Towards an integrated biodiversity and ecological research data management and archiving platform: the German federation for the curation of biological data (GFBio)

Abstract

Biodiversity research brings together the many facets of biological environmental research. Its data management is characterized by integration and is particularly challenging due to the large volume and tremendous heterogeneity of the data. At the same time, it is particularly important: A lot of the data is not reproducible. Once it is gone, potential knowledge that could have been gained from it is irrevocably lost. In this paper, we describe challenges to biodiversity data management along the data life cycle and sketch the solution that is currently being developed within the GFBio project, a collaborative effort of nineteen German research institutions ranging from museums and archives to biodiversity researchers and computer scientists.