High demand for biodiversity data publication in freshwater science.

1. Aaike De Wever, Astrid Schmidt-Kloiber
Biodiversity data publishing in
freshwater sciences
© J. Freyhof, A. Hartl
RBINS – Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels
BOKU – University of Natural Resources & Life Sciences, Vienna

2. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Freshwater biodiversity
• Freshwater species face a higher extinction rate than species
in any other environment
• Need to improve capacity to protect and manage freshwater
biodiversity in the face of ongoing changes to global climate
and socioeconomics
Lipotes vexillifer
Recently extinct species
© Institute of Hydrobiology
Chinese Academy of Sciences
© M. Franzen
Incilius periglenes

3. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Data publishing versus data sharing
• Data publishing paradigm
– Both ‘traditional’
publishing through data
paper as well as making
data available on-line
– Stressing importance of
providing a citation for
data and citing data
– Assigning a Digital
Object Identifier (DOI) to
data
Mark J. Costello (2009) Motivating Online Publication of
Data BioScience 59 (5): 418-427.

4. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Building a global freshwater biodiversity
information hub – www.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
• Bringing data and information together in a central place
– the BioFresh platform
• Making data more easily discoverable
• Outlet for scientists to publish their data
• Supporting large scale analysis and modelling using
these data

5. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Building a global freshwater biodiversity
information hub
• Focus on
– information on datasets
(metadatabase)
– occurrence data (or
primary biodiversity data)
– distribution information
– all kinds of thematic
biodiversity maps
– other species information

6. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Availability of data – general
• Large amounts of data are unavailable and we only have
a vague idea of its volume
• Example for the data available through the Global
Biodiversity Information Facility network
– 20% of existing digitised data available through GBIF.
Saarenmaa (2006) ArcUser Online.
– 3% of natural history collections (digitised and non-digitised) are
accessible through GBIF.
Ariño (2010) Biodiversity Informatics, 7(2).
• There is a substantial volume of data we ‘know’ exists,
but is hard to get by (e.g. data collected for monitoring
the state of the environment or the impact of
conservation efforts)

7. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Availability of data – freshwater occurrences
• Based on the species names in the Freshwater Animal
Diversity Assessment (FADA) database (currently
covering about 1/3 of the global freshwater species) we
harvested the available occurrence data from GBIF
– 9M records, 7M geo-referenced (roughly 2% of the almost 400M
records)
– Roughly 1/3 collection data and 2/3 observation data
– Data from over 1200 datasets, but only 17 could be considered
being predominantly freshwater
• Data integrated in the BioFresh data portal
data.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu

8. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Availability of data – freshwater databases
• BioFresh constructed a metadatabase for documenting
freshwater focused databases
– 162 entries (54 under quality control)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
BioFresh related
datasets
external datasets con ngency fund
datasets
GBIF freshwater
datasets

9. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Data publishing through BioFresh
• Establishing a thematic freshwater node for the Global
Biodiversity Information Facility
• Data publishing efforts cover
– Data from project partners including databases from major EU
projects on freshwater biodiversity including WISER, EFI+,…
– Digitisation and compilation projects for completing data for
specific species groups: Odonata, EU fishes, Trichoptera,
Plecoptera, Ostracoda
– Mobilisation of data gathered for the intercalibration of methods
for the Water Framework Directive
– Encouraging the publication of your data…

11. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Data publishing through BioFresh
• What can we offer data publishers
– Biodiversity data publication offering
• visibility
• citations
• possibility for peer review both for metadata as for data
– Technical data quality review
– Automatic integration of data in on-line database and
visualisation tools
– But see also next slides…

12. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Data publishing through freshwater journals
• We convinced editors of 19 journals to
encourage the submission of biodiversity
data associated with papers published in
their journal
Bioscience, 62 (6): 529–530
• Submission of primary biodiversity data cfr.
submission of sequence data to GenBank
• Step towards mandatory/default procedure
Aquatic Botany
Aquatic Conservation:
Marine and Freshwater
Ecosystems
Aquatic Ecology
Aquatic Sciences
Canadian Journal of
Fisheries and Aquatic
Sciences
Ecology of Freshwater Fish
Freshwater Biology
Freshwater Reviews
Fundamental and Applied
Limnology
Hydrobiologia
Inland Waters
International Review of
Hydrobiology
Freshwater Science
Journal of Fish Biology
Journal of Plankton
Research
Limnetica
Limnologica
Marine and Freshwater
Research
River Systems

13. SIL2013 – August 2013 – Budapest, HUwww.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
Data publishing through data papers
• Producing a data paper for a dataset that is publicly
released (e.g. through the BioFresh data portal)
produces a clear mechanism to cite the data and track
its citation
• BioFresh is planning a theme issue focussing on
freshwater databases
• All contributions are very welcome!