In the science section of biodiversity next, events proposed would illuminate how far we’ve come in the last twenty years to provide access to biodiverse data — and help us envision a human and technological infrastructure for our best-possible imagined future. While improvements in research infrastructure allow us to amass more bio- and geo-diversity data, we still need faster access, sustained, updated, automated, linked resources, and more “linked data”. Many issues of decades ago continue to challenge us such as the need for authority files (locality, people, taxonomy) and identifiers (for everything). New technologies such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) provide ways to learn more from our specimen and observation data in ways never before imagined. Other insights may now be possible, other new methods from outside our discipline may (most certainly) prove useful to address current known and future (as yet unknown) needs.

Over the last decade significant investments in the field of bio- and geo-diversity e-infrastructures have led to a thriving, yet still fragmented, ecosystem of service providers. These providers facilitate access, interpretation and analysis of different biodiversity and geodiversity data classes. From occurrence records aggregators to unified global taxonomic backbones and from species interaction registries to species trait repositories, scientists are facing a growing portfolio of available online access to data services. The ongoing development of those infrastructures, at regional and at global scale, is dependent on the constant dialogue between scientists, policy makers and the public  (end-users) and the Research Infrastructure (RI) providers. Furthermore, there are still technological and data related challenges that need to be addressed, to enable existing RIs to operate within an agreed upon syntactic and semantic interoperability framework.

Plenary sessions, symposia and workshops in this track will provide the opportunity to the conference delegates to:

1. Share technological developments around the development and operation of existing and newly established e-infrastructures for bio- and geo-diversity data;
2. Discuss existing interoperability frameworks;
3. Address the challenges around data quality from the perspective of infrastructure operators;
4. Address issues related to long-term sustainability, business models and user access modes;
5. Understand how scientific use cases translate into actionable RI development strategies;   
6. Identify modes of collaboration with industrial actors, both as technology suppliers or users of the RIs services.