Brazil joins the Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Initiative puts the country, home of the planet’s greatest biodiversity, into a global network for sharing tools and experiences related to the management of biological information resources.

By Karina Toledo

Agência FAPESP – After more than a decade of mobilization and expectations from the local scientific community, Brazil officially joined the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) – the largest multilateral initiative to make data on biodiversity available on the Internet.

The network is composed of 58 countries and 46 organizations that gather information about the occurrence of plant, animal and microorganism species registered in herbaria, museums, zoological collections and microbial collections, in addition to data observation systems.

The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Marco Antonio Raupp, signed the memorandum of understanding on October 24, 2012.

The initiative puts the country – the home of 15% of the planet’s biodiversity – in a global community that shares data, information, tools, competencies and experiences involving the management of biological informational resources.

“Brazil’s entry is a very important step for us. We support the vision of a world in which information about biodiversity is freely and universally available for science and society. This requires the participation of the greatest possible number of countries with megadiversity, like Brazil,” comments Tim Hirsch, GBIF senior program officer for engagement, in an interview with Agência FAPESP.

According to Hirsch, joining will benefit Brazil. “With ten years of experience in building systems to manage information on biodiversity, GBIF offers tools, training and standards to facilitate digitalization, mobilization, discovery, access and use of data,” he affirmed.

For Carlos Alfredo Joly, coordinator of the BIOTA-FAPESP program, access to these tools is of fundamental importance for Brazilian science. “It will allow, for example, work with climate change scenarios and their consequences for species distribution,” he said.

Furthermore, Brazil’s participation brings new status and greater visibility to the archives of Brazilian museums, herbariums and collections. “This information will be available to any person interested in conducting research on the area, not only those who can visit these institutions,” he said.

As Joly recalls, Brazil actively participated in discussions regarding the creation of GBIF at the end of the 1990s and the definition of the model for computerization and management of the data network. “BIOTA-FAPESP was created in 1999, and all the program’s system information was developed to be totally compatible and easily integrated into the GBIF,” he noted.

Currently, there are more than 5 million records of samples collected or observed in Brazil – 2.3 million of which are georeferenced – that are available online and that can be immediately integrated into GBIF’s database. The information is collected under the speciesLink network, which was developed as a project of the BIOTA-FAPESP network and currently extends nationwide.

“SpeciesLink was created to digitize the archives of 12 zoology museums and herbariums in São Paulo state and to make them available online,” recalls Joly.

When the FAPESP-funded project ended, the initiative continued with the support of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) and international funding.

“Today, the platform brings together 285 collections and subcollections from all Brazilian states, with the exception of Amapá,” says Dora Canhos, researcher at the Environmental Information Reference Center (CRIA), which manages the information system.

But there is still much work to be done, added Canhos. “If we were to assemble the entire Brazilian collection in a single museum, it is estimated that we would have more than 30 million listings. Only five million are digitized and available online,” she commented.

Although Brazil is still not officially a member of GBIF, more than 1.6 million listings related to national biodiversity are already accessible on the global network, streaming from the more than 700 databases that it includes from 28 countries.

In the last three years, according to GBIF, at least 18 Brazilian-authored studies cited data obtained from the platform. Worldwide, on average, roughly four peer-reviewed articles are published weekly with data accessed from the GBIF network.

Brazilian system

The MCTI Director of Policies and Thematic Programs, Mercedes Bustamante, highlighted that Brazil’s decision to join the GBIF occurs at a moment when the country is structuring its own national information system on biodiversity.

Known as the Brazilian Biodiversity and Ecosystems Information System (SIB-BR), the initiative is conducted by MCTI in partnership with the Global Environment Fund (GEF) and involves US$ 28 million in investments.

“The GBIF experience could serve as a model for the Brazilian network, because it is not simply a database, but a platform that allows, for example, the use of tools to analyze the information it contains,” comments Bustamante.

One of the objectives of SIB-BR, emphasizes the MCTI director, is to ensure that the systematized information on biodiversity is incorporated into the process of decision-making and public policy development.

“The idea is not for SIB-BR to substitute for existing systems, like speciesLink. It is a platform that aggregates and will incorporate digitized information. The institutions that do not have the means to maintain their own databases can do this through the national system,” she affirms.

Associate member

Brazil will join GBIF as an associate member. Although it can fully participate in the publication of data and training projects, it does not contribute financially and does not have voting rights on the Board of Directors.

When it signed the memorandum of understanding, the country committed to move toward obtaining voting rights within five years.

In Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, México, Nicaragua, Peru and Uruguay are already members of GBIF. The network was founded by a group of countries in 2001 – with headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark – after a recommendation made by the megascience forum, today known as the Global Science Forum of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Currently, the GBIF has more than 388 million listings from more than 10,000 databases from 422 institutions.