The biodiversity data landscape is confusing! Hundreds of disparate databases, with non-standardized formats and often little description of fields and contents, and search engines that return either few results or hundreds. Perforce, our Opportunistic Database of Biodiversity Databases contains metadata on 100s of databases–and our experience has been that it’s often impossible to really know what is actually in a databases without actually downloading it.
Our vision is of a unified, community- and AI-curated and organized biodiversity data infrastructure which would provide a searchable index, clear metadata standards, and tools for integrating and comparing databases–described in our new article in BioScience!
The next stage of biodiversity informatics: Community-driven synthesis and integration of biodiversity databases [open access]
Feng, X., Smith, A.B., Boyle, B., Chen, X., Enquist, B.J., Gallagher, R., Hammock, J., Ho, J.C., Lien, A.M., Maitner, B., Sokol, E.R., Soltis, P., Wenk, E.H., Willoughby, A., and Park, D.S. BioScience in press.
