GBIF will organize three workshops to help “major international stakeholders to develop the global collections research agenda” within the SYNTHESYS+ NA5 Internationalization work package. These workshops are a contribution to the efforts of the biodiversity informatics community to develop sustainable, cost-effective, scientifically relevant and internationally applicable networks and systems for managing and using biodiversity information.
The participatory consultation will test a virtual alternative to a face-to-face workshop. We hope that it will both enable wider participation by interested stakeholders around the world and reduce the carbon footprint of biodiversity informatics. See ‘Why a virtual workshop?’ for a more extensive discussion of the approach and its rationale.
“Advancing the Catalogue of the World’s Natural History Collections” will provide inputs into several intersecting initiatives, including but not limited to:
- SYNTHESYS+, as a European initiative to advance collection-based data management that reinforces the efforts of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) and prepares for the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) to unify the region’s digital natural science assets
- Major global efforts that catalogue natural history collections, including reference datasets for important classes of collection, such as Index Herbariorum (IH) and World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC), and national and regional perspectives from initiatives like Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), other Living Atlases and iDigBio
- The TDWG Collection Descriptions Interest Group, with its experience in developing metadata standards to characterize natural history collections
- The alliance for biodiversity knowledge established following the 2nd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC2) in July 2018 to help international stakeholders of all scales work together more collaboratively
- The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook (GBIO) published following the 1st Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC) in July 2012 as a conceptual architecture for biodiversity informatics
- Activity 2c: Catalogue collections within the GBIF Implementation Plan 2021, aimed at improving global integration of efforts to build the collections catalogue, including reworking the Global Register of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl) as a contribution to an integrated catalogue
The consultation aims to offer value to all of these efforts, but more particularly to provide a common vision, road map and set of priorities for efficient and seamless interoperability between their platforms and for tools and services based on accurate and current collection information.