The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) will launch a call for grant proposals in 2025 in several regions after receiving €4 million from the EU, in an outreach that will complement its work on ‘data cubes’, an executive has said.
The grants are likely to be between €20,000 and €60,000 for data projects based in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, but the details have yet to be finalised, Kyle Copas, communications manager at the GBIF Secretariat, told Carbon Pulse.
Last week, GBIF signed a five-year contract to receive €4.3 mln from the EU to support data mobilisation projects via its Biodiversity Information for Development programme.
GBIF is a Denmark-based international organisation dedicated to providing access to scientific biodiversity data online. Its information is used in five peer-reviewed papers a day on average, Copas said.
“We’re looking to improve the evidence base in areas that historically have been data poor and in countries where they haven’t had resources to invest in the digitisation of open biodiversity data,” said Copas.
“These are data holding institutions that have existing sources of data that’s not currently available through GBIF, but can be digitised, reshaped, standardised, so that it can be made available.”
The projects will work at different scales – from institutional grants for things like digitising museum specimen data, to regional initiatives, to national projects involving stakeholders like public health authorities.
GBIF’s standards allow initiatives to combine diverse data sources ranging from environmental DNA to impact assessment data.
The previous round of the programme’s grants focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, funding over 100 small projects to help them make their data GBIF-ready.
The €4 mln brings the total EU investment in the programme between 2015 and 2029 to €9.5 mln.
DATA CUBES
A complementary GBIF initiative is ‘data cubes’, which could help make the data mobilised through the grant projects “coarser” and more usable for corporations for nature disclosures.
GBIF is working on ‘biodiversity cubes’ with EU-funded partner initiative the Biodiversity Building Blocks for Policy (BBBP). A data cube can integrate elements of what, when, and where, according to BBBP’s website.
“We have a service that is up and running, early stage, we expect that we’ll make that publicly available within the next several months. This may be something that would help particularly companies that are having to do reporting on sites that they control,” said Copas.
“We’re curious to know whether this format will help provide a basis for ongoing monitoring and surveying of those kinds of sites, so that people then can with greater confidence understand how those sites might be changing.”
TNFD FACILITY
GBIF hopes to form a key part of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD)’s global nature-related public data facility, Copas said.
Last year, TNFD said a global nature-related data facility accessible for the public should be created to support governments, businesses, and civil society.
“The TNFD’s focus is on location, asset level, location-specific data. That is essentially what GBIF provides, even if it’s expressed in a different vocabulary.”
“We’re looking at the presence of all organisms over space and time on the entire planet.”
GBIF is working on the data facility alongside Global Commons Alliance Accountability Accelerator, Capitals Coalition, CDP, Global Reporting Initiative, Open Earth, MRV Collective, Science Based Targets Network, and the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, TNFD said last year.
In February, researchers warned against the limitations of initiatives such as GBIF and the Ocean Biodiversity Information System, saying together they cover less than 7% of the world’s surface at five kilometres resolution.
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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