NFDI4Biodiversity: a German infrastructure for biodiversity data

Digital data have become an indispensable basis for biodiversity research. Sustainable curation, archiving, accessibility and integrability according to the FAIR principles ("Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable", Wilkinson et al. 2016) are essential for re-use to answer pressing questions in a rapidly changing environment. As part of the German multidisciplinary National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), the NFDI4Biodiversity consortium with 49 partners, spanning a broad spectrum from academia, to agencies, learned societies, and citizen science, has set itself the goal of providing a sustainable data infrastructure for biodiversity research. NFDI4Biodiversity builds on the German Federation for Biological Data (GFBio) project (2014–2021) and the GFBio e.V. founded in it, both organisationally and in the provision of services. These include a data submission and archiving system, support for the creation of data management plans and certification, portal functions with extensive data visualization and terminology services flanked by helpdesk, support and outreach activities*1 (Diepenbroek et al. 2014). Within the framework of NFDI4Biodiversity, these services will be expanded, based on (and calibrated by) the requirements of 23 concrete use cases from manifold biodiversity research domains. A central new component is the development of a capable multi-cloud platform, the "Research Data Commons" (RDC) where data can be aggregated, semantically linked and enriched with external services (Glöckner et al. 2020). Alongside the development of the services, the potential for joint use of standards and service components will be exploited through cooperation with existing data infrastructures. In addition to other NFDI consortia, international infrastructures and comparable national initiatives will play a special role; this process was already started with a symposium during the 2019 Biodiversity Next conference.