Biodiversity Informatics, Bonn

Our task

In biodiversity informatics, we deal with everything that has to do with information about the occurrence, distribution and appearance of biological organisms.

To this end, data models and tools are developed and used to enable the recording, further processing and utilisation of data in a broader context. However, one focus is on sustainability, i.e. the long-term perspective for the data and the semantics of the data, i.e. the meaning. The aim is to make the information available in an interdisciplinary, transparent and reusable manner. We are committed to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge and endeavour to make all information available in accordance with the FAIR principles.

We want to answer the following questions

• Changes in the distribution of species over time
• Niche modelling
• Online catalogues for species
• Reliable taxonomic catalogues
• Complex biological interactions (e.g. health, food security, environmental quality, national security)

Our three focal points:

• Research on biodiversity data and open knowledge
• Digitisation of natural science collections
• Development of infrastructure

The structuring of "big data" and the representation of morphological phenotypes are at the heart of research. This is being pursued in the project "eScience-Compliant Standards for Morphology - the MDB Prototype" (https://github.com/MorphDBase/MDB-prototype and https://proto.morphdbase.de).

For the digitisation of the natural science collections, the Diversity Workbench suite (https://www.diversityworkbench.net) is used as the central data management framework. The digital collection catalogues are published on the in-house collection portal https://collections.zfmk.de), GBIF and Europeana. Entire data sets from publications, for example, are published with their own DOI via GFBio.