EUROPEAN NETWORK FOR BIODIVERSITY INFORMATION (ENBI)

INTRODUCTION AND MAIN OBJECTIVES

Biological diversity is essential to maintain life on earth and has important social, scientific, educational, cultural, recreational and aesthetic values. However, most existing biodiversity information is distributed and not dynamically accessible in digital format. To be able to use biodiversity information to its full potential, for both scientific and societal applications, it will be crucial to digitise our primary biodiversity data and to make these data available in an integrated shared information infrastructure. It is also essential to co-ordinate and prepare for exciting future applications when biodiversity data can be studied in combination with data from other information domains such as molecular sequences, climate, or geography.

The business plan of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) gives priority to the vast objective to make primary biodiversity data globally available, to mobilize taxonomic data and biological collection and specimen data, as well as to promote the common access and interoperability between these databases.

The major objective of ENBI is to establish a strong network that will identify biodiversity information priorities to be managed at the European scale. Other objectives are the establishment of communication platforms to inquire the needs of end-users and to disseminate biodiversity expertise to professionals and policy makers. ENBI co-ordinates its activities with those of the European Community Clearing-House Mechanism as both give top priority to the easy access to biodiversity data.

The network is expected to evolve into a consortium with a core set of activities that will address and co-ordinate the variety of databases, interoperability, services, dissemination and legal and financial issues at a European level.

NETWORK STRUCTURE

The European Network for Biodiversity Information is organized on a project (work package) basis. There are four main clusters of work packages, allowing that the interaction between closely related work packages can be managed in an efficient way.

Cluster I Co-ordinating activities.

1. Network co-ordination / Co-ordination with GBIF / Sustainability and continuity of

European activities

2. ENBI Forums & Inventory of state-of-art.

3. Dissemination.

4. IPR, copyrights & financial issues.

Cluster II Maintenance, enhancement and presentation of biodiversity databases.

5. Co-operation of pan-European checklist and ‘Species bank’ database projects.

6. Co-operation of pan-European databases on biological collections and specimens.

7. Observational survey data.

Cluster III Data integration, interoperability and analysis.

8. Data management in large distributed biodiversity database systems.

9. Interoperability and common access.

10. Generic analysis tools and data mining.

Cluster IV Products and e-services.

11. Multi-lingual access

12. Information services on European biodiversity data.

13. Making non-European biodiversity data in European repositories globally available.