Biodiversity Information Science and Standards最新文献

{"title":"Extracting Masks from Herbarium Specimen Images Based on Object Detection and Image Segmentation Techniques","authors":"Hanane Ariouat, Youcef Sklab, M. Pignal, Régine Vignes Lebbe, Jean-Daniel Zucker, Edi Prifti, E. Chenin","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112161","url":null,"abstract":"Herbarium specimen scans constitute a valuable source of raw data. Herbarium collections are gaining interest in the scientific community as their exploration can lead to understanding serious threats to biodiversity. Data derived from scanned specimen images can be analyzed to answer important questions such as how plants respond to climate change, how different species respond to biotic and abiotic influences, or what role a species plays within an ecosystem. However, exploiting such large collections is challenging and requires automatic processing. A promising solution lies in the use of computer-based processing techniques, such as Deep Learning (DL). But herbarium specimens can be difficult to process and analyze as they contain several kinds of visual noise, including information labels, scale bars, color palettes, envelopes containing seeds or other organs, collection-specific barcodes, stamps, and other notes that are placed on the mounting sheet. Moreover, the paper on which the specimens are mounted can degrade over time for multiple reasons, and often the paper's color darkens and, in some cases, approaches the color of the plants.\u0000 Neural network models are well-suited to the analysis of herbarium specimens, while making abstraction of the presence of such visual noise. However, in some cases the model can focus on these elements, which eventually can lead to a bad generalization when analyzing new data on which these visual elements are not present (White et al. 2020). It is important to remove the noise from specimen scans before using them in model training and testing to improve its performance. Studies have used basic cropping techniques (Younis et al. 2018), but they do not guarantee that the visual noise is removed from the cropped image. For instance, the labels are frequently put at random positions into the scans, resulting in cropped images that still contain noise. White et al. (2020) used the Otsu binarization method followed by a manual post-processing and a blurring step to adjust the pixels that should have been assigned to black during segmentation. Hussein et al. (2020) used an image labeler application, followed by a median filtering method to reduce the noise. However, both White et al. (2020) and Hussein et al. (2020) consider only two organs: stems and leaves. Triki et al. (2022) used a polygon-based deep learning object detection algorithm. But in addition to being laborious and difficult, this approach does not give good results when it comes to fully identifying specimens. \u0000 In this work, we aim to create clean high-resolution mask extractions with the same resolution as the original images. These masks can be used by other models for a variety of purposes, for instance to distinguish the different plant organs. Here, we proceed by combining object detection and image segmentation techniques, using a dataset of scanned herbarium specimens. We propose an algorithm that identifies and retains the pixels belongi","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73621649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Journey to a TDWG Mappings Task Group and its Plans for the Future","authors":"David Fichtmueller","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112148","url":null,"abstract":"Some Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) standards have had mappings to other standards for years or even decades. However each standard is using its own approach to documenting those mappings, some are incomplete and often hard to find. There is no TDWG recommended approach for how mappings should be documented, like the Standards Documentation Standard (SDS) does for the standards themselves. \u0000 During TDWG 2022 in Sofia, Bulgaria, the topic of mapping between standards was mentioned several times throughout the conference, which led to an impromptu discussion about standards mappings at the Unconference slot on the last conference day. Afterwards a dedicated Slack channel within the TDWG Slack workspace was added to continue the conversation (#mappings-between-standards). During further discussions, both within the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) of TDWG and during separate video conferences on the topic, it was decided to form a dedicated task group under the umbrella of the TAG. This task group is still in the process of formation. The goal of the group is to review the current state of mappings for TDWG standards, align approaches by the different standards to foster interoperability and give recommendations for current and future standards on how to specify mappings. Further work to define the strategy and scope for achieving these goals is needed, particularly to gain community input and acceptance. Consideration has been given to a range of possible types of mappings, which serve the different use cases and expectations for mappings such as machine actionability and improved documentation of the TDWG standards landscape to aid user understanding and implementation. In this talk we will show the work that has already been done, outline our planned steps and invite the community to give input on our process.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91524354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards the Atlas of Living Flanders, a Challenging Path","authors":"Dimitri Brosens, Sten Migerode, Aaike De Wever","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112155","url":null,"abstract":"In Belgium, a federal country in the heart of Europe, the competencies for nature conservation and nature policy lie within the regions. The Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) is an independent research institute, funded by the Flemish regional government, which underpins and evaluates biodiversity policy and management by means of applied scientific research, and sharing of data and knowledge.\u0000 One of the 12 strategic goals in the 2009-2015 INBO strategic planning was that: 'INBO manages data and makes them accessible. It looks into appropriate data gathering methods and means by which to disseminate data and make them readily available'. Since 2009, the INBO has steadily evolved into a research institute with a strong emphasis on open data and open science. In 2010 INBO became a data publisher for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), adopted an open data and open access policy and is known for being an open science institute in Flanders, Belgium. In 2021, a question arose from the council of ministers on the possibility and availability of a public portal for biodiversity data. The goal of this portal should be to ensure findability, availability, and optimal usability of biodiversity data, initially for policy makers, but also for the wider public. With the Living Atlas project already high on our radar, an analysis project, funded by the Flemish government, started in December 2021. All the entities in the department of 'Environment' contributed to a requirements and feasibility study, a proof of concept (POC) Living Atlas for Flanders was set up and the required budget was calculated.\u0000 During the requirements and feasibility study we questioned the agency for nature and forest (ANB), the Flanders Environment Agency (VMM), Flemish land agency (VLM) and the Department of Environment with the help of a professional inquiry agency IPSOS on the possible relevance for policy of a Flemish biodiversity portal, the need of high resolution data (geographical and temporal scale) and the availability of biodiversity data in Flanders, focussed on key species, protected species and other Flemish priority species.\u0000 During the technical proof of concept, we tested the Living Atlases (LA) software suite as the most mature candidate for a Flemish Living Atlas. We checked how we could set up a LA installation in our own Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment, evaluated all the used technologies, estimated the maintenance and infrastructure cost, the needed profiles and the number of full-time equivalent personnel we would need to run a performant Atlas of Living Flanders.\u0000 The goal of this talk is to inform the audience on the steps we took, the hurdles we encountered and how we are trying to convince our policy makers of the benefits of an Atlas of Living Flanders.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88258987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":" Invasions, Plagues, and Epidemics: The Atlas of Living Australia’s deep dive into biosecurity","authors":"Andrew Turley, Erin Roger","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112127","url":null,"abstract":"Early detection of new incursions of species of biosecurity concern is crucial to protecting Australia’s environment, agriculture, and cultural heritage. As Australia’s largest biodiversity data repository, the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is often the first platform where new species incursions are recorded. The ALA holds records of more than 2,380 exotic species and over 1.9 million occurrences of pests, weeds, and diseases—many of which are reported though citizen science. However, until recently there has been no systematic mechanism for notifying relevant biosecurity authorities of potential biosecurity threats. To address this, the ALA partnered with the (Australian) Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry to develop the Biosecurity Alerts System. Two years on, the project has demonstrated the benefits of biosecurity alerts, but significant barriers exist as we now work to expand this system to State and Territory biosecurity agencies, and seek new sources of biosecurity data. In our presentation, we discuss a brief history of invasive alien species in Australia, the Biosecurity Alerts System, and how we are approaching issues with taxonomy, data standards, and cultural sensitivities in aggregating biosecurity data. We conclude by detailing our progress in expanding the alerts system and tackling systemic issues to help elevate Australia’s biosecurity system.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"222 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76987901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"DiversityIndia Meets: Pioneering citizen science through collaborative data mobilization","authors":"Vijay Barve, Nandita Barman, Arjan Basu Roy, Amol Patwardhan, Purab Chowdhury","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112163","url":null,"abstract":"DiversityIndia, founded in 2001, is an online community dedicated to promoting meaningful discussions and facilitating the exchange of diverse perspectives on lesser-known taxonomic groups, including butterflies, moths, dragonflies, spiders, and more. The core idea behind DiversityIndia is to establish a network of like-minded individuals who possess a deep passion for these subjects and actively participate in various aspects of biodiversity observation and research.\u0000 Initially, the taxonomic focus of DiversityIndia centered around butterflies, which led to the creation of the ButterflyIndia Yahoo email group. The group quickly gained recognition for its significant contributions in sharing valuable insights about butterflies, including information about their habitats and lesser-known species. ButterflyIndia also played a vital role in facilitating connections among scientists and researchers who were dedicated to studying Lepidoptera. As a result of its collaborative efforts, the group actively contributed to major book projects and web portals, further enhancing the knowledge and resources available to the butterfly research community. As time progressed, the group expanded its presence to include various social media platforms like Orkut, Facebook, Flickr and more, thereby expanding its influence and reach.\u0000 The realization of a significant need for empirical research on butterflies, requiring the involvement of both specialists and enthusiasts across diverse habitats, led to the first ButterflyIndia Meet in 2004 at Shendurney, Kerala. This pioneering concept garnered immense success, attracting participants from diverse regions of the country and backgrounds. Since then, several ButterflyIndia Meets have been organized, resulting in the documentation of numerous butterfly species. Building upon this success, DragonflyIndia and SpiderIndia were established with similar objectives and have successfully coordinated multiple gatherings (Fig. 1).\u0000 One of the most notable DiversityIndia Meets occurred in April 2022, held in Sundarbans, West Bengal. This particular meet marked a significant milestone as the documented dataset, comprising information on all taxonomic groups observed during the event, was published through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) (Roy et al. 2022). This publication allowed for wider accessibility and utilization of the valuable biodiversity data collected during the meet.\u0000 In addition to the Sundarbans meet, ongoing efforts are currently underway to gather occurrence data from all the previous meetings conducted by DiversityIndia (Table 1). The aim is to compile and mobilize this data on GBIF as datasets, involving active participation from the members who attended these meetings. This endeavor seeks to maximize the availability and usefulness of the biodiversity information gathered through the various DiversityIndia Meets over time.\u0000 According to the published records so far (Global Biodiversity Informa","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80036704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Will a Local Portal using Global Data Encourage the Mainstreaming of Biodiversity Informatics in Asia? In Taiwan, We Say Yes","authors":"Jerome Chie-Jen Ko, Huiling Chang, Yihong Chang, You-Cheng Yu, Min-Hsuan Ni, Jun-Yi Wu, You Zhen Chen","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112176","url":null,"abstract":"Five years ago, the value of biodiversity open data was scarcely recognized in Taiwan. This posed a significant challenge to the Taiwan Biodiversity Infomation Facility (TaiBIF), our national node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), in its sustained efforts to enhance data publishing capacities. Notably, non-academic entities, both governmental and industrial, were reluctant to invest resources in data management and publication, questioning the benefits beyond purely research-oriented returns.\u0000 At the time, Taiwan had fewer than a million published records domestically, while GBIF held around 3 million occurrence records for Taiwan, largely unused by local users. We speculated that this discrepancy in data usage stemmed from three factors: (1) lack of species names in the local language within the occurrence data, (2) missing locally important species attributes, such as conservation status and national red list categories, and (3) absence of a culturally relatable local portal promoting biodiversity data usage.\u0000 To address these issues, we launched the Taiwan Biodiversity Network (TBN) website in 2018, localizing global data from GBIF and integrating missing information from local data sources. Collaborating with wildlife illustrators, we designed a user-friendly data interface to lessen the system's technical or academic barriers. This effort led to a doubling of website visitors and data download requests annually, and in recent years, biodiversity open data has become a vital component in environmental impact assessments. This upward trend heightened the recognition of the value of biodiversity open data, inciting organizations, such as initially data-conservative government agencies and private sectors with no obligatory data-sharing, to invest in data management and mobilization. This advancement also catalyzed the formation of the Taiwan Biodiversity Information Alliance (TBIA), actively promoting cross-organizational collaborations on data integration.\u0000 Today, Taiwan offers more than 19 million globally accessible occurrence records and data for more than 28,000 species. While the surge in data volume can certainly be credited to the active local citizen science community, we believe the expanded coverage of species and data types is a result of a growing community supportive of biodiversity open data. This was made possible by the establishment of a local portal that effectively bridged the gap between global data and local needs. We hope our experience will motivate other Asian countries to create analogous local portals using global open data sources like GBIF, illustrating the value of biodiversity open data to decision-makers and overcoming resource limitations that impede investments in biodiversity informatics.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74888548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Measuring Habitat Restoration using the Darwin and \"Event\" Cores: Australian examples powered by BioCollect","authors":"Peter Brenton, Peggy Eby, Robert Stevenson, Elizabeth R. Ellwood","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112083","url":null,"abstract":"Habitat decline and fragmentation are major factors in biodiversity loss across the globe and can be difficult to measure, particularly at landscape scale (Brooks et al. 2002, Fahrig 2003, Ritchie and Roser 2019). In Australia, rural, coastal and urban communities have been undertaking habitat restoration activities since the mid-1980s to protect and restore ecological balance on private land and in local shared and natural spaces. Much of the restoration effort has centered around hands-on activities as a mechanism for building community with environmental benefits. Over such a time span, thousands of locations throughout the country have been transformed from degraded and highly disturbed landscapes into resemblances of more-or-less natural areas. \u0000 However, collecting and analysing data for these activities was given little attention until quite recently, as governments, philanthropists and other investors have become increasingly interested in measuring the value and outcomes from investment. To measure the effectiveness of the restoration effort, it is essential to to benchmark the environmental state and species composition before the restoration begins, but surprisingly or unsurprisingly, this is rarely done (Hale et al. 2019).\u0000 Responding to this call for better documentation of restoration outcomes, over 30 groups have been using the Atlas of Living Australia’s BioCollect platform to capture complex information about current and past restoration work. The BioCollect platform enables each type of monitoring, establishment, and follow-up activity to have its own data collection schema and associated metadata structured around using a hierarchy of sampling events based on the Event class in the Darwin Core standard, which allows relationships between types of event records to be specified. When event records are created through use of an activity-based template, each occurrence of a species is also parsed and configured as a Darwin Core occurrence record. Standard templates have been created for a range of activities, such as benchmarking assessments, site establishment, follow-up interventions and monitoring over time, which are being used by many different groups over large areas of the landscape. This allows each group to operate independently, yet collect standardised data that can be easily aggregated at larger temporal and spatial scales, quantifying change over time. The relationships between occurrences and the event context in which they were collected is also preserved and navigable.\u0000 Here we present how Darwin Core and Event Core have been implemented in the BioCollect platform to enable this important data to be collected and stored in its full richness and resolution.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84158634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Optimizing the Monitoring of Urban Fruit-Bearing Flora with Citizen Science: An Overview of the Pomar Urbano Initiative","authors":"Filipi Miranda Soares, Luís Ferreira Pires, Maria Carolina Garcia, A. D. de Carvalho, S. Koffler, N. Ghilardi-Lopes, Rubens Silva, Benildes Maculan, Ana Maria Bertolini, Gabriela Rigote, L. Coradin, U. Montedo, Debora P. Drucker, Raquel Santiago, Maria Clara de Carvalho, Ana Carolina da Silva Lima, Karoline Reis de Almeida, Stephanie Gabriele Mendonça de França, Hillary Dandara Elias Gabriel, Bárbara Junqueira dos Santos, A. Saraiva","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112009","url":null,"abstract":"The \"Pomar Urbano\" (Urban Orchard) project focuses on the collaborative monitoring of fruit-bearing plant species in urban areas throughout Brazil.\u0000 The project collected a list of 411 fruit-bearing plant species (Soares et al. 2023), both native and exotic varieties found in Brazil. This list was selected from two main sources: the book Brazilian Fruits and Cultivated Exotics (Lorenzi et al. 2006) and the book series Plants for the Future, which includes volumes specifically dedicated to species of economic value in different regions of Brazil, namely the South (Coradin et al. 2011), Midwest (Vieira et al. 2016), Northeast (Coradin et al. 2018) and North (Coradin et al. 2022). To ensure broad geographic coverage, the project spans all 27 state capitals of Brazil. The data collection process relies on the iNaturalist Umbrella and Collection projects. Each state capital has a single collection project, including the fruit-bearing plant species list, and the locality restriction to that specific city. For example, the collection project Pomar Paulistano gathers data from the city of São Paulo. The Umbrella Project Urban Orchard was set to track data from all 27 collection projects.\u0000 We firmly believe that these fruit-bearing plant species possess multifaceted value that extends beyond mere consumption. As such, we have assembled a dynamic and multidisciplinary team comprising professionals from various institutions across Brazil in a collaborative effort that encompasses different dimensions of biodiversity value exploration and monitoring, especially phenological data.\u0000 One facet of our team is focused on creating products inspired by the diverse array of Brazilian fruit-bearing plants. Their work spans across sectors of the creative industry, including fashion, painting, and graphic design to infuse these natural elements into innovative and sustainable designs (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).\u0000 A group of nutrition and health scientists in conjunction with communication and marketing professionals is working to produce engaging media content centered around food recipes that incorporate Brazilian fruits (Fig. 3). These recipes primarily feature the fruit-bearing plants most frequently observed on iNaturalist in the city of São Paulo, allowing us to showcase the local biodiversity while promoting culinary diversity. Some of these recipes are based on the book Brazilian Biodiversity: Flavors and Aromas (Santiago and Coradin 2018). This book is an extensive compendium of food recipes that use fruits derived from native Brazilian species.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"229 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84050439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Promoting High-Quality Data in OBIS: Insights from the OBIS Data Quality Assessment and Enhancement Project Team ","authors":"Yi-Ming Gan, Ruben Perez Perez, Pieter Provoost, A. Benson, A. C. Peralta Brichtova, Elizabeth R. Lawrence, John Nicholls, Johnny Konjarla, Georgia Sarafidou, H. Saeedi, Dan Lear, Anke Penzlin, N. Wambiji, W. Appeltans","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112018","url":null,"abstract":"The Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) (Klein et al. 2019) is a global database of marine biodiversity and associated environmental data, which provides critical information to researchers and policymakers worldwide. Ensuring the accuracy and consistency of the data in OBIS is essential for its usefulness and value, not only to the scientific community but also to the science-policy interface. The OBIS Data Quality Assessment and Enhancement Project Team (QCPT), formed in 2019 by the OBIS steering group, aims to assess and enhance data quality. It has been working on three categories of activities for this purpose:\u0000 \u0000 Data quality enhancement and management\u0000 \u0000 The OBIS QCPT organized data laundry events to identify and address data quality issues of published OBIS datasets. Furthermore, individual OBIS nodes were invited to give their data-processing presentations in the monthly meetings to foster knowledge sharing and collaborative problem-solving focused on data quality. Data quality issues and solutions highlighted in the presentations and data laundry events were documented in a dedicated GitHub repository as GitHub issues. The solutions for data quality issues and marine-specific pre-publication quality control tools, designed to identify the data quality issues, were provided as feedback to the OBIS Capacity Development Task Team. These inputs were used to create training resources (see OBIS manual, upcoming OBIS training course hosted on OceanTeacher Global Academy) aimed at preventing these issues.\u0000 \u0000 Standardization of OBIS data processing pipeline \u0000 \u0000 As OBIS uses the Darwin Core standard (Wieczorek et al. 2012), the use of standardized tests and assertions in the data processing pipeline is encouraged. To achieve this, the OBIS QCPT aligned OBIS quality checks with a subset of core tests and assertions (Chapman et al. 2020) developed by the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Biodiversity Data Quality (BDQ) Task Group 2 (TG2) (Chapman et al. 2020) as tracked in this GitHub issue. Not all default parameters of the core tests and assertions are optimal for marine biodiversity data. The OBIS QCPT met monthly to determine suitable parameters for customizing the tests. The pipeline produces a data quality report for each dataset with quality flags that indicate potential data quality issues, enabling node managers and data providers to review the flagged records.\u0000 \u0000 Community engagement\u0000 \u0000 The OBIS QCPT led a survey among data users to gather insights into OBIS data quality issues and bridge the gap between the current implementation and user expectations. The survey findings enabled OBIS to prioritize issues to be addressed, as summarized in Section 2.2.2 of the 11th OBIS Steering Group meeting report. In addition to engaging with data users, the OBIS QCPT also served as a platform to discuss questions related to the use of Darwin Core from the nodes and provided feedback for the term discussions. \u0000 In summary, the OBIS QCP","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85992377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Growth and Evolution of the Symbiota Portal Network","authors":"Katie Pearson, E. Gilbert, K. S. Orellana, Greg Post, Lindsay Walker, Jenn Yost, Nico Franz","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112028","url":null,"abstract":"Symbiota is empowering biodiversity collections communities across the globe to efficiently manage and mobilize their data. Beginning with only a handful of collections in two major portals in the early 2010s (Gries et al. 2014), Symbiota now acts as the primary content management system for over 1,000 collections in more than 50 portals. Over 1,800 collections share data through Symbiota portals, constituting over 90+ million records and 42+ million images. The iDigBio Symbiota Support Hub, a team and cyberinfrastructure based out of Arizona State University and supported by the United States (U.S.) National Science Foundation, hosts 52 Symbiota portals and provides daily help and resources to all Symbiota user communities. The Symbiota codebase is being actively developed in collaboration with several funded projects, including the U.S. National Ecological and Observatory Network (NEON), to support new data types and connections, such as between Symbiota portals and other collections management systems, and to other resources (e.g., Index Fungorum, Global Registry of Scientific Collections, Bionomia, Environmental Data Initiative). Because the Symbiota codebase is open source and shared among portals, new developments in any portal empower the entire network. Here we describe recent expansions of the Symbiota network, including new portals, collaborations, functionalities, and sustainability actions. We look forward to building further collaborations with diverse, international collections data communities.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"77 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84059322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}