Use Case: Ecological Survey Data Exchange Specification - Forest Basal Area Monitoring

Data Publishing Diversifying the GBIF data model
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This thread can be used to discuss and provide feedback to the use case on Ecological Survey Data Exchange Specification - Forest Basal Area Monitoring.

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Daniel, many thanks for your message. We work with tree surveys data and plan publish dataset through GBIF (may be Zenodo, because have many issues in DwC data standartization). Our data more complex than in your example, and include different types of tree measurements (individual tree height, DBH, age, social class, and etc.), Should we use differenet organismType (=dwc:organismScope?) for different measurement types?

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Hi Natalya,

For publishing in the current model, I’d probably suggest reaching out to helpdesk@gbif.org for advise. I think you might be able to include your measurements using the Measurement or Facts extension? https://rs.gbif.org/extension/dwc/measurements_or_facts_2022-02-02.xml

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Of course, we can use Measurement or Facts extension. However, this extension is not indexed and included in the GBIF portal. Does GBIF plan to index this extension?

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Thanks @Natalya

We intend to make all data available in downloads (i.e. if your search returns records with measurements, those will be available to download), but how much is indexed for search (e.g. find records with a measurement in ) is unknown and could be difficult to achieve consistently given the variety of data that can be included.

Does this help?

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Just to mention, and recognizing that it might lie beyond not only the case study but also our relevance, there’s an interesting commentary just out on forestry data, FAIRness and fairness, with a past Ebbe winner as lead author:

Renato AF de Lima et al. (2022) Making forest data fair and open. Nature Ecology and Evolution . Making forest data fair and open | Nature Ecology & Evolution

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Yes, thank you! Hopefully this will be implemented soon.

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To highlight the potential policy relevance of this case study, there’s this in the latest report from IPCC Working Group III §7.6.4.4 (emphasis mine):

Ground-based forest inventory measurements have been developed in many countries, most prominently in the northern hemisphere, but more and more countries are starting to develop and collect national forest inventories. Training and capacity building is going on in many developing countries under UNREDD and FAO programmes. Additional efforts to harmonize data collection methods and to make forest inventory data available to the scientific community would improve confidence in forest statistics, and changes in forest statistics over time. To some extent the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative fills in this data gap (https://gfbi.udl.cat/).