15 Years of Data Curation in the Biodiversity Exploratories – Past, Present, Future
Creators: name: Fürstenau, Cornelia
name: Ostrowski, Andreas
name: Petzold, Eleonora
name: Zander, Franziska
name: König-Ries, Birgitta
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: Curation infrastructure: Tools, systems and services that are in development
Curation infrastructure: Evaluations of existing tools and principles in data curation
curation workflow
biodiversity data
BExIS
IDCC25

description: Datasets with informative, precise metadata and error-free, clean data are undoubtedly of great value. However, the way to high-quality datasets is often tedious and needs well-informed and trained researchers and, ideally, the support of data curators. Additionally, over the last decades, the requirements for datasets and databases have continuously evolved (e.g., FAIR, new persistent identifiers, licenses, and open data initiatives). This poster will show how a project repository's data management and underlying software have been developed to meet these demands over the last 15 years.

In the interdisciplinary project Biodiversity Exploratories (BE), funded by the German Research Foundation, researchers from various institutions investigate biodiversity and the influence of land use intensity in grassland and forests in three regions of Germany. Since the start of the BE in 2006, projects have collected a huge amount of diverse data reflecting the wide range of scientific disciplines involved in biodiversity research.

To manage all data in one place and foster data sharing between the projects and across the different project phases of the BE, a data management team has accompanied the BE from the beginning. From the development of the Biodiversity Exploratory Information System (BExIS) in 2007, through the migration to the 2nd generation of the software (BEXIS2) in 2021 until now, the data management system and the data management services have been continuously developed to meet the evolving needs of the users and the data quality requirements.

The first data was uploaded to BExIS in 2008. The metadata schema, software features, the data policy, and the data curation workflow have been revised several times in the following years. New features have been added to the software, such as DOI assignment and tombstone pages for datasets, and the data management services have been further expanded.

The poster focuses on the progress made in the data curation workflow. In 2011, the first manual low-level dataset quality checks started and were intensified over the years. With the increasing focus on good dataset quality, a data curator joined the team in 2017. Initially, changes to datasets and communication with the data creators were documented in a spreadsheet. Since 2020, we have been using GitHub to strengthen our curation processes further. To improve the documentation and reduce the data curator's workload, we developed an application for BExIS that automatically creates standardized GitHub issues for each newly created dataset. It also supports the curation process by sending curation emails to the data owner after the curator has reviewed the dataset and documented any necessary adjustments in the corresponding GitHub issue.

In the future, we envision the development of a curation and communication tool as an integral part of the underlying software BEXIS2 to improve the transparency of the curation process, promote cooperation between data curator and data owner within the data management system, and establish a quality indicator for datasets.