BiodiFAIRse establishes new concept to better scale workflows

Toward an international Biodiversity essential variables data implementation framework as a new BiodiFAIRse roadmap for the GOSC initiative

Faced with the biodiversity crisis and its impact on humanity (see Cardinale et al., 2012), a new GOSC case study proposal will capitalize on the first (2019-2021) BiodiFAIRse investigation (see slides from the FAIR Festival 2021) to propose an open science cloud oriented FAIR implementation of biodiversity monitoring workflows, from small to global scales, thanks to the essential biodiversity variables (EBVs).

Indeed, the problem of scale in ecology is recurrent (see Levin 1992 and Mark C. Urban et al., 2021), and the biodiversity community (scientists, policy makers, managers, NGOs) need to build a strong framework to observe, learn and understand the spatio-temporal biodiversity state and dynamic. One of the most relevant approaches to disentangle biodiversity architecture and dynamics is the EBVs concept. Because we can potentially extract a lot of information from raw datasets sampling at different ecological scales, we suppose thanks to FAIR data and source codes implementation, we could extract these EBVs to design our global biodiversity monitoring.

Through the GO FAIR BiodiFAIRse Implementation Network, we established how Ecological and Environmental sciences can benefit from existing open standards, tools, platforms used by European as well as Australian and US infrastructures, particularly regarding the Galaxy platform, DataOne and GBIF networks of data catalogs in combination with the amazing Ecological Metadata Language standard.

Here, we propose a 2022-2024 BiodiFAIRse roadmap as a “convergence” between international approaches through these standards, tools and platforms linked to an important mission such as the one of the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON): “Improve the acquisition, coordination and delivery of biodiversity observations and related services to users including decision makers and the scientific community”. And so, we will contribute to the GOSC vision.

So, this case study will propose to focus on approaches, implementations, and technologies who can benefit to others scientific domains and the goal of the project is to investigate how GOSC can help making a complete “GEO BON Biodiversity change detection and attribution cycle” through multiple FAIR tools.

For more information:

What are the essential biodiversity variables?

The Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) describes the EBVs as follows:
“These Essential Biodiversity Variables, defined as the derived measurements required to study, report, and manage biodiversity change, focusing on status and trend in elements of biodiversity should play the role of brokers between monitoring initiatives and decision makers. They provide the first level of abstraction between low-level primary observations and high-level indicators of biodiversity.”

What is BiodiFAIRse?

BiodiFAIRse is an international initiative to build a virtual research environment and tools, collectively bringing their expertise to FAIR compliance by adapting data exchange standards, promoting the use and mapping of controlled vocabularies and collaborating in the development of registries gathering FAIR research objects and processes, analysis tools, and scalable workflows. See more here https://www.go-fair.org/implementation-networks/overview/biodifairse/ and here https://www.cesgo.org/biodifairse/.

What is the GOSC initiative?

The Global Open Science Cloud (GOSC) initiative will encourage cooperation, alignment, and ultimately interoperability, between existing and emerging Open Science Clouds through thematic Working Groups (key areas and shared interest) and through detailed Case Studies that will demonstrate how international collaborative research communities and projects can be supported by Open Science Clouds.

Authors :
Anne-Sophie Archambeau, GBIF France node manager
Yvan Le Bras, French biodiversity data hub manager
Olivier Norvez, French biodiversity data hub animation coordinator