GBIF Work Programme 2020 Annual Update to Implementation Plan 2017–2021

Andorra: The Andorran node of GBIF has scarce human resources to provide data to the GBIF. Nevertheless we have made an effort to increase the data amount by the assistance of our collaborator in Andorra. Also we are constantly in contact with the Spanish node team, the Real Jardín Botanico in Madrid, which gives us an appreciated technical assistance.

Benin: One workshop was achieved in May 2019 to train national partners on data mobilization, data uses as well as registration on GBIF site to become more visible on GBIF site. At 5 least NGOs register on GBIF site this year. The master program in biodiversity informatics is doing great with in-depth capacity building of students from Benin and other African countries. It is just unfortunate that we never have the support of GBIF in that innovative and promising program.

Canada: CBIF contributes to the focus on people via David Shorthouse’s development of the Bloodhound application (https://bloodhound-tracker.net/) that enables agents to “Claim the natural history specimens you collected or identified, track their use in new science, and help acknowledge your peers, mentors, and organizations.” We continue to support David’s further development of this important tool and consider how to link this to development of community attribution standards and best practices.

Canadensys: We have followed the discussions in GBIF Community forum, but we have not been part of the survey.

iDigBio: In February 2019, iDigBio and the Office of Academic Support (OAS) and Student Support Services (SSS)/TRiO Program at the University of Florida co-organized a free Biology Career Conference and Fair for undergraduate students called iDigTRiO. TRiO is a federally funded grant program to help first generation students, low income students and students with disabilities navigate and succeed in their undergraduate careers and beyond. The event was targeted to SSS and TRiO students but was open to all undergraduates.

Japan: Provided one workshop to show GBIF Japan can now accept fossils, and to enroll people in this area.

Mexico: Internal process know how extended for people inside publisher CONABIO, know in another best practices on check list, train of trainers in checklist.

Netherlands: NLBIF and Naturalis Biodiversity Center host the Biodiversity Next 2019 conference that will bring together a wide audience of biodiversity data, standards, and infrastructure stakeholders.

Spain: Helped testing and participating in the GBIF Community Forum.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden has followed the development of GBIF’s experiences of GDPR adaptation in relation to expanded user profiles and data publication.

United States: US Node Manager joined GBIF Community Forum and contributes to relevant discussions.

Zimbabwe: In January 2019, GBIF Zimbabwe set up a technical committee composed of people with relevant skills and knowledge required for the effectiveness of the Node. These include, ecologists, entomologists, microbiologists, bioinformaticians, wildlife ecologists, ichthyologists and herpetologists. Launched a website for GBIF Zimbabwe and created twitter account.

Andorra: We plan to continue working with Spanish node team to continue improving our National Data Portal of Andorra and also increase the volume of data on biodiversity.

Benin: Capacity building through workshops and in the framework of the master program in biodiversity informatics data mobilization data uses.

Canada: CBIF will continue to collaborate with GBIF to incorporate Bloodhound functionality into the suite of GBIF services.

Canadensys: We will continue to follow and be part of the discussions in the forum. We think that the platform and discussions are really useful.

iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to support the series of workshops aimed at broadening participation in the biological sciences. iDigBio is planning a second annual iDigTRiO Biology Conference and Fair for February 2020.

Japan: Provide one workshop to expand the GBIF-related biodiversity informatics community.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Naturalis plans to implement augmented user profiles based on ORCID in ELViS, to be developed in SYNTHESYS+

Spain: We will spread through our national communication channels the new and expanded user profile at gbif.org when it is ready.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden will upgrade data provider’s agreements where necessary. Staying informed by and participating in discussions via the GBIF Community Forum (and GBIF webinars) will be encouraged within our regional community.

United States: USGS will work with OBIS to provide an updated memorandum of understanding between OBIS and GBIF.

Zimbabwe: Set up GBIF Zimbabwe community forum by June 2020

Argentina: Participation as mentor and trainer (national, regional and global), workshops with the Environment Secretariat for training.

Australia: The Atlas co-coordinated the CESP Paris workshop (March 2019) with GBIF France and GBIF Spain which provided training for the GBIF node staff on spatial components of the Atlas including the Spatial Portal. The Atlas developed training materials to support this workshop that can be used for future events.

Belgium: Completed set of explainer texts in multiple languages: French and Dutch translations.

Benin: One workshop was achieved in May 2019 to train national partners on data mobilization, data uses as well as registration on GBIF site to become more visible on GBIF site. At 5 least NGOs register on GBIF site this year. The master program in biodiversity informatics is doing great in in-depth capacity building of students from Benin and other African countries.

Canadensys: Canadensys, in partnership with iDigBio and GBIF Spain, and partially funded by the CESP program, has developed a series of workshops in Canada in order to strengthen the stakeholders knowledge about data mobilization, data cleaning and data-use. These workshops have been focused on the region, but the documentation developed can be easily adapted and reused outside North America. The documentation is available in both English and French.

Colombia: Biodiversity Data Publication Training Workshop: This workshop provided information and training for publishing biodiversity data through SiB Colombia and GBIF online platforms. The workshop took place on November 30, 2019 at Corporación Autónoma Regional del Risaralda, Quindío. The objective of the workshop was to support GBIF-Colombia’s partners (particularly environmental authorities and ONG) achieving greater visibility at the national and international level publishing biodiversity data. A total of 15 participants attended the workshop. Through the workshop aims, participants were informed on the recent activities of GBIF Colombia and the importance of biodiversity data publishing. Participants were invited to keep supporting GBIF-Colombia in its ongoing and future activities. https://sibcolombia.net/taller-sirap/ Biodiversity Data Publication Training Workshop: This workshop provided information and training for publishing biodiversity data through SiB Colombia and GBIF online platforms. The workshop took place on April 24–26, 2019 at Universidad Industrial de Santander, Bucaramanga. The objective of the workshop was to support GBIF-Colombia’s partners (particularly biological collections) achieving greater visibility at the national and international level publishing biodiversity data. A total of 23 participants attended the workshop. Through the workshop aims, participants were informed on the recent activities of GBIF Colombia and the importance of biodiversity data publishing. Participants were invited to keep supporting GBIF-Colombia in its ongoing and future activities. https://sibcolombia.net/taller-uis-2019/.

France: GBIF France supplied trainers and mentors for workshops organized by GBIF during 2019 under BID and BIFA for capacity enhancement in data publishing and use. Togo and France : Implementation of a capacity enhancement project to increase the online presence of GBIF Togo. Designing a dedicated, dynamic online site, devoted to biodiversity and news from Togo, based on ALA tools.

iDigBio: iDigBio partnered with Environmental Data Initiative (EDI), Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), DataONE, GBIF, NEON and Arctic Data Center on a Data Help Desk at the 2019 meeting of the Ecological Society of America. The goal was to engage participants one-on-one about their questions, comments and concerns about using these data in their discipline and area of research. iDigBio has developed a strong relationship with The Carpentries. iDigBio staff participate in Carpentries workshops throughout the year. iDigBio also has several staff members trained as Carpentries instructors.

Japan: Provided two workshop for data carpentry and GBIF/S-Net website use.

Mexico: Development website snib.mx for accessing and download occurrences data and national list of species with distribution in Mexico. Preparation tutorials for use geoportal.conabio.gob.mx it is a geographical portal with thematic maps and occurrences maps. In process, collaboration CESP2018_011 “Increasing capacities to develop National Species Checklists in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region” with the publish “Aves de México” and “Helmintos parásitos de vertebrados” national list of Mexican species.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Naturalis contributed to training and capacity enhancement activities using GBIF training materials in the COST Action MOBILISE.

Netherlands: NLBIF has motivated data providers to take more responsibility for their data and manage their data on the NLBIF IPT or start hosting their own IPT.

Norway: BioDATA is a three-year project (2018–2021) managed by GBIF Norway in collaboration with the Norwegian Research School in Biosystematics (ForBio) and the GBIF Secretariat, that is funded by the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education (DIKU). BioDATA build biodiversity data management skills across the former Soviet Union region and includes partners, students, and training events in Belarus, Tajikistan, Armenia, Ukraine and Norway (see also Activity 1e). BioDATA is reusing GBIF BID training materials and have completed the translation of the training curriculum to Russian together with the GBIF.ru team. A light-weight Raspberry Pi IPT server was developed for BioDATA training purposes at venues with unstable and low bandwidth Internet connections (See also activity 1e and 3b).

South Africa: SANBI-GBIF is recruiting a Biodiversity Informatics Support Officer to support training and engagement portfolio of work. This will support national and regional efforts and tie into GBIF helpdesk requirements as needed.

Spain: The e-learning platform of GBIF.ES has been used to host training modules for BIF and BIFA programmes, as well as for other capacity programmes within the network such as Biodiversity Data Management Skills for Students (BioDATA) and Biodiversity Information Management and Reporting (BIMR), reaching communities in Eurasia and South-East Europe respectively. GBIF Argentina has also used our e-learning platform to offer a course on biodiversity data quality and publication. We trained staff from Secretariat in using the Spanish e-learning platform. GBIF Spain is organizing an online workshop on R open to be run in November 2019 addressed to the national and international community. GBIF Spain co-coordinated with ALA and GBIF France the Living Atlas International Workshop that took place in Paris (March 2019) and used our informatics infrastructure to test the exercises.

Sweden: Representatives from GBIF-Sweden has participated in BID activities as Trainers and mentors (South Africa, Russia, Trinidad/Fiji/Cameroon, the Netherlands (GB26).

United States: Contributed to Marine Biodiversity Observation Network Pole to Pole workshop to train Central and South American country representatives in aligning data to Darwin Core and sharing via IPT.

Zimbabwe: Trained stakeholders (data holders and data users) on GBIF data access – January 2019.

Australia: Attendance and involvement in future workshops and efforts to improve documentation.

Argentina: Participation as mentor and trainer (national, regional and global), (start to) publish the National Biodiversity Inventory of the Environment Secretariat on the ALA Portal of Argentina.

Belgium: Complete set of explainer texts in multiple languages: French and Dutch translations.

Benin: “Capacity building through workshops and in the framework of the master program in biodiversity informatics Data mobilization Data uses.

Canadensys: Canadensys will continue to work on developing the documentation about data-cleaning, publication and data-use. This documentation will be published on our community page (https://community.canadensys.net/) but will be available to reuse for other institutions or nodes. This documentation will probably be published as short blog post on specific topics.

France: GBIF France will continue support for capacity enhancement activities and workshops.

iDigBio: iDigBio will continue its collaboration and relationship with The Carpentries. iDigBio has several workshops, webinars, symposia, and other events planned.

Japan: Provide two workshop for data carpentry and more use cases to be collected.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Further training and capacity enhancement activities will be organized through the COST Action MOBILISE.

Norway: BioDATA will during 2020 organize data mobilization training events in Armenia (April 2020) and in Ukraine (October 2020).

South Africa: SANBI-GBIF will continue to conduct training workshops and develop communities of practice in identified biodiversity informatics areas.

Spain: We will replicate the Data Use For Decision Making workshop for the Iberoamerican community in coordination with other nodes from the region. We will continue to provide support for GBIF coordinated training through our e-learning platform, as well as for other members of the network (e.g. GBIF South Africa). We will work together with the Secretariat to expand the functionalities of the GBIF.ES e-learning platform. We will attend and support future workshops and efforts to improve documentation around the Living Atlases platform.

Sweden: Experiences gained from the above will be integrated in educational and outreach activities nationally and elsewhere. Participation in the development of biodiversity informatics training curricula will continue.

United States: USGS will continue to participate as a teacher in workshops and meetings to advance data curation skills globally and across domains.

Zimbabwe: Data mobilization workshop in January 2020 Data access workshop in March 2020.

Andorra: On February 2018, Atlas Living Andorra was launch and presented to media. The ALA-Andorra was undertaken by a company specialized in informatics systems and the assistance of our colleagues of the Spanish Node.

Argentina: Capacity self-assessment ready, mentor to new nodes.

Australia: The Atlas assisted in the recruitment of two Living Atlas Coordinator positions with GBIF’s funding; a Technical and Administrative position. These positions will help develop the community further by organizing the governance arrangements around the Atlas tools and improving support and documentation for nodes attempting to use the Atlas tools for their biodiversity informatics portals.

Benin: In the framework of our master program, courses are being registered and will be provided to JRS Biodiversity Foundation, our donor. It will be then popularized and disseminated to be available for the general public.

Canada: CBIF is reviewing use cases and considering options for a new Canadian biodiversity portal. We participated in the workshop “Living Atlases workshop (CESP) 2019” held in Paris, France in April. CBIF participates in the Biodiversity Open Data Ambassador and has included GBIF materials in talks at conferences/meetings on biodiversity informatics topics.

Canadensys: Our node manager (Carole Sinou) is involved as a trainer in the BID and Global Nodes Training. The Canadensys team is also involved in the Living Atlases Community and Carole is part of the interim steering group. Anne Bruneau (HoD) and Carole will participate in the GB26 and Biodiversity_Next conference.

Colombia: Ventanas departamentales / Regional windows: Starting from a need for regionalization of SiB Colombia that has been latent for some time, during the first quarter of 2019 the first instance to explore biodiversity at departmental level in the country was launched. The first department is Santander. This window is a tool for exploring the data and information available about a specific department and sow the seed to develop a very useful tool for decision-making and territorial management at the regional level, through appropriation, awareness and empowerment.Data repatriation: from September 2018, the SiB Colombia has been working in the data repatriation process to the national data portal. In the first quarter of 2019, we repatriate 3,773,350 occurrences from eBird, iNaturalist, Xeno-canto and GBIF.org (https://sibcolombia.net/integracion-datos-2018/). In the third quarter we hope to support the hosting of a strategic GBIF dataset from CIAT - A global database for the distributions of crop wild relatives. https://doi.org/10.15468/jyrthk Participation in CESP: Increasing capacities to develop National Species Checklists in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region.

France: GBIF France helped to develop a portal based on the ALA software for GBIF Togo. GBIF France coordinated the CESP project : “International Living Atlases workshop: how to improve data use with Atlas of Living Australia modules” and co-organized with ALA the Paris workshop in April 2019. GBIF France will supply mentor for workshops organized by GBIF under BID and GNM on managing a GBIF participant node.

iDigBio: iDigBio has been participating in the monthly GBIF webinars when feasible. If live participation was not possible, the recordings have been utilized. iDigBio will be participating in the Node Training at GB26.

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Joint organization of 2018 Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Asia Regional Nodes Meeting in Kathmandu on 17–18 September 2018 (https://www.gbif.org/event/EEvUGytWxw48WQgkAwCkg/2018-gbif-asia-regional-nodes-meeting). Reactivated HKH-BIF (re-registration with GBIF). Participated in GBIF Network Webinar#1: Understood some elements of sequenced based data mobilization, and received introduction on Biodiversity Information for Development and BIFA.

Japan: Continuous improvement of S-Net system (domestic website for searching natural history specimens).

Mexico: Develop websites Enciclovida (http://enciclovida.mx), SNIB’s geoportal (http://geoportal.conabio.gob.mx/) and SNIB (http://www.snib.mx)

Netherlands: NLBIF made a financial contribution to the Living Atlases project and started to look into implementation of Living Atlases for NL. The NLBIF node manager has joined the Open Data Ambassador Programme.

Norway: GBIF Norway contributes as mentor to the regional GBIF network meeting in the Pacific in August 2019.

Spain: We have contributed to translations of training modules on managing a GBIF Participant Node, and we have hosted the online activities for these workshops. We have been mentors in the training activities on managing a GBIF Participant Node carried out in Trinidad. We will be mentors in the Global Nodes Meeting training in Leiden. We have been supporting GBIF Zimbabwe in establishing its GBIF Node. We have supported the development of the Living Atlases (LA) community. We are part of the LA interim committee and we have been active with the LA communication and outreach, promoting LA in different forums and conferences. We have supported and assisted new LA coordinators that will be helping the nodes that intent to use the Atlas tools. We have worked together with Nodes from UK, Australia, France, Sweden, Portugal and Canadensys to create video tutorials and online exercises for LA users around the world. We have supported other data managers of other Living Atlases installations.

Sweden: Reiterated capacity self-assessments have been made and the result added to the European nodes regional report (and we do well!). Additional ALA platform tools are being developed and offered to the Living Atlases Community. Apart from data publication (see below) the latter is probably the most significant contribution from GBIF-Sweden to the global biodiversity informatics community.

South Africa: SANBI-GBIF will consider mechanisms to engage the scientific community around the new and evolving concept of the GBIF Open Science Ambassador Concept. Here the Node will take forward the initial advocacy actions with the marine science community, conducted at the South African Marine Science Symposium. SANBI-GBIF has highlighted research aimed at developing the field of biodiversity informatics in South Africa through the use of primary data (big data –more than 2 million records) and informatics tools (niche models) to address key biodiversity challenges (food security and climate change). This demonstrates the use and relevance of GBIF mobilized data across the value chain. Showcase examples for Southern Africa will be derived.

United States: Continued collaboration with iDigBio building nodes capacity and cooperation.

Zimbabwe: Purchased and installed server for hosting data for GBIF Zimbabwe.

Andorra: We will attend to improve Capacities and Tools of ALA-Andorra

Argentina: Mentor to new nodes

Australia: Continued support for the Living Atlases Community, providing support and guidance to the Living Atlas coordinators.

Benin: In the framework of our master program, courses are being registered and will be provided to JRS Biodiversity Foundation, our donor. It will be then popularized and disseminated to be available for the general public.

Canada: CBIF will contribute to discussions/evaluations about lightweight national portals and potentially collaborate with GBIF to further develop/support/sustain an option that would be suitable for Canada and other countries.

Canadensys: We will continue to be involved as much as we can in the different initiatives developed by GBIF. It is important to give back to the community as much as we can.

Colombia: Ventanas departamentales / Regional windows: During the first quarter of 2020 will be released the version 1.1. The second department will be Boyacá. This window is a tool for exploring the data and information available about a specific department and sow the seed to develop a very useful tool for decision-making and territorial management at the regional level, through appropriation, awareness and empowerment. Data repatriation: Data repatriation of new occurrences between January – December 2019.

France: GBIF France will continue to participate in the activities of the Living Atlases Community.

iDigBio: iDigBio finds the monthly GBIF webinars valuable and plans to continue attending. iDigBio is currently in a sustainability planning process. As part of these efforts, iDigBio will consider capacity self-assessment as an information tool. In addition, iDigBio plans to evaluate Living Atlases as a potential long-term portal infrastructure. Lastly, iDigBio will consider taking advantage of the node mentorship program.

Japan: Continuous improvement of S-Net system (domestic website for searching natural history specimens).

Mexico: “Continue to update data occurrences in published datasets. Continue to gather new occurrences for publish in Mexican node"

Norway: As part of the BioDATA project, GBIF Norway will provide node mentoring services to partner countries who make progress towards joining GBIF as new members (see also Activity 1e).

Spain: We will keep on supporting the Living Atlases community: support coordinators to find a model of governance for the community; assist other data managers of the different Atlas around the world. We will work to develop online exercises on different modules of the Atlas to continue improving LA documentation for users.

Sweden: Continued development and addition of ALA tools will be shared through the new Swedish “Bioatlas” and by sharing code at GitHub. Support to other nodes employing techniques where we may be of help will continue/increase.

South Africa: SANBI-GBIF will highlight the role of GBIF and engage the scientific community at the annual Biodiversity Information Management and Foundational Biodiversity Information Programme Forum, on the Biodiversity Open Ambassador programme

Andorra: Increase biodiversity data amount related with Andorra.

Argentina: Argentina has a collection catalogue (and institutions) since 2003. We keep updating it.

Australia: The Atlas worked with the collections to identify the trait data available in existing database held in data managements systems by natural history collections. In addition, the Atlas engaged with members of the research community in Australia to discuss use of traits.

Belgium: Hosted IPT installations for two African nodes.

Benin: Capacity building is achieved to data publishers during our workshops in achieving data format, data cleaning, and data publishing as well. They are also assisted and encouraged to register on GBIF site. When they are ready to publish their data, they are intensively assisted by members of GBIF Benin to have data in adequate format, and cleaned before publishing.

France: GBIF France offers data hosting and maintains IPT instances for 14 southern countries.

Germany: Mobilizing biodiversity data: By mid of 2019 more than 47 million occurrences within 35,000 datasets covering 252 countries and areas have been made available by 40 publishers from Germany. By end of 2019 occurrence data, especially for the vascular plants for Bavaria (“Flora von Bayern Initiative”) will be significantly extended and the dataset for German fungi will be updated. German GBIF-Nodes continue to develop the DCOLL initiative with the aim of digitizing all German natural history collections (large-scale funding approval pending) and collaborate in the corresponding European Initiative (DiSSCo). Continuous support for Data providers using the BioCASe software for data publishing in GBIF, Europeana, GGBN, and other special interest networks. Implementation of further routines for data quality control are implemented in the Diversity Workbench software suite and in JACQ.

iDigBio: As of the end of May 2019, iDigBio had approximately 71 datasets in various stages of mobilization. As part of our data mobilization efforts, iDigBio staff periodically provide IPT help, support, and training to data publishers. iDigBio partnered with Environmental Data Initiative (EDI), Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), DataONE, GBIF, NEON and Arctic Data Center on a Data Help Desk at the 2019 meeting of the Ecological Society of America. The goal was to engage participants one-on-one about their questions, comments and concerns about using these data in their discipline and area of research.

Japan: New IPT server established, and started to provide data to GBIF. Tools to convert/check data from Excel to DwC provided.

Mexico: Increase number of occurrences through Mexican node at least 500,000 records planned for the last quarter. In progress publish two national checklist “Aves de México” and “Helmintos parásitos de vertebrados” with approximately 2,000 valid species.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Naturalis has discussed with GBIF Secretariat to provide an IPT through DiSSCo for serving collection data from countries in Europe participating in DiSSCo that have no GBIF node yet.

Netherlands: Through several workshops NLBIF has engaged with most of the Dutch Natural history museums and explained the ease of DwC and the possibility publication in the Biodiversity Data Journal. In the second half of 2019 this will have follow up and expected contributions of data to GBIF. Furthermore, NLBIF supports and promotes data publishers in hosting their own IPTs. And NLBIF is supporting data publishers to add multimedia files to their GBIF records.

Norway: GBIF Norway provides a helpdesk for data publishers in Norway, and will continue to host datasets for selected data publishers outside of Norway upon request – including data hosting requests from BioDATA partners. GBIF Sweden assisted GBIF Norway with the assessment of proposals and selection of data publishing co-funding grants for mobilizing Norwegian biodiversity data in GBIF.

South Africa: Strategic engagements/meetings between SANBI-GBIF Node Manager and South African Head of Delegation will continue in order to evolve the South African Node planning, and Africa portfolio of work and to elaborate the Science Diplomacy role SANBI-GBIF can play. Phase 2 (of national data platform) commenced in October 2018 (24 months), which looks at the implementation phase of the NBIS.

Spain: We are using our IPT installation in test mode to help other Nodes and providers in the data publication process.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden hosts IPT installations of successively more data providers nationally.

United States: Worked directly with new data publishers to align their data to Darwin Core and share it via IPT and provide support and guidance on the use and implementation of the IPT, data preparation, and Darwin Core implementation as needed/requested.

Andorra: We plan to keep working of gather biodiversity data of Andorra as much as possible. Another goal will be make to know GBIF in Andorra and so increase the number of entities interested in publishing their data in the GBIF portal.

Argentina: Argentina has a collection catalogue (and institutions) since 2003. We keep updating it. Try to reduce the number of IPT to centralize all the data sets in one IPT.

Australia: Develop a community of practice in the management of trait information. Develop a roadmap for trait mobilization activities.

Belgium: Host IPT installations.

Benin: Capacity building in data mobilization and data uses.

Canadensys: If needed, our team can help as mentor or as tester for the cloud-hosted IPT.

France: GBIF France will continue to support data hosting and publishing services for southern countries.

Germany: Independent of the success of the DCOLL Initiative, German GBIF Nodes will continue to support digitization efforts in collections and publications of observation datasets. Expected are significantly increased numbers in occurrence data of vascular plants, further digitization of German collections, fully referenced diatom data from the of the German Barcode of Life Initiative and further improvements in the JACQ (Virtual herbaria) and Diversity Workbench software. Continuing BioCASe Helpdesk. Implementation of ABCD 3.0 in BioCASe and beyond.

iDigBio: iDigBio is currently in a sustainability planning process. As part of these efforts, iDigBio will evaluate data holder capacity self assessment as a method of improving our ongoing data mobilization processes.

Netherlands NLBIF will continue the 2019 activities.

South Africa: SANBI-GBIF hosts an IPT which supports both national and regional data publishing. This includes helpdesk support.

Spain: GBIF Spain will continue to offer online support to data publishers also outside Spain in using IPT. We will assist GBIF Zimbabwe to configure and maintain its own IPT.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden will continue to offer services and support for data publishers covering all kinds of data. We expect progress also within the field of molecular data publication.

Argentina: Argentina participates actively in the translation of GBIF content. Support is provided, as a regional representative, to all countries that do not have a node yet, but are interested in joining GBIF.

Benin: We are invited to attend workshops organized by partners to make presentations on GBIF, how to publish data, how to register on GBIF site and the usefulness of data uses.

France: Help for French translations: GBIF.org, workshop materials. Co-organized with Norway and the NSG chairs, invitation of the project leader of a Balkan project and few observers of Balkan and eastern countries to the EU nodes meeting in Oslo, Norway (May 2019).

Germany: [National and International] German GBIF Node institutions are participating in numerous international collaborations and are constantly promoting participation in countries that have not yet joined GBIF.

iDigBio: The iDigBio Node Manager currently serves as the Regional Representative for participant nodes in North America.iDigBio has a leadership role with the Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN), which aims to expand the efforts of the NSF Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program. iDigBio will be hosting the annual ADBC Summit in October 2019, which brings together representatives from NSF’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program.

Japan: Several new organization started to provide data to JBIF (currently 100 organizations).

Mexico: The SNIB (Sistema Nacional de Información sobre Biodiversidad) process was published on the portal snib.mx, the summary process and phases diagram from the collection of specimen information to its publication on a web page. Include 8 documents describing subprocesses inside general process SNIB.

Netherlands: NLBIF facilitated the contribution of all data from observation.org, the largest citizen science portal of the Netherlands, with more than 26 million records. NLBIF has funded a project aimed at connecting the Ukrainian UkrBin data http://www.ukrbin.com to GBIF and further improve the engagement of citizen scientists in Ukraine. The NLBIF node manager has presented the requirements of becoming a GBIF participant at an online conference meeting in Ukraine.

Norway: GBIF Norway funded and organized the 2019 European GBIF Nodes meeting in Oslo in May 2019 and provided funding for inviting observers from Armenia and Belarus, and co-funding together with GIZ for an observer from Croatia to join the European Nodes meeting.

South Africa: The ABC project follows an incentivised approach for data mobilization. As a final outcome of the project, a prize-giving ceremony will be conducted in February 2019 based on a number of criteria. This approach will demonstrating the use and application of data which has been mobilized, for aspects of societal need and/or policy relevance.Through SANBI-GBIF, new countries in Africa will be identified to further the biodiversity informatics agenda in support of science and sustainable development. National networks will be developed in the region through the implementation of further BIMFs and GBIF advocacy will be conducted.

Spain: We have helped translating gbif.org and https://www.biodiversityinformatics.org/ to Spanish. We have run data mobilization onsite and online training activities with national and international participants to engage new participants.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden has shown interest in supporting presumptive new participants in the community.

Zimbabwe: Data holding institutions were identified.

Argentina: Argentina participates actively in the translation of GBIF content. Support is provided, as a regional representative, to all countries that do not have a node yet, but are interested in joining GBIF

Benin: Data publication, Registration of data publishers, data uses

Canadensys: Carole is deputy regional representative for the North American region and will continue to be involved in both the region and, if possible, in the BID program, as mentor.

France: Translations to be continued

Germany: Continued promotion of GBIF in national and international initiatives.

iDigBio: iDigBio is willing to continue offering its Node Manager as the Regional Representative if re-elected. iDigBio will continue its participation and involvement with BCoN. iDigBio is planning a 2020 Biodiversity Summit, which will be a collaborative meeting of the ADBC community, GBIF governing board, TDWG, and the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian). The meeting will feature the evolution and accomplishments of specimen-based science and the impact of digitization. This international event will be an excellent opportunity to highlight to a global audience the excellent work that our ADBC community is doing on behalf of U.S. collections.

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Sensitize data holders and data providers in ICIMOD’s eight regional member countries in the Hindu Kush Himlayan region about the importance of data publishing, and use of HKH-BIF regional platform for data publishing or use of available in-country platforms such as in India and China.

Japan: Provide meeting occasions to enroll more organizations.

Mexico: Prepare documents about National Catalogue of species.

Netherlands: Continue same work programme.

Norway: The BioDATA project managed by GBIF Norway contributes to promoting expanded GBIF country membership in the former Soviet Union region (including strategic partners from Belarus, Tajikistan, Armenia, and Ukraine). In addition to the primary goal of providing academic training (Activity 1b), BioDATA aims to build capacity needed for establishing national GBIF Participant Nodes (Activity 1c and 1e).

South Africa: A service provider has been secured and SANBI-GBIF will consider the ideal strategic approach to support expanding participation, and will engage with the GBIF Secretariat to ensure coordination.

Spain: Translation of gbif.org to be continued. Explore ways to expand participation in North African countries in collaboration with Ministry of Science.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden will primarily be engaged in the Living Atlases Community as a means to contribute to the expansion of the global network of GBIF.

United States: Planned collaboration with US marine community participants on a workshop to foster uptake of Darwin Core in marine biological data communities, draft controlled vocabularies for this community, and assess overlap with other ocean observing standards like NetCDF and Climate and Forecast.

Zimbabwe: Identification of more data holding institutions.

Argentina: Coordination, as a regional representative, in the reports from each node for the joint regional report.

Australia: Analysis of GBIF pipelines was undertaken, and project plans for further work with GBIF’s code base have been made.

Benin: We advanced in data mobilization and data uses, we encouraged institutions to register on GBIF site so as to become more visible.

Canada: CBIF participated in the North American Nodes Meeting where discussions of ways to better coordinate regional, country and continental activities with GBIF plans took place. We currently also contribute to plan implementation through supporting the efforts of the HOD for SPNHC and TDWG (Dr. Macklin). Dr. Macklin is also the current Chair of TDWG and is working with GBIF to advance mutual goals in standards development and biodiversity informatics. We also contribute as a member of the Steering Committee (via TDWG) for Biodiversity_Next 2019, a critical forum for discussion of the goals of GBIF and the alliance.

Canadensys: Our team has helped in the translation of the documentation for the alliance.

France: Co-organization with Norway of the EU nodes meeting in Oslo. Election of the new EU representative and Deputy.

iDigBio: iDigBio hosted the regional meeting of participant nodes in North America in association with the 2019 Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: A meeting was held between the DiSSCo coordination office and GBIF Secretariat to discuss coordination of implementation activities. Naturalis provided D2.3 Design of a collection digitization dashboard in ICEDIG which provides input for further development of GRSciCol hosted by GBIF.

Netherlands: NLBIF has adopted the DiSSCo-NL NTF lead and as such integrates GBIF and national DiSSCo activities.

Norway: GBIF Norway funded, hosted and organized the 2019 European GBIF Nodes meeting in Oslo in May 2019 (see also Activity 1c and 1e). GBIF Norway and the GBIF Norway network partners serve on GBIF committees as elected vice-chair for the GBIF Science committee and as vice-chair for the European GBIF Nodes committee.

South Africa: Strategic engagements/meetings between SANBI-GBIF Node Manager and South African Head of Delegation will continue in order to evolve the South African Node planning, and Africa portfolio of work and to elaborate the Science Diplomacy role SANBI-GBIF can play. Phase 2 (of national data platform) commenced in October 2018 (24 months), which looks at the implementation phase of the NBIS.

Spain: The GBIF.ES web page hosts activity reports from European Nodes that can be useful for other reporting activities Nodes. We have been trying to coordinate efforts on how to integrate EU Nodes services in the EOSC. We have communicated the progress done by GBIF in developing a global alliance for biodiversity knowledge in our national context.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden has participated in regional meetings, and at conferences adding to the implementation of prescribed GBIF activities. By providing the 1st vice chair of the Nodes Steering Group, GBIF-Sweden contributes to leading the work of connecting interested world-wide.

Argentina: Continue contributing to national, regional and global activities.

Australia: Review GBIF’s data pipelines work and data registry as part of an Atlas infrastructure review and refresh. Aim to align with GBIF where possible.

Benin: Capacity building, data mobilization, data use.

Canada: CBIF will continue to build on the progress made in 2019. We will also contribute through membership on the Steering Committee (via TDWG) for the Biodiversity Summit 2020 in Washington DC, a critical forum for discussion of the goals of GBIF and the alliance.

Canadensys: We will continue to help and be involved in the alliance as much as we can.

iDigBio: iDigBio plans to continue attending, supporting, and/or hosting regional meetings in North America. iDigBio also plans to continue offering the annual Digital Data Conference as a venue for the regional meetings.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: DiSSCo is coordinating with GBIF, iDigBio and IGSN to establish a global solution for Digital Specimen identifiers and other infrastructures. In SYNTHESYS+ ELViS development it will be investigated whether linkages can be achieved between ELViS and GBIF collection data (specimen datasets and collection metadata).Naturalis would like to share its developments using AI in species identification and work on using environmental DNA for biomonitoring with the GBIF community.

Netherlands: Continue work programme.

Norway: GBIF Norway contributes staff resources to the DiSSCo National Task Force (NTF) representing Norway in the DiSSCo Prepare process. GBIF Norway maintain liaison with international organization in the agrobiodiversity community to promote and actively support the harmonization with GBIF provided and solutions endorsed standards (see also Activity 2a, 3c and 5b).

South Africa: Further engagements with SANBI-GBIF Node Manager and HoD to evolve the Node planning and Africa portfolio.

Spain: Collaboration with EU Nodes and EOSC to explore best ways to integrate Node’s services in the EOSC.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden will continue to take part in leading and contributing to the development of interconnections at national and international levels (GBIC 2 follow-up etc. incl. participation in SYNTHESYS+).

United States: USGS will continue to be involved in and contribute to advancing and contributing to the ideas around the GBIC2 workshop sharing implementation and infrastructure suggestions as they pertain to the US and the various global communities of practice.

Zimbabwe: Develop and finalize a five year strategic plan and 2020 action plan.

Argentina: Participation, as a jury, of the evaluations of the IDB and BIFA projects. As well as a jury of the Ebbe Nielsen awards. On the other hand, participation in 2 CESP programs (one as a participant, the other as a coordinator). Trainer at the last BID meeting in Caribbean and at the Global Nodes Meeting.

Australia: ALA hosted a week long workshop/hackathon with developers from GBIF Brazil in Canberra (December 2018) to help them in the development of the Atlas based portal for Brazil.

Benin: We coordinated the implementation of the BID regional and national projects. In the framework of BID Regional project, we coordinated data mobilization and data uses in a consortium of 6 African countries. In the framework of a CESP program with Nigeria, we received and trained in Benin, the GBIF node of Nigeria.

Canadensys: We have participated in the five-year CESP review but we have not applied for funding during the 2019 call. The CESP program is a great incentive to promote projects between different nodes.

Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities: CETAF is a driving force behind the European DiSSCo Initiative, which aims at creating a Europe-wide research infrastructure to mobilize, unify and deliver bio- and geo-diversity information. The CETAF Secretariat is actively participating in several projects related to the implementation of DiSSCo, inter alia SYNTHESYS+ and MOBILISE.

Germany: Several German GBIF Node institutions actively participate in projects contributing to the European DiSSCo Initiative, that aims at creating a Europe-wide research infrastructure to mobilize, unify and deliver bio- and geo-diversity information. Strong engagement also in CETAF, GGBN and BioCASe.

Netherlands: Evaluated CESP 2019 call.

South Africa: Further engagement with regards to funding allocation will continue. The Africa Coordination Mechanism (ACM) 5 year strategy is seen as a catalytic investment. Sustainability will be built into the 1st phase, so there will be less concern about what happens subsequently, as this would have been built into the model. The ACM Business Case and Regional Engagement Strategy is a model that could be adopted in other regions of the world. In the 1st three years, through the ACM, GBIF-Africa, through SANBI-GBIF will explore the need and feasibility of developing a bigger platform that can provide for a strengthening of a community of practice for all African biodiversity informatics initiatives, to enhance and make more efficient use of the data. This will be done through leveraging additional regional and global partnerships and initiatives. Data mobilization funding through FBIP large and small grants ± €645,000 will continue in 2019. 4. ABC Prize money to be awarded in 2019.

Sweden: Contribution by staff participation in-kind at meetings, conference sessions, workshops etc.

Zimbabwe: Applied and obtained CESP funding for GBIF Zimbabwe in collaboration with GBIF Spain.

Argentina: Participation in 2 CESP programs (one as participant, one as coordinator), coordinating national co-financing for CESP, coordinated from Argentina.

Belgium: Help establishment of a second phase of BID in collaboration with the European Union

Benin: Continue to exert the mentorship among partners

Canadensys: We will not lead a proposal for a CESP grant in 2020, but, depending on the needs, we could act as mentor in another proposal. We are also opened to act as mentor for a project in the BID program, but we do not have a project in mind currently.

Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities: Participation in DiSSCo-related projects continues.

Germany: Participation in DiSSCo-related projects, CETAF, GGBN and BioCASe continues.

iDigBio: iDigBio will continue its integration and coordination efforts with GBIF, ALA, and DiSSCo.

Norway: The GBIF CESP OpenPSD project developed by the GBIF Nodes from Spain, Portugal, Norway, Colombia, and France will engage and document best practices for mobilizing biodiversity data from the private sector (see also Activity 1d, 3b and 3c). All of the Nordic and Baltic GBIF nodes contribute to the Nordic-Baltic collaboration on e-infrastructures for Biodiversity Informatics (DeepDive2 project proposal) funded by the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) of the Nordic Research Council (NordForsk) (see also Activity 2a, 2b, 3b, 4a, 4b and 4c).

South Africa: Develop funding strategies to support the Africa Coordinating Mechanism Business Case. Continued data mobilization funding through FBIP large and small grants of ± €645,000 will continue in 2020. The ABC2 project has been approved by the JRS and will be initiated in 2019 and continue into 2020.

Spain: GBIF Spain will be involved in 3 CESP projects that will take place from June 2019 to June 2020. We will coordinate the OpenPSD CESP project to mobilize data from private sector. We will be available to help in the second phase of BID programme if this takes place.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden will continue to contribute by offering opportunities for its staff members to participate in coordinated activities aimed at expand the scale and scope of GBIF.

Zimbabwe: Implementation of CESP project.

Argentina: Promote development of a shared domain model for sharing and linking all components of biodiversity information.

Australia: “Work is ongoing, and the Atlas continues to contribute to the work of the TDWG Biodiversity Data Quality Interest Group and Citizen Science Interest Group. The Atlas continues to be a seminal contributor to the international collaboration project which is developing and implementing the PPSR-Core data and metadata standard for citizen science. This project aims to provide a robust mechanism for data and metadata standardization and exchange for the citizen science domain, which is also compatible with, and leverages, other existing standards and protocols.

Canada: CBIF plays an active role in developing, reviewing and implementing standards. Staff contribute to the Collections Description (CD) standard, Darwin Core, Taxon Concept Schema (TCS), Data quality and controlled vocabulary standards, annotation and attribution standards, genomic standards, and others. Dr. Macklin is the current chair of TDWG and is working closely with GBIF to insure alignment to GBIF requirements and to seek funding to further mutual work.

Germany: Two German GBIF Nodes finalized the new Version of the TDWG Standard ABCD (Access to biological collection data, https://abcd.tdwg.org/3.0/). The Botanical Node houses the technical Secretariat of the Global Genome Biodiversity Network, significantly contributing to standard development for DNA- and Tissue samples.

iDigBio: “Several representatives of iDigBio participated in the GBIC2 conference. iDigBio, GBIF, ALA, and DiSSCo are making a concerted effort to coordinate efforts. Several iDigBio staff are involved with the Natural Collections Description (NCD) group.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Naturalis participates in modernizing data standards through TDWG and active participation in the TDWG CD taskgroup.

Netherlands: NLBIF is engaged in TDWG CD (Collection Description) which will likely feed into GRBio/GRSciColl which is adopted by GBIF.

Norway: The wider Norwegian GBIF community contributed to the implementation of the sampling event data model for environmental monitoring and survey-based data with focus on national implementation while contributing to the international standardization process (see also activity 3b).

Spain: We have started to explore how to serve species information under the Plinian Core Standard in the Living Atlas platform. Involved in the TDWG Species Information Interest working group.

Sweden: Being part of a national research infrastructure for biodiversity data provisioning, GBIF-Sweden has started working on taxonomic and other data standards for various kinds of “new” data types (molecular data, tracking data, sensor data).

United States: Continued to advance sampling event with extended measurement or fact extension for documenting data associated with biological observations but not appropriate for occurrence only Darwin Core.

Andorra: It is little bit hard for us to contribute in improve the participation on Building of data standards. Nevertheless we are open to adapt our data to the newest standards.

Argentina: Promote development of a shared domain model for sharing and linking all components of biodiversity information.

Australia: Align with international projects in establishing and using standardized tests and reporting.

Belgium: Help documenting a unified information model that covers the scope of GBIF content.

Biodiversity Heritage Library: Review options for implementing IIIF.

Canada: CBIF will continue to contribute to the standards work outlined in the 2019 progress report.

Germany: ABCD 3.0: German GBIF Nodes contribute to a new working group which aims to integrate ABCD and Darwin Core. Continued activities in GGBN.

iDigBio: iDigBio will continue its integration and coordination efforts with GBIF, ALA, and DiSSCo. iDigBio will continue to support the Natural Collections Description (NCD) group.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: DiSSCo seeks to join forces with GBIF and other infrastructures to work on interoperability standards for natural scientific collections. Naturalis plans to revive the BD Integration IG in RDA and to involve the the GBIF community in rewriting the chapter to create recommendations for modernizing GBIF community data standards in a multidisciplinary setting.

Netherlands: Continue TDWG CD activities.

Norway: Dependent on continued stable funding for GBIF activities in Norway, GBIF Norway will contribute to modernize and expand the support in GBIF for new data types for genome and eDNA data linked to “material samples”; and data types for ecological data sets based on the “sampling event” model (see also Activity 3b).

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden will further work on taxonomic and other data standards for various kinds of “new” data types (molecular data, tracking data, sensor data).

Argentina: Promote publication of species checklists through GBIF network, as a coordinator of the CESP2018-011: 11 nodes/institutions work together to develop a manual to improve the publication of checklist. Also to boost the publication of national checklist.

Australia: Continued work on improving access to the Australian checklists. These data are available now in Darwin core archives to feed into Catalogue of Life plus.

Benin: “Many checklists have been published on medicinal plans and agroforestry species:

Biodiversity Heritage Library: Participated in GlobalNames Workshop and Catalogue of Life Plus meetings.

Canadensys: The Canadensys team has maintained Vascan (https://data.canadensys.net/vascan/), the Database of Vascular Plants of Canada, which is used in the GBIF backbone, and is an important resource for biologists and botanists in Canada and elsewhere. Vascan continues to be actively curated and up to date based on recent publications.

Colombia: Publication and update of different national species checklists, supported by specialist groups and biological collections.

France: Update of TAXREF, the French national checklist.

Germany: A project implementing the registration system for algal names (PhycoBank) was concluded and the fully functional application is now being tested within the phycological community. The global Caryophyllales Network is coordinated at the Botanical Node. It will produce a complete taxonomic backbone for this order, comprising about 5% of flowering plants.

Integrated Taxonomic Information System: Through the Catalogue of Life Partnership and through the CoL Global Team, ITIS was integral to the planning and implementation of the Catalogue of Life Plus initiative.

Japan: Additional data and revision to be continued. Endangered Species (National and local in Japan) checking application to be developed.

Mexico: Consolidation of the first two national species lists for GBIF Mexican node: “Aves de México” and “Helmintos parásitos de vertebrados”. Publish in process through participation in CESP2018_011 “Increasing capacities to develop National Species Checklists in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region”. Website snib.mx development include lists of species with distribution in Mexico for download. A total 102, 866 valid or accepted species and 8,543 valid or accepted infra species.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Naturalis is working together with GBIF and NLBIF to coordinate and carry out work under the NLBIF-funded Catalogue of Life Plus (CoL+) project, led by Olaf Banki. The existing processes for constructing the monthly and annual Catalogue of Life checklists and for constructing the GBIF taxonomic backbone have been replaced with a single solution that delivers both products (together forming a “provisional checklist”). This new infrastructure is currently in beta testing and will be taken in production in 2019. The new infrastructure includes handling of existing GBIF Checklistbank capabilities (registry integration, images, descriptions and the infrastructure has be developed to have updates to the provisional checklist being reflected directly in the GBIF data index and vice versa. Naturalis is working with Catalogue of Life to develop and increase participation of a a responsive expert community for the names infrastructure.

Netherlands: NLBIF is one of the main sponsors of CoL+ project.

Spain: Publication of several checklists with national and regional scope.

Species 2000: The Catalogue of Life + steering committee consists of the following parties: Barcode of Life Data Systems, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Encyclopedia of Life, Global Biodiversity Information Facility, and Species 2000 / ITIS / Catalogue of Life, and Naturalis Biodiversity Center. Recently the Distributed System of Scientific Collections joined the steering committee and discussion with Lifewatch to join are ongoing. The steering committee will become part of the Board of Directors of Species 2000 to jointly govern the new Catalogue of Life Infrastructure. The COL+ project team consists of representatives of Species 2000, GBIF Secretariat, Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the Illinois Natural History Survey. In 2019, the new tooling for the assembly of the Catalogue of Life will go in production by the 4th quarter. The monthly editions will be resumed in the new Catalogue of Life infrastructure and persistent, unique identifiers for names will be part of the new infrastructure. By the end of 2019 all functionality of the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy will be integrated in the new Catalogue of Life infrastructure. A new public portal will be in beta version by the end of 2019. The infrastructure will be hosted by GBIF. In 2019, the requirements for scientific names and taxonomic services of all COL+ consortium partners as well as other important stakeholders will be captured. Also the use of the COL in scientific publications will be analysed. GBIFS and Species 2000 had discussions with the European Environmental Agency concerning taxonomic backbone services, and in the context of the Synthesis+ project will continue these discussions together with DiSSCo. GBIF and Species 2000 are working together with the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin to organize a workshop to gather the taxonomic expertise to build the best global resource for Lepidoptera taxonomic data. Together with the Conservatory and Botanical Garden of the City of Geneva and the World Flora Online Consortium a workshop is planned to gather the taxonomic expertise to build the best global resource for plant taxonomic data. Species 2000 and GBIF are organizing a symposium on getting towards a joint global names and taxonomic infrastructure at the Biodiversity_Next conference in October in Leiden, The Netherlands.

Sweden: By synchronizing the national Swedish Dyntaxa taxonomic backbone with the Catalogue of Life, GBIF-Sweden contributes to the enhancement of the global names infrastructure.

Argentina: Keep working to publish more checklist at the nodes related on the CESP2018-011 and any other with interest.

Australia: Further work to improve the currency of taxonomic information in the Atlas based on the Australian checklists.

Benin: Continue previous work programme.

Biodiversity Heritage Library: Continue to participate in GlobalNames Workshop and Catalogue of Life Plus meetings. Implementation of new Global Names services in BHL.

Canadensys: We would strongly encourage CoL+ to continue taking into consideration the Canadian expertise for vascular plant taxa.

Germany: Updated list of fungi and fungal-like organisms from Germany compiled by the German Mycological Society (DGfM) available via GBIF. Algal names from the PhycoBank algal registrations system available via GBIF. Application to General Nomenclature Committee to recognize PhycoBank as a global repository for algal names. Complete taxonomic backbone for Caryophyllales available, inter alia through World Flora Online.

Integrated Taxonomic Information System: ITIS is developing and will deploy in 2020 an online taxonomic workbench that will allow for the development of taxonomies based on expert communities. This effort will support taxonomic sectors which currently lack adequate support and will improve alignment with other checklist efforts. This is part of the ITIS' commitment to the CoL+ (GBIF’s names infrastructure.)

Japan: Improvement of training data for Endangered Species to be revised.

Mexico: About 8 new national checklist: Phengodiae, Lycidae, phytoplankton (Pacific Ocean), ants, amphibians and reptiles, Lamiaceae, and echinoderms. Comparing Catalogue of Mexican species vs. Catalogue of Life CoL 2018, only 33.5% of species and 18.42% of infra species in the CoL with distribution in Mexico.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Work on CoL+ will be continued early 2020 to provide a end-user interface to the renewed Catalogue of Life infrastructure and to replace the CoL website with a new one to be hosted by GBIF.

Netherlands: NLBIF continues the contribution to the CoL+ project and the development of the new CoL infrastructure to serve as taxonomic backbone for GBIF, DiSSCo and aligned projects.

Spain: Intend to publish national list of invasive species and regional species lists from natural parks.

Species 2000: A long term vision for Catalogue of Life+ as incubator project for the alliance for biodiversity knowledge will be developed. This will result in the scoping of a second phase of the Catalogue of Life Plus project for which funding will be sought. This second phase will likely focus on empowering the taxonomic community to make better use of the Catalogue of Life and implement taxon concept identifiers. The second phase will also encompass the needs for names and backbone services of the COL+ consortium partners and other key stakeholders as best as possible. Special attention will be made in linking DNA barcode information and the Catalogue of Life in discussion with the International Barcode of Life and GBIF amongst others.

Sweden: More taxonomic names and concepts (esp. related to fungi and procaryotes) will be included in the set of services offered by GBIF-Sweden.

Switzerland: Publication of national species checklists for red list groups and important invertebrate groups.

Argentina: Since 2003 Argentina have a catalogue of institutions and collections and keeps growing.

Benin: Three metadata have been published in the framework of our joint CESP project with GBIF France

Canada: CBIF staff contribute to the Collections Description standard.

Canadensys: Metadata on Canadian collections are relatively up to date on the Canadensys website (through the IPT and the ALA framework)

iDigBio: Several iDigBio staff are involved with the Natural Collections Description (NCD) group. iDigBio maintains a comprehensive list of known biodiversity collections in the United States.

Japan: Preliminary questionnaire provided to data providers for future stock of data.

Mexico: “Colecciones Biológicas científicas Mexicanas” http://www.biodiversidad.gob.mx/especies/colecciones/ is a web portal with 747 metadata of scientific Mexican collections in 237 national institutions. The collection metadata was developed with standard international Natural Collections Description (NCD).

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Naturalis led the development of the DiSSCo Prepare proposal which includes preparations towards a catalogue of the European collections. As part of a project financed by the Dutch research council (NWO, ALWIN.005), Naturalis together with NLBIF, and the foundation for Dutch Natural History Collections has created a collections dashboard for the Netherlands. This dashboard is the first online representation of the natural history collections in the Netherlands that are digitized as well as not yet digitized. The dashboard will be published in the country page of DiSSCo.eu and NLBIF.nl.

Netherlands: NLBIF is part of TDWG NCD that furthers the CD (Collection Description) standard https://www.tdwg.org/community/cd/ to describe natural history collections. A preliminary standard has been implemented in a dashboard that shows the Dutch national collection as part of the NLBIF activities under DiSSCo-NL.

Spain: We maintain, improve and keep updated the Spanish registry of biodiversity collections and databases that currently hosts 230 institutions and 471 collections/databases. This metadata repository is a first step for data mobilization and it as available at https://www.gbif.es/registro-instituciones/.

Sweden: In collaboration between The Swedish Museum of Natural History GBIF-Sweden runs the development of a web-based collection management system (DINA web).

Switzerland: Contribution to the report of the Swiss Academy of Sciences: National significance of natural history collections in Switzerland.

United States: Continued significant investment and contribution from ABCD, iDigBio including hosting an annual conference and working directly with collection managers.

Argentina: Keep working with our catalogue and collaborate with the GRBio / GRSciColl initiative presented at GBIF.

Canada: CBIF will continue to contribute to the Collections Description standard.

Canadensys: If needed, we can help review and update information about Canadian Collections on the Global Register of Biodiversity Collections (GRBio)/Global Register of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl) dataset. We will maintain the collections' metadata up-to-date on Canadensys.

iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to support the Natural Collections Description (NCD) group. iDigBio will continue maintaining its list of U.S. collections. Ultimately, iDigBio’s goal is to integrate this list with the result from the GBIF/GRBio/GRSciColl collaboration.

Japan: Evaluation of questionnaire to know/analyses the status.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Naturalis is planning to establish a proto-version of the future DiSSCo collections catalogue and is investigating to use GBIF as one of the authoritative sources of data. For the catalogue a minimum information specification for collections (MICS) needs to be developed in conjunction with work on the TDWG CD standard and based on the work already done in ICEDIG.

South Africa: The Natural Science Collections Facility, Funded by the Department of Science and Technology plays a key role in the development of catalogues for collections.

Sweden: Expanding DINA web to cover not only biological objects (including sequence data) but also palaeontology and geology will continue in 2019.

Switzerland: Update of Swiss GRSciColl records. Promotion and support of collection metadata acquisition.

United States: ABCD, iDigBio to continue work in advancing and facilitating sharing of catalogue collections.

Argentina: We started working with the environment secretary to publish the national biodiversity inventory and national species lists. On the other hand, it is expected to feed the national portal with these national listings.

Australia: Recommend that the community works collaboratively to define targets around coverage and extent of our data products (e.g. temporal/ spatial and taxa). This will help define the level of effort required for data publishers to met these gaps. Also define level of use from Occurrence to Abundance to True Absence.

Benin: Many data gaps are being identified and will be filled in the framework of the master program in biodiversity informatics

Colombia: Santander BIO and Boyacá BIO. two projects to promote knowledge, conservation, management and sustainable use of biodiversity in these territories. With the joint work of several research institutes and organizations these projects made a large amount of data available through the SiB Colombia in regions of the this departments previously difficult to access. In this way it has been possible to fill data gaps in Colombia through these regional initiatives. Santander BIO and Boyacá BIO Datasets: https://www.gbif.org/dataset/search?q=Santander%20BIO https://www.gbif.org/dataset/search?q=Boyac%C3%A1%20BIO

iDigBio: iDigBio hosted an Invertebrate Collections Digitization workshop in February 2019. Participants discussed best practices and considered ways to improve on existing methods to improve efficiency and speed of data mobilization. iDigBio hosted a Digital Future of Entomology symposium at the 2019 Eastern Branch EntSoc meeting. Attendees learned exactly what digitization means and discussed current and future prospects of digitization in entomology.

Integrated Taxonomic Information System: ITIS has developed numerous taxonomies to close know taxonomic gaps and has provided them to the global community as part of ITIS' commitment to names infrastructure.

Japan: Research program on gap analysis for endangered species to be continued.

Netherlands: The NLBIF call 2018/2019 has funded a project to share data from the Ukrainian UkrBin database with GBIF.

Norway: GBIF Norway was during 2019 an active partner of Nordic crop wild relative projects and international agrobiodiversity processes to represent and promote implementation of GBIF infrastructure technology and solutions (see also activity 3a, 4a, and 5b).

Spain: We have mobilized data from public administrations and marine data.

Sweden: By developing standards for new data types GBIF-Sweden has been able to reach out to previously less well covered data providers.

Argentina: Continue with the publication of the national inventory of biodiversity and national lists of species. On the other hand, it is expected to feed the national portal with these national listings.

Benin: Many data gaps are being identified and will be filled in the framework of the master program in biodiversity informatics.

Canadensys: In coordination with CBIF, the official Canadian node, it would be great to start a hunger-mapping project in order to identify the gas in Canada and to find solution to resolve those gaps.

iDigBio: iDigBio will continue its work to expand knowledge of what is contained within collections so that it is easier to determine the remaining volume of work.

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Advancing Biodiversity Informatics Capacities in the HKH- Regional Workshop (define data gap map for Asia): explore possibilities of collaboration with GBIF, relevant institutions in HKH regional member countries, and Asian Node.

Japan: Gap analyses to be carried out in some model collections.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Work on large scale digitization plans will continue in DiSSCo-linked projects.

Norway: GBIF Norway and GBIF Portugal intend to represent GBIF in the agrobiodiversity community during 2020 with several new project proposals under development.

Spain: We will start mobilizing data from private sector in collaboration with Nodes from Norway, Portugal and Colombia. Define priorities for content mobilization in coordination with GBIF Secretariat and Ministry of Environment.

Sweden: Among the collaborating institutions of the Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure work will continue to develop and adapt systems for accepting and presenting new data types.

United States: Work with the Global Ocean Observing System and GEO BON to identify priority datasets related to Essential Ocean and Essential Biodiversity Variables.

Zimbabwe: Citizen science will be a focus.

Argentina: With the work with the environmental secretary we’re going to promote use of sampling event data model for ecological and monitoring datasets.

Australia: The Atlas went through a process of business analysis on species level and specimen level trait data, assessing availability and the use of standards and ontologies. The analysis also documented potential use cases for the use of traits in Atlas.

Biodiversity Heritage Library: Implemented the addition of already transcribed materials to BHL.

Colombia: Training Workshop with the National Institute of Health to publishing data relating to vectors and hosts of human diseases. The workshop took place on 20 September 2018 at National Institute of Health, Bogotá. A total of 10 participants attended the workshop. https://sibcolombia.net/taller-sirap/ https://sibcolombia.net/taller-ins/

Germany: As part of GFBio (German Federation for Biological Data, www.gfbio.org): establishment of workflows and software infrastructure for archiving and publishing data sets from national biodiversity research projects. GFBio includes the provision of observation and collection data to GBIF via the established GBIF-D data centres and BioCASe/ABCD interfaces. The German Botanical Node hosts the technical secretariat of the Global Genome Biodiversity Network. 90 Biobanks provide more than 1.6 million standardized DNA and 370,000 tissue sample data. Most of the linked specimen data records are also published in GBIF. MetBaN (https://github.com/sproft/MetBaN/tree/v0.1.0) is a bioinformatic pipeline which implements a modular and flexible species delimitation approach by streamlining metabarcoding and phylogenetic software packages. MetBaN is developed at the Botanical Node.

iDigBio: iDigBio sponsored a Phenology Deep Learning workshop in January 2019. This workshop focused on exploring such technologies as deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), data protocols and standards for linking trait data to specimen records, tracking phenological synchronization across phyla, and tools for trait measurement and analysis. iDigBio sponsored an Imaging and Digitization Workshop for Amateur Paleontologists workshop in July 2019.

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Provided technical support to Department of Plant Resources to publish occurrence data of endemic flora of Nepal via HKH-BIF platform (http://rds.icimod.org:8080/hkh-bif/resource?r=endemic_flora_of_nepal_kath)

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: DiSSCo is discussing with other RIs, Plazi and in RDA how to serve expanded collections data with improved provenance and all data derived from specimen linked back to the specimen.

Norway: Based on the recommendations and guidelines from the GBIF CESP Bireme report (developed by the GBIF Nodes of Belgium, France, Ireland, Norway, Portugal and Species2000), GBIF Norway has engaged with the Agency of Environment in Norway to promote the use of the GBIF data streams in EU-directive biodiversity information reporting. The Norwegian Environment Agency are positive to engage with the European Environment Agency (EEA) to explore Bireme recommendations further. The need for adjustments to the data standards and data models (see Activity 2a) should be expected.

South Africa: Citizen Science community and records catalysed and available through iNaturalist.

Sweden: Increasing the exactness of metadata and sample-based data is highly prioritized with GBIF-Sweden, as is that of integrating procaryote and sequence data.

Andorra: One of the main tasks of GBIF-Andorra is to make to know to our Andorran partners the sense and the need of GBIF network for promoving the use of ALA-Andorra. At the same time, we are encouraging people to participate in citizen science projects related to biodiversity.

Argentina: Argentina promotes the realization of the City Nature Challenge at the national level and the iNaturalist application to be used in different projects. In addition, we participate as a founding member of the Iberian American Network of Citizen and Participatory Science (RICAP). Also we’re promoting the CC with workshops, talks and activities for scientists and public in general.

Australia: Uptake of the BioCollect platform has continued to grow and consolidate across Australia in citizen science data collection as well as professional ecology and state & local government sectors. WA state government is using BioCollect as a project-based mechanism for sharing proponent data from planning and development applications. The Atlas is commencing a project to parse and harvest biodiversity occurrence data from those projects. An instance of BioCollect has been established in Queensland to support project-based state government program delivery and data collection and sharing for environmental intervention activities within the terrestrial watershed to the Great Barrier Reef.

Benin: 17 data publishers are registered on GBIF site and will be more and more active in publishing their data.

Canadensys: Not directly in link with the items in the work program, but the workshops developed during the CESP program were intended to reach and engage data holders from Canada and the United States. Participation during more general events in Montréal have also helped engage citizens.

Colombia: “Work with the Colombian community of iNaturalist supporting the City Natua Challenge 2019 in Bogotá and Medellín. https://sibcolombia.net/reto-naturalista-urbano-2019/ https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/25956-colombia-inaturalist-world To June, 119 national organizations as data publishers through GBIF Colombia.

Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities: The helpdesk offered by the BioCASe secretariat (which also functions as CETAF’s participant node for GBIF) is consulting and assisting potential new data providers in the process of sharing their collection and observation data with GBIF. This explicitly includes providers from countries not yet participating in GBIF, such as Italy and Albania.

France: “Data publishing support to TOTAL Company Contribution to two CESP projects:

Germany: “A Workshop for German herbaria focusing on digitization and data infrastructure was organized by the German Botanical Node. The Mycological Node organized training workshops for users of the Diversity Workbench software.

iDigBio: Data mobilization is a core activity of iDigBio, including reaching out to collections.

Japan: Expanded through hosted meetings.

Mexico: Increase data publishing to be continued, approximately 500, 000 more occurrences records.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: DiSSCo applied to be come an other associate participant so it can engage its data holders to supply data to GBIF As part of a project financed by the Dutch research council (NWO, ALWIN.005), Naturalis together with NLBIF, and the Foundation for Dutch Natural History Collections have facilitated the signing of a declaration to work together on a Netherlands biodiversity information infrastructure. This declaration is signed by all members of the DiSSCo/NL consortium and the Foundation for Dutch Natural History Collections. The DiSSCo/NL consortium will be coordinated by NLBIF.

Netherlands: NLBIF, as DiSSCo-NL NTF lead has engaged with all Natural History Museums in the Netherlands to develop a National Collection Dashboard. In a follow up DiSSCo-NL partners will be supported to contribute their digitized collections to GBIF.

South Africa: SANBI-GBIF and the Systematics Division will implement the 2019 National Biodiversity Information Management and Foundational Biodiversity Information Management Forum (BIMF-FBIP Forum).SANBI-GBIF 2019 Training event will be conducted alongside the BIMF-FBIP Forum. SANBI-GBIF will conduct a national training event, which will also include regional representation, as well as trainers which form part of the GBIF mentors network. This will support the development of communities of practice in data management nationally and regionally and aligns with the objective to develop the Centre for Biodiversity Information Management.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden keeps searching for and approaching new potential data providers.

Switzerland: Collaboration with the Laboratory of Applied Microbiology, University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) and the Vector Biology and Control Group, Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (SwissTPH) in order to mobilize and share the data of cantonal and federal surveillance programs on invasive alien mosquitoes.

Zimbabwe: First meeting held in January 2019.

Andorra: In the near future, we will work to add the biodiversity information from citizen science in the GBIF database. The data from the Ornitho project is an example we are working at this moment (https://www.ornitho.ad/)

Argentina: Keep promoting the CNC and participate at the ECSA in Trieste with a researcher and member of the RICAP. Keep promoting the CC.

Australia: Continuing work to promote and support use of the BioCollect platform across multiple communities. Continuing to work with the international citizen science and standards communities on a global standard for project-based data exchange. This work is progressing steadily and ALA is playing a key role in it. Preparing for a major UI refresh of BioCollect. Improving APIs for data and metadata exchange as well as external platforms interaction with BioCollect such as external mobile apps for data collection and external data consumer platforms. The Atlas’s engagement with the federal Department of Environment and Energy (DoEE) via the MERIT application is yielding increasingly hi-resolution and accurate rich data about Australian government investments in environmental interventions and outcomes. Working with DoEE it is planned for biodiversity data embedded in these data sources to be mined to augment existing occurrence data streams.

Canadensys: We will continue to reach new data holders and work with the one that already have published data on Canadensys or other platform.

Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities: BioCASe helpdesk will continue to assist data providers with data publication.

France: Promotion of data publishing and activities of the CESP projects to be continued.

iDigBio: iDigBio will continue its data mobilization efforts, with a vision of mobilizing ALL collections data in the United States.

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Publish ICIMOD programme based biodiversity data from different landscape initiatives Proposal development support to partners in the HKH regional member countries- BIFA/ GBIF-YRA Explore funds to support students in the Central Department of Botany to mobilize university herbarium based dataset **Subject to fund availability.

Japan: To be expanded through meetings.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: DiSSCo will engage with natural history collections in DiSSCo not yet publishing to GBIF to supply data to GBIF.

Norway: As part of the GBIF CESP OpenPSD project (developed by GBIF Nodes in Spain, Portugal, Norway, Colombia and France) we will engage new data holders in the private sector (see also Activity 1g).

South Africa: SANBI-GBIF and the Systematics Division will implement the 2020 National Biodiversity Information Management and Foundational Biodiversity Information Management Forum (BIMF-FBIP Forum).SANBI-GBIF 2019 Training event will be conducted alongside the BIMF-FBIP Forum.

Spain: We plan to replicate the LichenCity project in 2020 in different Spanish cities. Organize workshops on data mobilization and data use for specific stakeholders such us private sector, and public administrations. We plan to mobilize data from the private sector.

Sweden: By approaching citizen science groups, researchers and management practitioners substantially more data and data types are going to be published in the coming years.

Switzerland: Ensure data publishing for all major collection-holding institutions of Switzerland. Continuation of efforts towards a partnership with collection holding and research institutions active in DNA sequencing (linkage of sequence data, DNA-samples and reference specimens). Collaboration with national biodiversity data centres in order to capture and use species trait data.

Zimbabwe: Capacity enhancement workshops e.g. Darwin core standards, data quality tools and IPT.

Canadensys: We have accepted to take care of orphan datasets from Canadian institutions currently published through outdated protocols (DiGIR, TaPIR) by CBIF. We are waiting for CBIF approval to start the ingestion process.

Colombia: Rescue of data dataset from Biota Colombiana Journal. Dataset before the implementation of data paper model. All datasets published through https://ipt.biodiversidad.co/iavh/

Integrated Taxonomic Information System: ITIS' taxonomic workbench development will provide the biodiversity community with a tool that provides a stable and long-term solution for updating and maintaining taxonomic information.

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Migrated 14 checklist data to HKH-BIF. Our IPT registered earlier in 2012 became dormant so had to be reinstalled and re-registered. So we had to move our earlier published datasets into this current HKH-BIF platform.

Sweden: As in Work Programme item 3c.

United States: Several projects—​including iDigBio, VertNET, BISON—​working with researchers to rescue, QA/QC and provide access to U.S.-originating datasets.

Canadensys: We will temporarily host the CBIF orphaned datasets until CBIF is ready to host them again.

Integrated Taxonomic Information System: In 2020 ITIS plans to release its taxonomic workbench that will provide the biodiversity community with a tool that provides a stable and long-term solution for updating and maintaining taxonomic information.

Netherlands: Once the NLBIF website is renewed it will be used to further promote the vision and mission of GBIF and NLBIF, including the rescue of datasets.

Sweden: As in Work Programme item 3c.

United States: BISON will focus on rescuing amphibian data.

Canadensys: Canadensys publishes on its IPT data, such as specimens consulted for taxonomic revisions and georeferenced observations used in other research, using DOIs that are included in peer reviewed publications.

Colombia: Continued support to Biota Colombiana with the data paper model, a national scientific journal. http://revistas.humboldt.org.co/index.php/biota

iDigBio: iDigBio began developing comprehensive citation guidance for data obtained from its portal. The draft citation guidance is available on the Data menu in the Beta Portal.

South Africa: SANBI-GBIF will integrate data paper publication within Bothalia - African Biodiversity and Conservation Journal

Canadensys: We will continue to use DOIs to link datasets and to keep track with the publications using data published on Canadensys.

iDigBio: iDigBio will continue to refine its citation guidance in response to feedback.

Biodiversity Heritage Library: Make progress on adding BHL Europe data to BHL. Minimal progress has been made. Developed a plan for a rapid ingest of BHL Europe materials.

iDigBio: iDigBio partnered with the Society of Herbarium Curators to conduct a Strategic Planning for Herbaria short course. The goal was to produce a strategic plan for each represented herbarium, including vision, mission, stakeholders, strategies, goals, objectives, evaluation, and sustainability, among other things. iDigBio has been working with the community on alternative data storage solutions, such as CyVerse.

Mexico: In process, mentoring and collaboration with UNIBIO-Instituto de Biología UNAM publisher for reactivate data publish and rescue orphaned datasets.

Norway: GBIF Norway contributed to best practices guidelines and implementation of specimen-level DOIs in collaboration with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in coordination with the GBIFS (see also activity 3a, 4b, and 5b).

Biodiversity Heritage Library: Implement the plan for rapid ingest of BHL Europe materials.

Canadensys: We will follow the recommendations from GBIF in order to ensure data persistence.

iDigBio: iDigBio is working to improve its data mobilization efforts and workflows, including moving towards IPT as the preferred publishing mechanism. iDigBio will continue to work with the community on alternative data storage solutions and strategies.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Persistent identifiers for specimen related data will be implemented in ELViS.

Argentina: Training workshops in different areas of the country for data providers. Permanent help desk in the publication and data quality.

Australia: ALA and GBIF ran a combined workshop in Canberra in February to analyse the potential areas of collaboration and alignment of tools and code bases.

Benin: The node of GBIF Benin is more and more capacitated and assure adequate quality to data through cleaning process before data publication.

Canada: CBIF staff contributed to the work of the TDWG Biodiversity Data Quality Interest Group on data quality standards and controlled vocabularies.

Canadensys: All datasets published on Canadensys are verified prior to publication using the GBIF Validator Tool. We also invite data holders to use that tool before submitting dataset to Canadensys. For already published dataset, we invite data holders to use the metrics linked to their resources in order to enhance data quality for their next publication.

Colombia: Open Refine Scripts SiB Colombia is working in a set of scripts in OpenRefine for data quality management of primary biodiversity data. Some of these scripts are being used now by the Node Staff in the process of accompaniment that is done with the publishers, assessing the quality and generating quality reports for each dataset before them will be published through the IPT. The Colombian Node is making improvements on these scripts and developing new scripts to consolidate a toolkit in OpenRefine available for all the GBIF and informatics biodiversity community. An article about this work is also being built to be published in 2018–2019. OpenRefine scripts Repository: https://github.com/SIB-Colombia/data-quality-open-refine.

France: GBIF France contributes to harmonies and put in place a better national data workflow.

iDigBio: iDigBio staff are participating in the TDWG Data Quality Interest Group. iDigBio hosted a Collecting Metrics of Success symposium at SPNHC 2019. This symposium discussed the current metrics being collected, what metrics are needed, and who needs them. In addition, the symposium began a conversation about metrics the community could amass collectively, across collections and across the world.

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Supported TUTH – data publisher from Nepal to validate occurrence datasets for publishing compiled under BIFA project – “Mobilizing occurrence data of alien and endemic plant species of Nepal” (Data published through TaiBIF- http://ipt.taibif.tw/manage/resource.do?r=bifa3_25).

Japan: As a result of assessment, some amount of data duplication was detected.

Norway: GBIF Norway helpdesk assists Norwegian data publishers with assessment of data quality before and after data publication. And a very active network of enthusiasts and professionals in Norway provide rapid feedback and suggestions to fixing data quality issues on Norwegian datasets (see also Activity 1d).

Spain: GBIF Spain organized online data quality workshop for 28 people including international participation. We received nearly 100 inscription forms. We run data quality tests before publishing datasets through GBIF. Working on including new data validations in our tool “Darwin Test” to check more Darwin Core fields.

Sweden: Employing data validation tools developed nationally at one partner institution of the Swedish Biodiversity data Infrastructure, GBIF-Sweden takes responsibility for data provided by Swedish owners.

Switzerland: Participation in a project to establish a registry of Swiss collectors for validation purposes.

Argentina: Training workshops in different areas of the country for data providers. Permanent help desk in the publication and data quality. Develop regular data set reports for data publishers and nodes.

Australia: GBIF work plan participation response GBIF work plan participation response 100% 10 SDG 2 of 2 Context: AA5 Continuing to collaborate with the SDG community and implement platform-based solutions to improve the value, applicability and accessibility of citizen science data for SDG’s. Further review work is scheduled for this year as part of ALA infrastructure refresh., Focus areas will be data registries and occurrence data processing and data quality.Screen reader support enabled. Further review work is scheduled for this year as part of ALA infrastructure refresh. Focus areas will be data registries and occurrence data processing and data quality. Anonymous Wombat has joined the document.

Canada: CBIF staff will continue to contribute to the work of the TDWG Biodiversity Data Quality Interest Group on data quality standards and controlled vocabularies.

Canadensys: We will continue with the same protocol.

iDigBio: iDigBio has a vision of integrating with other data validation tools. iDigBio will continue its participation with TDWG.

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Continue providing technical services to data publishers in the HKH countries as required- in relation to data publishing in HKH-BIF.

Japan: Continued assessment of data duplication and missing data.

Mexico: To be continued Mexican node assessment of data duplication and development tools for review data of occurrences.

Netherlands: NLBIF will start looking into implementation of the Living Atlas platform and within that scope also look into data quality.

Spain: Enable Darwin Test software to validate checklist datasets and sampling event data datasets.

Sweden: Additional metadata will be covered in the above mentioned system for data validation.

Switzerland: Engage collection holding institutions to complete the Swiss collector’s registry.

Canadensys: We have started using UUIDs for new collections.

Colombia: Data curation in more than 1 million of occurrences published through GBIF Colombia using work routines with Google Refine.

Germany: In cooperation with CETAF member institutions: semantic enrichment of linked open (specimen) data published via CETAF IDs (see https://doi.org/10.1038/546033d). The Botanical Node continues to support the AnnoSys system for structured annotation of individual specimens, which is accessible via 13 biodiversity data portals.

iDigBio: iDigBio continues to refine its GitHub workflow for maintaining its collections catalogue.

Mexico: Tools for data cleaning and assessment taxonomic and geographic data.

Spain: We released new version of Elysia, software application to manage natural history collections developed by GBIF.ES, with new features and improvements such us as a more direct process to export collection’s data from Elysia to the Darwin Core standard. Elysia is also available in English.

Argentina: Develop strategy and support mechanisms for expert communities to curate sections of GBIF data

Canada: Implementation of data annotation and attribution services in the DINA Collection Management System currently under development.

Canadensys: We will continue to use UUIDs or other identifier using GBIF’s recommendations.

Germany: Further promotion of CETAF Identifiers and semantic enrichment activities. Continued support and promotion of AnnoSys.

iDigBio: iDigBio will be continuing to streamline its collections catalogue and data mobilization workflows.

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Enhancing data quality of Herbarium Specimens and museum collections- regional training for HKH member countries. ** Need to explore possible collaborations with Chinese Academy of Science and other Asian Node member countries.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Naturalis will lead on ELViS development that will enable data curation in collections for loans, visits and digitization on demand in DiSSCo.

Norway: GBIF Norway aims to maintain, and further improve, a machine-readable persistent identifier (PID) resolver for as many entities as we have resources to cover within the Norwegian data streams to GBIF. Dependent of continued stable funding, we aim to provide machine actionable data annotation services from this service (see also activity 2a, 3b and 4b).

Spain: Promoting the use of Elysia out of our national borders.

Argentina: Publicize GBIF as data tool via university libraries and faculties: this year the NM is going to participate in Argentine days of botanica and in the annual meeting of Argentine palaeontology, promoting the publication and reuse of the data present in GBIF and in the national portal.

Australia: The ALA added some enhancements to Spatial Portal to allow for the exporting of species level trait information from ALA into the EcoCloud platform. The ALA has also commenced initial work on the Collaborative Species Distribution Modelling (CSDM) project which is a collaboration with EcoCloud that will results in functionalities with integration with EcoCloud.

Benin: A functional Regional Master Program in Biodiversity Informatics opened its doors in October 2017 in Benin and students from many African countries are receiving in-depth capacity training to mobilize and use data to address the biodiversity conservation and sustainable uses in the context f climate and global changes.

Canadensys: We actively inform our users and data holders on how to use data from GBIF, and we use the GBIF Science Review to promote data-use and give examples. Most participants to our CESP workshops were coming from academia and are using data from GBIF for their research. Participants are usually becoming advocates to the use of data from GBIF during their classes, explaining to their students how to get and use this type of data.

France: Contributions to modules in Biology and Systematics masters and doctoral modules at MNHN and Sorbonne University.

iDigBio: iDigBio hosted the 2019 Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference at Yale University in June 2019. The conference provides a forum for biodiversity researchers to share and examine the uses of digitized data across all biodiversity disciplines, with special emphasis on using the wealth of digitized specimen data being generated worldwide. In March 2019, iDigBio hosted the 5th Life Discovery – Doing Science Biology Education Conference held in Gainesville. The theme was “microbiomes to ecosystems: evolution and biodiversity across scale, space, and time” which aligned well with iDigBio’s mission to promote the use of biodiversity data in both research and education. iDigBio maintains public libraries on Google Scholar and Mendeley. Recently, iDigBio used the Mendeley API to create a searchable library, including iDigBio’s tags such as grant number, portal used, etc. iDigBio facilitated guest blogs on its website to highlight data use, data cleaning, and other topics.

Japan: Papers using the data from Japan Node increased.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Naturalis and NLBIF are hosting the Biodiversity_Next conference, co-organized with GBIF, TDWG, iDigBio, DiSSCo, LifeWatch and CETAF. At Biodiversity_Next, Naturalis Biodiversity Center and NLBIF are organizing a symposium on digital biodiversity data as frontier for science as part of the Biodiversity Open Data Ambassador programme. As part of a project financed by the Dutch research council (NWO, ALWIN.005), Naturalis together with NLBIF, and other partners conducted a survey and in depth interviews amongst 100 scientists within the Netherlands on the need for biodiversity information infrastructures, particularly on natural science collections, to support all the steps of the research data management cycle.

Norway: The Norwegian BioDATA project provide graduate and post-graduate level university training on biodiversity data management and mobilization (see activity 1b). During 2019, BioDATA provided academic training courses in Belarus (February 2019) and in Tajikistan (June 2019). GBIF Norway provides helpdesk services to support Norwegian students and researchers on accessing and using GBIF mediated data together with data from other sources.

South Africa: Further engagement to seek funding and consider the BDI Research Chair appointment, to be conducted with DST/NRF, University Partners and other funders.SANBI-GBIF will looks at mechanisms to operationalize the Centre for Biodiversity Information Management, through added strategic and technical assistance.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden participates, alongside consortium partners in the Swedish Biodiversity data Infrastructure, in a great number of activities directed towards educational and research institutes.

Zimbabwe: Data access workshop held for academia

Argentina: Keep continue attending scientific meetings to continue promoting the national biological data system and GBIF.

Australia: Further work on CSDM and delivery of components and enhancements to support CSDM.

Canadensys: We will continue to engage academia whenever possible.

France: Participation to master and doctoral modules to be continued.

iDigBio: “iDigBio will host the 2020 Digital Data Conference at Indiana University, Bloomington. iDigBio will continue to facilitate guest blogs on its website. iDigBio is planning a 2020 Biodiversity Summit, which will be a collaborative meeting of the ADBC community, GBIF governing board, TDWG, and the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian). The meeting will feature the evolution and accomplishments of specimen-based science and the impact of digitization. This international event will be an excellent opportunity to highlight to a global audience the excellent work that our ADBC community is doing on behalf of U.S. collections.

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development: Publication of Data Paper / Use of GBIF-mediated biodiversity data – with partners. (Birds diversity in the HKH)

Japan: Continue to increase numbers of data from Japan.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center: Naturalis will conduct a survey under the RDA-Europe Ambassador programme to identify the current needs of the international biodiversity and geodiversity data community for a discipline-specific group under RDA (currently the Biodiversity Data Integration IG)

Netherlands: NLBIF plans to further promote the use of GBIF data for scientific analyses and introduce the value of GBIF data for biodiversity studies in university curricula.

Norway: The emerging new Living Norway network (currently pending research infrastructure funding) has established a working group on how to teach open biodiversity science and FAIR data practices at university level in Norway.

South Africa: Work will continue to appoint a BDI Research Chair. SANBI-GBIF is engaging the Department of Science and Innovation, previous Department of Science and Technology, to support a Priority Research Chair.

Spain: Continue engaging academia. Make an inventory of masters and university degrees that promote GBIF data in classrooms.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden participates, alongside consortium partners in the Swedish Biodiversity data Infrastructure, in a great number of activities directed towards educational and research institutes.

Switzerland: Promote GBIF data use and data sharing at Swiss universities and research institutions.

Zimbabwe: Data access and use workshop to be held by March 2020.

Canadensys: Answering the needs from our users and data holders, we have developed documentation for the Canadensys Explorer based on ALA framework, and for data-cleaning. We have also worked on translation of the GBIF website and some documentation for both GBIF and ALA.

iDigBio: iDigBio representatives participated in the Harnessing Natural History Collections Data workshop that led to the report released in April 2019. The report is entitled “Extending U.S. Biodiversity Collections to Promote Research and Education” and articulates a national vision to leverage digital data from biodiversity collections for novel and innovative uses. An iDigBio representative was appointed to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee investigating the value and future of biological collections. The committee will review how National Science Foundation-supported collections of organisms are used in research and education and how to maintain them so that they continue to benefit science and society in the future.

Japan: Documents and administrative process reviewed and refined to increase user-friendliness and efficiency.

Norway: GBIF Norway maintained follow-up activities (with focus on Nordic and European crop wild relative communities) based on the recommendations from the 2016 fitness for use task group reports (see also activity 3a).

United States: Contributed feedback through GitHub and feedback mechanisms on the website to help identify needs of the communities we work with.

Canadensys: We will continue helping in the different translation project when needed, as well as creating documentation answering the needs of our users.

iDigBio: iDigBio has several workshops, webinars, symposia, and other events planned.

Japan: Periodical review of documents and administrative process.

Netherlands: The NLBIF node manager as Open Biodiversity Data Ambassador will document user needs for GBIF data wherever relevant.

Norway: Dependent on continued and stable national funding for 2020, the wider Norwegian GBIF community will capture, document and improve the GBIF fitness for use in academic and applied research on ecological monitoring using the sampling event data model (see also activity 2a).

Australia: Collaboration with the SDG community and implement platform-based solutions to improve the value, applicability and accessibility of citizen science data for SDG’s.

Colombia: Support to consolidate the IPBES National Assessment, particularly in the chapter 2 - Status of Colombian Biodiversity http://humboldt.org.co/es/actualidad/item/1257-convocatoria-evaluacion-ipbes-colombia Status and trend of Colombian biodiversity: An annual publication from the data published. https://cifras.biodiversidad.co/.

iDigBio: iDigBio plans to participate in the WeDigBio event in October 2019. Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections, or WeDigBio, is a global data campaign, virtual science festival, and local outreach opportunity, all rolled into one.

South Africa: SANBI-GBIF will engage with the IPBES Chair for data and knowledge, to reinforce a stronger IPBES perspective to the ACM work, as it shows the data needs and the potential. The IPBES Africa Assessment reinforces the need for investment in biodiversity information and the ACM.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden has contributed to the GEO-6 reports and will continue to do so at the level of co-authoring and evaluating contents.

United States: Chairing session at Biodiversity_Next to better connect policy makers with relevant data streams.

Zimbabwe: National biodiversity report for CBD

Australia: Continuing to collaborate with the SDG community and implement platform-based solutions to improve the value, applicability and accessibility of citizen science data for SDG’s.

Belgium: Explore and prototype a tool, based on occurrences API, that will return a species list from a user-defined polygon.

Canadensys: We would like to work with GBIF and other organizations to establish standardized links to leaf spectral data obtained on the ground and through imagery at various levels (linked to a pan-Canadian project called CABO, http://www.caboscience.org/)

iDigBio: iDigBio plans to continue participation in the annual WeDigBio events each October.

Netherlands: NLBIF will promote the contribution of long-term monitoring data to GBIF.

Spain: Organizing a thematic workshop to promote the publication of sampling-event based data addressed to public administrations.

Sweden: GBIF-Sweden has contributed to the GEO-6 reports and will continue to do so at the level of co-authoring and evaluating contents.

Switzerland: Continuation of data digitization activities in relation with running programs of the Federal Office of Environment.