Copenhagen and Amsterdam, 24 June 2010 -- The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the LifeWatch infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research recently joined forces by signing a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) that will enable the two organizations to collaborate on development and sharing of critical biodiversity informatics infrastructure and information.
LifeWatch, a consortium of institutions and organisations acting on behalf of a number of European States and scientific networks, is working towards establishing a distributed infrastructure that would support scientific research within the context of European strategies concerning biodiversity and eco-systems.
The main objective of the MoC is to put in place an institutional framework that will allow the two like-minded initiatives to work closely together on a number of common strategic issues. Such activities include the promotion of a free and open data sharing policy, fostering the use of common standards and protocols, effective communication and coordination, supporting GBIF infrastructure with LifeWatch capabilities, and the strengthening of services that would assist LifeWatch-users in publishing their data via the GBIF network.
"Through this agreement, both organizations - and the informatics community at large - are benefitting from 10 years of investment in GBIF by countries to date," said Dr. Nick King, Executive Secretary of the GBIF. Wouter Los, project leader of the LifeWatch preparatory phase, commented: "Based on our respective mandates which are very complementary, GBIF and LifeWatch now have a formal framework in place for cooperation and collaboration on infrastructural developments."
LifeWatch is intended to occupy a strategic position within the European informatics science research infrastructure context. Building upon the existing GBIF data resources and supporting informatics infrastructure, LifeWatch will provide enhanced analytical and modeling services, as well as bring in additional data resources. As a result larger numbers of users in the region are expected to share their data through the GBIF network, which is already in use by many European countries. Through the complementarity of GBIF's data e-infrastructure and web services and LifeWatch's comprehensive range of analytical tools and services, the alliance has the potential to deliver a new breadth and depth of biodiversity research in Europe.
The MoC also seeks to leverage and synergise the two organisations' country membership-based status and the respective distributed research infrastructures. The agreement (pdf with full text here) came into force on the 14th of June 2010.
LifeWatch Grand Opening, Amsterdam March 12th, NEMO Science Centre
Amsterdam, March 10th 2008
It is increasingly important that Europe develops novel approaches to understand and manage our living environment, allowing for the development of reliable and science-based management strategies. We can move closer to this goal by making available and sharing electronic data on biodiversity records. But the current availability of Earth habitat observations and species-level and ecosystem biodiversity data is poor. This is particularly true with respect to co-ordination and data sharing among countries, organisations and disciplines, and meeting the needs of sustainable development. There are large spatial and temporal gaps in data coverage. This denies large-scale analytical and modelling developments that benefit of these resources. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility has made much progress in providing access to interoperable databases, but has to rely on the data-providers. Moreover, there is an eroding observational infrastructure and inadequate long-term data archiving. Targeted collective action is a feasible solution to these issues.
"We will see a new generation of a research infrastructure. Its architecture will allow scientific and other users to operate their own virtual laboratory, while sharing their data and modelling tools with all other users. Networks of ecological observatories and biological collections are going to offer an integrated access to support the understanding of the natural environment. All users benefit from the full computational power of the infrastructure. This user driven infrastructure is going to boost innovation."
Wouter Los, project coordinator, Universiteit van Amsterdam
"Just imagine we would be able to develop tools for automatic monitoring, directly linked with databases and web applications. Just like predicting the weather, we would be able to predict the presence of biodiversity in certain areas. A stronger communication tool about biodiversity is hard to imagine."
