availability of soil biodiversity
data in GBIF.
• Sweden: 2022: The above (see 2021) is a long-term undertaking, and we will as possible try tocommit ourselves to any such activity but have not yet planned for it in our work plan.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: TDWG members participated actively in the CETAFDiSSCo

COVID19

Task

Force

as

well

as

by

developing

theViralMuse

Task

Force

https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/ViralMuse_Task_Force. Members of ViralMuse would be
happy to contribute our expertise to the GBIF task group on mobilization and use of biodiversity
data for research and policy on human diseases. Note that Pam Soltis (UF, iDigBio) and Deborah
Paul (TDWG, INHS) have an NSF grant to work on exactly what this GBIF group is working on.
We’d be pleased to collaborate on activities if deemed appropriate.

66

• Uganda: More continued support and participation in the documentation and mentor-ship ofdata provider documentation and dissemination efforts.

Activity 5c: Support biodiversity assessment
Rationale (for the period 2017-2022)
One of GBIF’s key roles is as organizer or global evidence for species distribution, based on point
records for species in time and space. Expansion of data publishing to accommodate sampling event
data enables this evidence base also to mobilize and organize basic data on species populations andabundance. As a result, GBIF is positioned to serve as a critical resource for supporting biodiversity
assessment at all scales. In particular, GBIF should serve as the data foundation for GEO BON todeliver Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) for species distribution and population abundance.
These EBVs represent a continuum from modelled representation of species occupancy (presenceonly) in defined units of space and time through to richer assessment of species abundance in thoseunits. GEO BON should serve as a forum for addressing the challenges of modelling such variables
and interpolating sensibly between existing data points. This includes determination of appropriate
scale at which modelled variables are adequately supported by current data. GBIF needs to ensurethat it delivers the data foundations required for these activities, thereby supporting therequirements of IPBES, species Red Listing through IUCN and national authorities, the CBD and the
Aichi Targets and Sustainable Development Goals.

2021 Progress
Following the contract awarded in 2020 to the VertNet consortium in response to the call for
proposals to analyse the biodiversity data needs in the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework,
the Secretariat worked with the authors to finalize the document which will be published later in
2021. The analysis presents a number of conclusions and recommendations for more consistent andtransparent use of species occurrence data in indicators monitoring the goals and targets of theframework. Plans are being developed for a workshop to be held early in 2022 bringing together key
partners to help implement the recommendations.
The Secretariat has engaged actively in the delayed preparations for the COP15 UN Biodiversity
Conference, through virtual sessions of the Convention’s subsidiary bodies in May and June, as wellas the final meeting of the Open Ended Working Group in August/September 2021 addressing
recommendations for the detail of the framework. Through collaboration with GEO BON and anumber of national governments, these meetings have provided an opportunity to highlight theimportance of primary data mobilization in successful implementation of the framework, and this isreflected in wording of several of the draft recommendations arising from these meetings.
In April ahead of the subsidiary body meetings, the Secretariat organized and chaired a virtual roundtable on biodiversity monitoring and data as part of the Fifth Science-Policy Forum for Biodiversity
and Eighth International Conference on Sustainability Science. Including speakers from GEO BON,
the Chinese Academy of Sciences, UNEP-WCMC, NatureServe, iDiv and the Instituto de Investigaciónde Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt, the session provided an opportunity to reach abroad science/policy audience regarding the need for increased investment in biodiversity data andmonitoring. The key messages from the round table were included in an information document
provided for the virtual SBSTTA24 meeting.

67

Work continued in 2021 to implement several of the collaborations included in the Memorandum of
Cooperation between GBIF and IUCN. This included a survey of experts involved in the IUCN Species
Survival Commission to understand better the way that GBIF-mediated data is used in the Red Listingprocess, and issues identified by IUCN users. The survey will help to inform planned engagement
activities including webinars to improve understanding of GBIF’s services and functionality, as well asemphasizing best practices for data citation.
The Secretariat implemented a new connection with the IUCN Red List web services to ensure thatthe latest version of the extinction risk category is available on the species pages of GBIF.org.
Development has begun to implement filtering of occurrence data by Red List extinction risk
category, but issues related to the handling of synonyms are being addressed before thisfunctionality can go live on GBIF.org.
The Secretariat continued to work with the IPBES Task Force on Knowledge and Data across anumber of areas to improve the use and citation of data in assessments, as well as prioritizing data
gaps (see also Activity 3a). This included contributing to guidance videos provided by the Task Forceto assessment experts in the application of the IPBES Data Management Policy, and contributing
suggestions for the handling of data originating from indigenous and local knowledge.

2022 Work items• Through the alliance for biodiversity knowledge, hold a workshop on the outcomes of the analysis
of primary data needs for the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, involving partners in
GEO BON, the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership, CBD Secretariat and others• Implement a process enabling key checklists to be used in filtering occurrence data, such as Red
Listed species and invasive alien species (carried over from 2020 and likely to be incomplete in
2021)• Work with the new secretariat of GEO BON to improve connections between Biodiversity
Observation Networks (BONs) and nodes at national, regional, thematic and global levels• Continue collaboration with IUCN to implement the Memorandum of Cooperation, including
exploration of publication of reference datasets associated with Red List assessments, anddevelopment of training material for use of data in the Key Biodiversity Area (KBA) process• Continue to engage with the IPBES Data and Knowledge Task Force to support use of GBIFmediated data in ongoing and upcoming assessments

2021 Participant contributions• Brazil: Monitoring the tools available in GBIF for the assessment of biodiversity has been carriedout, in addition to the dissemination of the tools available in the Living Atlas infrastructure, andalso the availability of various thematic lists on SBBr, such as threat lists, invasive lists,sociobiodiversity list.
• Chinese Taipei: Biodiversity data has been used to calculate biodiversity indicators through the
Taiwan Biodiversity Observation Network (TaiBON) project and some indicators has been used
for writing Taiwan’s first national biodiversity report.
• Finland: FinBIF has developed tools for the Finnish assessment of threatened species. The
Regional Threat Assessment 2020 was published in the Web Service of the Red List of Finnish

68Species.
• iDigBio: iDigBio participated in WeDigBio, Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections, atwice-annual event that brings together biodiversity collections, educators and researchers using
collections data, and community scientists around the world to mobilize collections data via
online platforms. The 6th annual event took place entirely online. During the four days of
WeDigBio 2020, over 83,000 digitization tasks were completed, making this the most productive
October event yet! The only event that has been more productive was WeDigBio Lite, the onlineonly event in April 2020 when 135,000 tasks were completed – a goal we look forward to breaking
in the future.
• International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Review of fungi The Landscape
Initiative for Far-eastern Himalaya (HILIFE) of ICIMOD is supporting a review work of fungi in fareastern Himalayan Landscape, based on published literature. The dataset on the diversity offungi will be published via HKHBIF; Likewise, checklist of flora and mammals is also expected.
• Mauritania: Awareness campaigns have been carried out for the protection of the biodiversity ofcontinental wetlands.
• South Africa: SANBI-GBIF has supported biodiversity assessment efforts through work on the
IPBES knowledge and data task force.
• Spain: Exploring ways on how to engage in these activities in a productive way. Progress: We arein contact with the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and regional governments tounderstand their data and science expertise needs regarding biodiversity, and finding ways tosupport them as well as to assist them in publishing the data they produce and gather in GBIF.
• Sweden: 2021: Biodiversity assessment/analysis for assessment is one major focus of SBDI, andalthough GBIF-Sweden has not been actively involved in the work on producing EBV:s weconsistently strive to furnish data users with more and better data for environmental analysis,
and with efficient tools to carry out assessments. We contribute by offering SBDI4R (web-enabled
version of RStudio with ALA4R pre-installed) and Dockerized R-software bundle Mirroreum foruse in the cloud or locally as desired.
• Switzerland: Publication of annotated national checklists for selected beetle families(Cantahridae, Lycidae).
• Uganda: The node is providing technical backstopping to number of biodiversity assessment
efforts within the stakeholder ecosystem. Notably was the development of the national offset
guidelines for Uganda.

2022 Participant plans• Brazil: Continue monitoring GBIF activities and disseminate tools and services for biodiversity
assessment at the national level.
• Chinese Taipei: TaiBIF plans to improve the data pipeline from the data repository to indicator
calculation and trend interpretation.
• iDigBio: iDigBio plans to continue participation in WeDigBio events.
• International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: In 2022, we will explore small
grants to support assessment and review of key biodiversity resource.
• Mauritania: Field mission awareness campaign and training of populations on approaches to69

conservation and restoration of ecosystems.
• South Africa: SANBI-GBIF will continue efforts to support assessments through IPBES task forceof knowledge and data.
• Spain: Same as 2021.
• Sweden: 2022: In 2022 work on SBDI4R continues, and the recent update of Mirroreum is
promoted. GBIF-Sweden has been represented in GEO BON since the early 2010’s but due toresource shortage unable to commit to any work in practice. Yet we follow advances made with
EBV:s, KBA:s, and with IUCN Red and Black listing.
• Switzerland: Continuation of data digitization activities in relation with running programs of theFederal Office of Environment.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: Please note from recent NSF grant, we developed a toolfor use by the IUCN to visualize the georeferences against the shape files for the Horseshoe Batsand relatives. We successfully worked out a way to give them access to this information. For yourpurposes, we note they shared with us that most often, groups come to them asking for data,but rarely do groups come to them, offering them data. They were pleased to receive the contact
and the data — for use by their IUCN group that manages these particular taxa. (Note of course
we selected these taxa for their alleged link to Covid19).
• Uganda: To continue provision of the technical support to stakeholders.

Activity 5d: Assess impact
Rationale (for the years 2017-2022)
GBIF Participants require clear evidence of the benefits arising from investments in national- scale
content mobilization and from GBIF global activity. At present, the main source of evidence
presented derives from monitoring of published literature to identify uses of GBIF within research.
This activity has been reported through annual GBIF Science Reviews and clearly demonstrates
growing use of GBIF in research. Monitoring the literature in this way is time-consuming, andbecomes more so as the relevant literature increases. A sustainable approach is required for future
monitoring of this kind. GBIF now issues and promotes Digital Object Identifiers for data downloads
and expects that these can be used both to simplify discovery and to improve the detail offered toParticipants and data publishers on some uses of data. Participants also require more information
on non-research uses of GBIF infrastructure, particularly in various kinds of government or industry
assessments. A broader review of costs and benefits arising from GBIF investment would be valuable
for Participants arguing continued engagement within GBIF and other countries considering
Participation.

2021 Progress
The outcomes of the systematic review of research enabled by access to GBIF-mediated data,
commissioned by the Secretariat in 2020 and carried out by Dr Mason Heberling were published in
the PNAS journal, providing a valuable reference on the range of science across many disciplinesthat is made possible by the GBIF collaboration and investment.
The total number of research papers citing use of GBIF as a data source passed the 6,000 milestone70

in July 2021, and the 2020 Science Review, published in February 2021, summarized 67 articles
reflecting the range of research and policy applications supported by GBIF. Based on the citation
trends observed by July 2021, the number of research papers citing GBIF use was anticipated to
exceed 1,200 during the whole year, compared with 987 in 2020.
To support broader demonstration of GBIF’s impact, the Secretariat secured approval from the
Executive Committee during 2021 to commission a robust quantitative analysis of the value andimpact of the GBIF network. Terms of reference for this study will include examining GBIF’s
investment and use values, contingent value, efficiency impacts, innovation value and return on
investment. Responding to a recommendation of the GBIF 20-year review, this work is expected to
begin in the last quarter of 2021 and be completed by the middle of 2022.

2022 Work items• Publish quantitative analysis of the value and impact of the GBIF network, and promote inengagement with governments, funders and other partners• Launch Ebbe Nielsen Challenge and Young Researchers Awards competitions for 2022 (€25k),
and generate communications connecting past awardees with subsequent work and impact• Explore options for a 'Nodes Award Scheme' to recognize progress, performance and innovation
across the community• Produce communication materials including short videos demonstrating the impact of GBIF’s
funded programmes such as BID and BIFA
• Complete and promote communication materials demonstrating GBIF’s impact across thematiccommunities, thereby supporting the case for increasing the number of Voting Participant
countries

2021 Participant contributions• Brazil: Activity did not progress in 2021.
• Finland: FinBIF has developed tools for automatic tracking of citations. FinBIF has also launched
Restricted Data Request Service for managing data requests for sensitive data or data that haveother restrictions preventing open access. The data compiled will shed light on what is restricteduse data needed for (mining, wind farms, power lines, construction etc.) and will give unique dataon impact of making restricted data available and accessible.
• iDigBio: iDigBio conducts an annual survey of its internal team as well as the collections
community, broader scientific community, partners, stakeholders, and others interested in thenational digitization effort. The survey is conducted to help track progress toward goals, identify
community needs, solicit community feedback, and measure the impact of iDigBio’s activities.
iDigBio tracks data use in literature and publishes graphs on its website showing publications
resulting from ADBC funding.
• Korea, Republic of: We have translated and published the 2020 GBIF Science Review to
distribute these to researchers and decision-makers in related fields.
• Mauritania: Resilience of local communities.
• Netherlands: Naturalis Biodiversity Center together with NLBIF has embarked on a study on thephysical and digital use of its collections. This has provided insights on number of downloads

71

from shared data and the importance of data aspects for data users. The most requested
predicates included taxon key, the presence of coordinates and the absence of geospatial issues.
These metrics, next to the actual use of data in scientific papers, are important KPI’s that assess
the impact of data sharing through GBIF.
• South Africa: SANBI-GBIF is developing a showcase to support the efforts relating to impact.
• Spain: Plans: Implementing the conclusion drawn from the activities mentioned for 2020 in theNodes' plans. Progress: Data and figures from GBIF Science Reviews and GBIF Overview Slides
are routinely used in our communications and reports. Ebbe Nielsen Challenge and Young
Researchers Awards are widely promoted and supported. GBIF Spain dataset and publisher
performance tracking system was was dismantled in 2016 is being recovered. This was the basis
for assessing performance and impact of institutions and projects involved in GBIF from Spain,
and we aim to recover this capacity.
• Sweden: 2021: Using Matomo software, SBDI/GBIF-Sweden monitor publications using GBIFmediated data, data downloads and and SBDI services usage on behalf of the Swedish ResearchCouncil for annual reports KPA:s).
• Uganda: The data and information from and about Uganda in Uganda are increasingly utilized
by the scientists and policy makers in Uganda for informed decision making. More response tocalls have been reinforced by the available facts to support funding decision making.

2022 Participant plans• Belgium: Reaching Integrated and Prompt Action in Response to Invasive Alien Species(RIPARIAS) LIFE project develops an innovative evidence-based workflow for decision making on
IAS management, translating national management objectives to concrete actions by
maximizing cost efficiency of management, piloted in Dijle, Mark and Zenne river sub-basins of
the Scheldt river basin district. Belgian expert from the Platform to review IAS assessment for
IUCN.
• Brazil: TBD• iDigBio: iDigBio plans to conduct a community survey in early 2022 to assess the impact of its
efforts and to gather community input. iDigBio will continue to track and publish statistics for its
website, data portal, data use, and events.
• Mauritania: Conduct field work.
• Netherlands: Standardize the R-script to generate the download KPI’s for general use by data
publishers.
• South Africa: The efforts to reinforce the data-science-policy value chain through initiatives likethe Foundational Biodiversity Information Programme of SANBI, will continue into 2022.
• Spain: To continue and conclude plans started in 2021.
• Sweden: 2022: This year represents a continuation of previous year’s monitoring procedures,and to some extent an even more detailed account of research interest´s infrastructure use. On
the other hand use by other categories would be valuable and time and effort permitting we will
set out to find out more about public management and private enterprise usage of SBDI.
• Taxonomic Databases Working Group: TDWG conducts yearly surveys post-conference, andotherwise as needed to track progress and note needs. We will continue to do so of course, and72

the challenge of continuing to do all things virtually, adds to our need to listen, and improve how
we do our work.
• Uganda: Increase data use in decision making and encourage from the Lab to the world conceptof availing data and information.

73