The Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN), in collaboration with the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), has developed a comprehensive roadmap toward an integrated biological and environmental data network. The initiative, known as the Building an Integrated, Open, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (BIOFAIR) Data Network project, addresses the urgent need to connect fragmented data held in biodiversity collections and other biological and environmental data repositories to tackle pressing societal challenges, including biodiversity loss, climate change, invasive species, and emerging public health threats.
The project, described in a recent article in the journal BioScience, was underpinned by extensive community engagement with ecological, climate, environmental, genetic, health, biodiversity informatics, and federal stakeholders. Through six virtual listening sessions, project organizers engaged 199 stakeholders representing 142 organizations, followed by a workshop with 75 participants affiliated with 110 organizations and initiatives. The collaborative effort developed five cross-cutting themes to guide data integration: stocktaking and gap analysis, technological capacity building, best practices and standards, education and training, and community building.
"Biodiversity collections, including over a billion specimens in the United States, offer unparalleled information for understanding evolution, biological processes, and biodiversity responses to environmental change," the authors explain. Uniting species occurrence data from collections with other data sources related to their biology, interactions with other organisms, and their physical environment will require thoughtful community coordination, they say, but the benefit to science could be massive: "An integrated data network... could enable transformative research across biology, ecology, public health, and environmental science." Such infrastructure could support forecasting biodiversity changes, predicting invasive species distributions, and informing public health policies in response to newly emerging diseases.
The project's organizers emphasize that success depends on both technical infrastructure and large-scale community action, stressing that building the BIOFAIR Network will require "an inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable community of data providers, managers, and users that can integrate across technical, educational, and policy boundaries to support collective data sharing."
Funded by the National Science Foundation (DBI award no. 2303588), more information on the BIOFAIR Data Network project can be found at https://bcon.aibs.org/biofair .
