Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (SBDI): Insights from the Swedish ALA installation

Abstract

The Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (SBDI) is a biodiversity informatics infrastructure and is the key national resource for data-driven biodiversity and ecosystems research. SBDI rests on three pillars: mobilisation and access to biodiversity data; development and operation of tools for analysing these data; and user support. SBDI is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) and eleven of Sweden’s major universities and research government authorities (Fig. 1). mobilisation and access to biodiversity data; development and operation of tools for analysing these data; and user support. SBDI is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) and eleven of Sweden’s major universities and research government authorities (Fig. 1). SBDI was formed in early 2021 and represents the final step in an amalgamation of national infrastructures for biodiversity and ecosystems research. SBDI includes the Swedish node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the key international infrastructure for sharing biodiversity data. SBDI's predecessor Biodiversity Atlas Sweden (BAS) was an early adopter of the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) platform. SBDI pioneered the container-based deployment of the platform using Docker and Docker Swarm. This container-based approach helps simplify deployment of the platform, which is characterised by a microservice architecture with loosely coupled services. This enables scalability, modularity, integration of services, and new technology insertions. SBDI has customised the BioCollect module to remove region-specific constraints so that it can be more readily improved for environmental monitoring in Sweden. To further support this, there are plans to develop services for the distribution of terrestrial map layers, which will provide important habitat information for artificial intelligence and machine learning research projects. The Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs) portal, an interface to sequence-based observations, is an example of integration and new technology insertion. The portal developed in SBDI and seamlessly integrated with the ALA platform provides basic functionalities for searching ASVs and occurrence records using the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) or filters on sequencing details and taxonomy and for submitting metabarcoding dataset Fig. 2. Future developments for SBDI include a continued focus on eDNA and monitoring data as well as the implementation of procedures for handling sensitive data.